Building templates

A template is a kind of building as slots with options; a variant is one option per slot plus a level; the chooser picks, the compiler draws, the city measures.

The crafts learn to build from nothing; the voxel editor corrects a finished building. Templates put a third way between them, the way a 2D game does sprite variants. A template is a kind of building as slots (walls, roof, storeys, chimney, windows, porch, annex, yard, trim, flag, and what the trade adds: a forge’s hearth, a mill’s wheel, a granary’s staddles, a church’s tower, a market’s open sides), each with a short list of options; a variant is one option per slot plus a level, the step the building has reached (hut → cottage → house → townhouse); and the compiler turns a variant, a footprint and an era into a blueprint the city measures exactly like anything else.

The choosing is what an AI is allowed to do. A Chooser is shown the menu and picks; it never draws. The heuristic chooser is deterministic from a seed and varied; a model behind PALIM_LLM_URL can be asked instead and its answer is checked against the menu. The city’s DesignAdvisor offers the kept variant at every house commission, and a home nobody can live in is never built.

The templates tool compiles any template at any level with any options and paints it with the same painter as the stills on this site. The fourteen built-in templates and their slots are in the rules reference.

In the code: crates/engine/src/blueprint/mod.rs crates/engine/src/blueprint/compile.rs crates/engine/src/blueprint/chooser.rs · playground: templates

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