Voxel City has had the big civic buildings for a while. A hospital, the university, a stadium, even a rocket pad. What it was missing was the stuff you'd walk to in your slippers. Somewhere to swap a book, somewhere for the kids to play, an allotment.
That's what this batch is. Services now opens on a new Local tab, and there are round the corner places in Parks, Transit and Utilities too.
What's in it
The Local tab has a little library in a timber hut with a reading bench, a repair café with a toaster in bits in the window, a Library of Things where you borrow a drill instead of buying one, a red-brick community hall with bunting out for a fete, a wellbeing hub that opens onto a garden, a night market under string lights, and a cool room for sitting out a heatwave.
Each one does something small. The repair café means homes within four tiles throw out 15% less. The Library of Things means homes nearby need fewer materials to grow. The community hall and the little library make a few Ideas for Town Plans.
In Parks there's a playground, allotments that take the food waste from the bins round them, a dog park and a rain garden that gets ducks after a storm. There's also a bike dock and a mobility hub for getting about, and a neighbourhood battery painted with a mural, which glows at dusk.
The fire post and the police post belong here too, a single engine in a brick shed and a blue police box with a car. They're for the corner of town a full station can't quite reach, and they don't have levels.
Places nearby
The reason these matter is a new need. Homes at levels 4 and 5 now want places nearby, a mix of kinds within six tiles. One kind for level 4 and two for level 5. The kinds are a park, a playground, a library, a café and a bike dock.
It only slows a home down. Half its tries to grow wait, and that's all. It never stops it outright, because a town that sulks isn't cosy. When a home is short, the fix button picks the playground first, as it's cheap and fits almost anywhere.
There's a new Places nearby view to go with it. Homes with two kinds or more within reach show green, one kind butter yellow, none red, so you can see the gaps in a street at a glance.
The Commons
The one big building in the batch is The Commons, a library, a hall with a café and a nursery round one courtyard with a big tree. It counts as three kinds of place on its own, within eight tiles. You get it when a district with the Everything Nearby character reaches level 3.
Smaller things
A walkway now counts as frontage for any place that doesn't send out vehicles, so a playground can sit on a footpath. Anything with a van or a lorry still needs a road a car can drive on. And a build tile's cost turns red when you can't afford it, which is the sort of thing I should have done months ago.
The plan was also for some of these to fit on the verges and the middle of roundabouts, the odd leftover scrap of land at the end of a street. That part isn't done yet. It's coming.