Layout, belts, and performance

Paths and homes

Every building needs a path to the Great Hall. Moving and rotating cost nothing. A building still under construction refunds in full if you remove it. A finished one refunds nothing, so the cheap experiments are the ones you cancel mid-build. Elves staff workshops and live in homes: Cottage 2, Bunkhouse 4, Lodge 8. They do not have individual needs. Cheer buildings near those homes — Hearth, Cocoa Hall, Elf Plaza, Skating Rink — raise Cheer weekly, which is the currency of masterworks.

Camera, stamps, photos

WASD or arrows pan. The wheel zooms. Middle-mouse drag orbits and tilts, and Q and E orbit too. Keys rebind under Options, with Restore Defaults. For props: C copies, Z and X resize, V cycles variants, 1–3 apply stamps, Shift plus the number saves a stamp, U undoes. F8 saves a postcard to Pictures / Build Christmas. H hides the interface. F9 is the street-level walk. Space pauses, and pause holds the time of day, which is the only way to freeze night because there is no clock control. The cycle is about 10 minutes.

When the village gets heavy

Options, Picture: Standard, Medium, or Performance, resolution from 720p to 4K, windowed or borderless, display and window size. The developer says a very large village at 4K is the heaviest case and that late-game villages depend more on the processor than the graphics card. The Steam overlay is off at launch because enabling it caused severe performance problems. If 3D fails at startup, use the “Use 2D Compatibility Graphics” button and tell the developer your card in the discussions.

Big Belt is the achievement for a first Level 2 refit. I do not have the refit’s numbers, so this is not a belt-math guide. Railway Founded and All Aboard are post-story. Accessibility that is actually listed: reduced motion, a large interface, full rebinding, camera-speed sliders, and hold-to-confirm on destructive actions. Music is 30 tracks in Lo-fi, Atmospheric, and City Builder albums, with separate music and effects sliders.

The production side of a stuck workshop is on production chains. Requirements are on the PC page.