Holdfast

Holdfast brings complete semi-automated town-building to Vintage Story. Instead of placing every block by hand, you lay down a town hall, recruit workers, and let your townsfolk raise the buildings, work the land, cook the meals, and protect you from hostiles while you get on with surviving and taking care of the town. If you've ever wanted your hard-won base to feel like a living settlement rather than a quiet stack of chests, this is for you.

Inspired by colony mods like MineColonies, but built from the ground up for Vintage Story's world, seasons, and survival rhythm.

Early release
This is the first public release, and your town can currently grow up to Tier 2. That will give you a full economy with builders, farmers, cook, quarry, lumberyard, workshops, and defenses

How it works
The Townhall is the heart of your settlement. From there you place building sites from a catalogue of ready-made structures. Your builder only needs you to supply the materials, and the work gets done. You can select base materials for the buildings from what your town actually has, so you're not blocked looking for rare ingredient. All blocks in the buildings are craftable with few exceptions.

As buildings come online, you assign workers to them, bringing your town to alive:

- Builders raise new structures from your blueprints.
- Farmers plant, tend, and harvest your fields with the seasons.
- Cooks turn raw food into proper meals and keep everyone fed.
- Quarry workers dig out rock and stone.
- Lumberjacks obtain the wood you need for your constructions.
- Workshop hands craft the blocks your town runs on.
- Guards and archers patrol the walls and answer the call when hostiles arrive.
- Automatic crossbows in towers shoot enemies at sight.
- Everyone seek shelter in the Keep during temporal storms.

Your workers need to eat and sleep to work their shifts. Working shifts are between 8am and 6pm with no weekend (period is pre-worker rights anyways). Workers sleep between 7pm and 6am.

Getting started

1. Explore the world and find a large flat land to settle in
2. Find a dimond, craft and place a Town Hall block to found your settlement. 
3. Craft a builder hammer. Lay chests in the external perimeter of the construction and fill them with the construction materials (right click the townhall block with the builder hammer to activate building gohst preview). Right-click anywhere within the constrcution area using the builder hammer to automatically construct the Town Hall.
4. Build a dwelling as above and recruit your first worker.
5. Build a Builder's Guild as above to assign an employment to your first worker. Once the Builder's Guild is built, then all construction materials should be deposited in the Builder's Guild trunks/chests. Don't forget to manually refresh the Townhall status tab to register the new buildings to initiate construction. 
6. Have the new builder build the town Eatery.
7. Lay down more building sites and let your builder do the construction.
8. Grow, unlock progress by building massive, yet useful constructions.

Feeding your people
The workers run on their stomach. Farms grow the food, the cook prepares it, and workers come to the eatery for a feed everyday between midday and 1pm. Let the supply run dry and productivity grinds to a halt. Workers will refuse to work on an empty stomach. You can hand-feed a starving worker yourself or place food on the eatery table during lunch time to get things moving again if a cook has not been hired yet. Keeping the food chain flowing is the quiet backbone of a thriving settlement.

Growing your town
Your Town Hall advances through tiers, and each tier unlocks bigger and better buildings. To unlock to the next tier, you need to complete challenging constructions which are both big and practical.

Add your own themes
Holdfast is created with a base theme pack but it allows you to create your own (instructions in the config/themes folder), so your buildings can match the look you want for your settlement. Use the provided teststructure block to test your creations. Create 3-tier constructable buildings using craftable materials in survival mode. Submit your creations to be included to the main theme pack, or create your own mod with theme packs for Holdfast. Buildings are not just aesthetic, but they have functions, see in-game descriptions for more details.

Known Issues

1. VS native pathfinding is the worst. I have made an road-aware navigation system for the workers, but you need to lay down the roads between buildings and around the town for workers to go from one place to another. Without roads the workers will try to walk through walls. If a worker does this or you see it is struggling to get to its destination (like spinning around) then interact with them to make them come to you and lure them close to a road.
2. The town requires the player to move goods around, development of a worker courier is part of the roadmap.
3. GUI tabs are static text so it requires player to change tabs or close and open GUI again to refresh text.

Mod compatibility
Holdfast has been designed using all vanilla items and blocks with the exception of the Holdfast-specific blocks required for functionality. With so many mods out there it is impossible to guarantee compatibility. Please test yourself and report sucess or compatibility issues in the mod comments.

Roadmap
This is a big project, with a fully design roadmap already in the making. I have programmed the basic architecture that can sustain the entire plan, it is just a mater of keep expanding it. We're releasing early so you can play it, break it, and tell us what you think. Bigger things are already on the way:

Town tier 1 Buildings (all complete)
- Townhall (levels 1 and 2)
- Builder's Guild (level 1 and 2)
- Dwelling (levels 1, 2 and 3)
- Eatery (levels 1 and 2)
- Farm (levels 1, 2 and 3)
- Lumberyard (levels 1 and 2)
- Quarry (level 1)
- Workshop (level 1, currently working on level 2))
- Barracks (level 1)
- Guard Tower (levels 1, 2 and 3)
- Walls (wall segment, wall corner, wall gate and wall tower) (levels 1, 2 and 3)
- Keep (unlocks tier 2) (levels 1, 2 and 3)

Town tier 2 buildings:
- Windmill (level 1 complete)
- Watermill (complete)
- Animal Pens (complete)
- Fishing Dock
- Grain Mill
- Bakery
- Sawmill
- Foundry
- Blacksmith
- Brickworks
- Mine
- Powerhouse (unlocks tier 3)
- Simplify list of materials for construction

- "Progression" theme pack

Town Tier 3 building:
- Miner's Guild
- Mining colony
- Caravan Camp (to access mining colonies by land)
- Trading Port (to access mining colonies by sea)
- Courier Hub
- Steelworks
- Final Monument: (in my list are: huge cathedral, a large palace; please send your ideas) 

Holdfast development takes lots of time.

Instructions on how to build your Town Hall:

Instructions for the Builder worker to build things automatically:

Instructions for the eatery: