Districts: why where you build matters
A world is a hex grid, and the grid is not scenery. Where a building sits relative to its neighbours changes what it produces, who can work it and how the people near it feel about it.
Focus: like beside like
A region gets 10% added to its output for every neighbouring region doing the same work, counting up to 5 neighbours. Three or more contiguous regions doing the same thing is called a district and the panel names it as one.
A mineworks with four mining neighbours is producing 140% of what the same building would produce alone. Planning a world therefore means deciding where the industry goes and keeping it together, rather than putting each building on its own best tile.
Labour: who can actually reach it
A region draws its workforce from 2 hexes away, and having them living that close is worth 15%. Housing is not something to tuck into the corner of a world — it is infrastructure that has to sit beside the work.
Nuisance: what the neighbours think
Towns are judged by what surrounds them. Each neighbouring nuisance adds 2.5 unrest and each amenity takes 1.5 off, averaged over all the towns on the world. A town ringed entirely by smelters is as bad for a colony's mood as a famine; one facing open water is worth having.
So the industrial belt wants to be together, and it wants to not be where people sleep. That tension is most of the planning in Starfoundry.
Blight: the answer to building one thing everywhere
Every rule above rewards concentration, and a design where concentration carries no risk has exactly one answer to every question. Blight is the answer to that, and it is the oldest one there is: a belt of identical fields is a belt one disease can walk the length of.
It spreads only between farming regions that touch, which makes an unbuilt tile a firebreak — the one piece of deliberate insurance that turns an empty hex from an oversight into a decision.
Buildings that improve their neighbours
Several structures produce nothing themselves and employ nobody. They make the regions touching them worth more: Archives add 45% to the Research of every region touching them, and Fertiliser, Purification and Automated works do the same 45% for farming, mining and industry respectively.
They do not stack. A second set of archives beside the same institute files the same papers twice. Spread them out and put each one where it touches as much of the right work as possible.
Keep reading
What happens when you end a turn
The exact order a turn resolves in, and why it explains most of the surprises.
Power, and what shuts down first
The grid, the shutdown ladder in full, and why a brownout is a warning rather than a disaster.
Food, farms and going hungry
How a sector feeds itself, what a birth actually costs, and how long you have when it goes wrong.