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Settlement Buildings and Economy

This page owns the settlement-side production and building layer.

Settlement buildings belong to the population-scale Settlement layer. They are not the same thing as Core infrastructure or Camp upgrades.

Building Families​

Grounded settlement building families include:

  • food and storage
  • housing and civic support
  • warding and watch
  • workshops and processing
  • extraction support and depots
  • training and recovery
  • administration and logistics

These families become meaningful once the first Outpost exists in Act 2 and broaden into the main settlement loop in Act 3.

Economy Rules​

  • Buildings should matter because they unlock or scale real settlement work.
  • Settlement output should depend on land, people, routes, and support chains, not only on stacking abstract modifiers.
  • Settlement screens can summarize stockpiles as Gold, Food, Wood, Metal, or Stone, but those labels are resource buckets and readouts rather than the core channel taxonomy.
  • Building choice should create footprint and labor tradeoffs the player can read.
  • The first Outpost should unlock the first meaningful settlement-side building decisions; Act 3 should broaden those decisions into a stable economic loop.

Relationship To Other Layers​

  • The Core handles the MC's fixed personal anchor.
  • The Camp handles mobile expedition support.
  • Settlements handle population-scale infrastructure, labor, and administration.
  • Core-side and Camp-side upgrades should not be used as synonyms for settlement buildings.
  • Resources and items flow through the broader rules in gd-resources-items-crafting.md.