You build on a settlement you founded, or on open land no settlement holds. Out on open land what you build is yours alone, but it weathers twice as fast; you can't build on someone else's settlement or close by it, and a new building must stand a tile apart from another. Pieces sit on the 4 m tile grid: a floor on a tile, walls on its borders or across it corner to corner, roofs over it. Storeys are 3 m apart, up to sixteen.

Planning

Right-click the ground on your settlement or on open land, or any piece of your building, and choose Build. The build wheel opens round the cursor with its groups: Floors and stairs, Walls, Roofs and gables, Fences. Click a group, then a piece; the middle of the wheel names what you point at and its parts against what you carry. Right-click or the middle goes back, Escape closes it.

A see-through copy then follows the cursor, snapping to the tile, border or corner nearest it. It is green where the piece can go and red where it can't, with the reason next to the cursor. The mouse wheel or R turns it; it takes the storey you point at on a building, and Page Up and Page Down move it a storey. Click to plan it there; you can plan a whole house before building any of it. Right-click or Escape stops planning.

The ground must be flat, every corner under the piece level, and level with the rest of the building. Flatten it first. Trees, boulders, water, wet low ground and mine entrances are in the way.

What holds what up

Everything must rest on something. The ground storey stands on the ground. Higher up, a wall needs a floor beside it or a full wall under it; a floor needs a full wall under one of its edges, or can reach one tile out from a floor that has one; a roof needs a full wall under an edge or a roof row beside it, and goes on top of walls, never on the ground. Staircases and diagonal walls stand on a floor of their storey, and nothing may be built over a staircase. Half walls, gables and gable peaks hold nothing up. You can plan on blueprints, but parts only go into a piece once what it rests on is finished.

Building

A planned piece shows as a blue blueprint. Right-click it and choose Continue building: each step adds one part and takes a few seconds. You need a joiner's mallet or a forge hammer, active or in your tool satchel, and the parts in your pack. You can reach pieces 3 m to the side and 4.5 m over your head, so roofs are built from the floor below.

Piece	Parts
Timber floor	10 boards, 2 tacks
Timber staircase	20 boards, 10 hafts, 2 tacks, 1 spikes
Timber wall, window, doorway or glazed doorway	20 boards, 1 spikes
Timber half wall	10 boards, 1 spikes
Diagonal timber wall	28 boards, 1 spikes
Rounded timber wall (a quarter circle; four make a round tower)	32 boards, 2 spikes
Timber gable	10 boards, 1 spikes
Timber gable peak	5 boards, 1 spikes
Shingle roof, roof corner, roof valley or roof ridge	10 shingles, 2 tacks
Plank door or glazed door	6 boards, 1 spikes
Wooden fence	2 boards, 2 hafts, 1 tacks

Shingles are sawn from boards with a bucksaw. When the last part is in, the piece stands solid. Its quality follows your Carpentry, capped by the parts. Posts go up where walls meet. Roofs rise a storey across a tile and stack: the next row up starts where the one below ends, the corner and valley turn round L shapes, the ridge closes the top, and gables fill the ends under them. Grass doesn't grow through a floor, and floors stand a few centimeters off the ground.

Doors

Once a doorway is finished, its menu offers Hang a plank door; a glazed doorway takes a glazed door. The door is planned in it and built the same way. A finished door's menu opens and shuts it; it swings into the room.

Fences

Fences go on tile borders on the ground. Unlike the rest they need no flat ground, rest on nothing, and don't join or count toward a building. How steep a slope you can fence grows with your skill: a fence's two ends may differ in height by 3 times the square root of your skill plus 10, in tenths of a meter (1.3 m at skill 1, 2.2 m at 16, 4 m at 100).

Fence	Parts
Wooden fence, plank fence	2 hafts, 2 boards, 1 tacks
Wooden or plank gateway, then its gate	2 hafts; the gate 2 boards, 1 tacks
Rail fence	4 wooden beams
Rail gateway, then its gate	2 wooden beams; the gate 2 more
Woven fence	1.5 kg of offcuts, in ten lots
Low rope fence	2 hafts, 2 ropes
High rope fence	2 hafts, 4 ropes
Palisade	10 fallen trunks
Palisade gateway, then its gate	6 fallen trunks; the gate 4 more

Stone and iron fences

Stone walls and iron fences come in seven stones. Pick the fence on the build wheel, then its stone: rubble, limestone, granite, soapstone, fieldstone, brick or plaster. They are built with Masonry from that stone's blocks: dressed stone for rubble, dressed limestone, dressed granite and dressed soapstone (a mason's chisel on 16.5 kg of each rubble), fieldstones (two for each block), bricks (a clay brick shaped from 5 kg of clay and hardened in a fire), and for plaster dressed stone with 5 kg of clay. The low stone wall and the curb take lots of rubble instead of blocks.

Fence	Parts (in the chosen stone)
Stone fence	10 blocks
Low stone wall	10 lots of rubble
Curb	6 lots of rubble
Stone parapet	15 blocks
Tall stone wall	20 blocks
Portcullis gateway, then its grille	15 blocks; the grille 2 iron fence bars, 2 small wheels, 1 rope
Stone and iron parapet	14 blocks, 1 iron fence bars
Chain fence	10 blocks, 6 large chain links
Iron fence	10 blocks, 1 iron fence bars
Iron gateway, then its gate	10 blocks; the gate 1 iron fence bars
High iron fence	16 blocks, 2 iron fence bars
High iron gateway, then its gates	16 blocks; the gates 2 iron fence bars

Iron fence bars are smithed from 6 kg of glowing iron at the great anvil, large chain links from 1 kg. A portcullis's grille rises into the wall instead of swinging. Every piece on the wheel can have a key: hold a key while pointing at it on the wheel to bind it, then press it to plan one piece after another.

A wooden beam is hewn from 17.25 kg of timber with a hewing axe (Carpentry). A gate is built in two steps: the gateway goes up from the build wheel, and as soon as it is finished its gate is planned in it by itself, ready for its parts. Every fence blocks people and animals; an open gate, or one swinging, lets people through.

Fences and gates follow the ground, each section 4 m long, and a gate's leaves follow the slope as their frame does. Gates open by themselves when you or a guard walk up to them and shut again behind you; animals can't get through. A palisade already rings Alderbrook, with a gate on each side.

How big

Carpentry limits a building's size: its ground-storey floors and walls together, less five, may not pass your Carpentry. A one-tile hut with four walls needs none; a 4 by 4 house needs 27. Going higher needs more: 21 Carpentry for two storeys, 30 for three, 39 for four, 47 for five, rising to 99 for sixteen. A roof counts as the storey under it.

Weathering and repair

Finished pieces weather a little every real day, two days after they are done; better pieces weather slower, stone a third as fast as wood, and the more worn a piece is, the faster it goes. A settlement keeps its buildings: with more than a month of upkeep in its coffer nothing weathers at all, and with a week to a month only a tenth as often. Out on open land pieces weather twice as fast. A wall worn through falls back to a plan; floors, roofs, stairs, doors and fences are lost. Examine a piece to see how it fares.

Right-click a worn piece and choose Repair: it takes one of the piece's own material (boards, dressed stone) and your Repairing skill, and starts its weathering over. A sound piece offers Improve instead: better material and more building skill raise its quality a step at a time. Plans nobody starts are gone after two days.

Taking down

Take down (with a mallet or hammer) gives back everything put into a blueprint, and half the parts of a finished piece. A doorway's door comes down first, and nothing can be taken down while something rests on it. While a building stands, the ground under it can't be dug.