In the time of playing this game i learned alot and after dropping tipps in many different threads, i wanna focus some a bit into one cohesive place.
Ofcourse while its called Königs Building Tipps anybody is free to drop there tipps here, i just thought beginner building tipps sounds discouraging and just building tipps pretty bland.
@Orkan hope you dont mind me answering the question here so i do not derail the what did you do today thread to much, so anyways here are some simple tipps for building buildings in this game.
You asked for entrances and personally i really dont like building those, just making something bareable and moving on, but i also learned alot since my last entrance so i might use this as inspiration to spiece mine up in the future.
So first of, lets talk about general shapes. The Nr. 1 easily fixable cause for a boring looking building is its shape, which generally means the closer it is to a square the more boring it looks, while the further away it is the more interesting it looks. Lets take a look at my unfinished gorilla house here.
Try to imagine it was only the box on right, doesnt look great does it? The fact that its elongated makes the blocky shape less jarring the more extreme one side is compared to the other, creating a more interesting shape. The same happens with the two out courves on the bottom at the right and left, giving a little more structure to the general shape and making it more then just a rectangle.
To break this up even more, having different sections with different kinds of elevations and roofs helps alot, as you can see with the glass roofs, the flat roof with the mulch beds and windows creating a more broken up and interesting shape and both the hole and square on the left. On their own each of these sections would be rather underwhelming, but together they compliment each other alot. This can also be seen in the fact, that the long mulched piece would look the best as a standalone house, not just because its the most detailed but also because its broken up more in smaller geometric shapes.
Their also is something in here that id actually mark as a mistake and thats the two leftest pieces of the bottom right glass ceiling. Atleast to me the longer i look at this pic the more wrong they feel, but why?
Simple, its because the rest of the buildings sections have a clear pattern. Every part is its own rectangle that fit together to make something more then the sum of its parts, but those two glass pieces ruin the rectangle aspect for the lower right glass ceiling. Thats also why the hole does not feel wrong but the glass does, as the hole still is clearly a rectangle.
To summarise, building anything in this game that isnt rectangular is a pain, so the best part to work around it for interesting shapes is to combine different rectangles that differentiate in roofs, height and shape to form a whole that looks as far away from a square as possible. The larger the building, the more effort typically is required as buildings with a with of 1 or 2 floor pieces generally look good enough as one rectangle thanks to the fact that even just a lenght of 2 floor pieces is double as much as 1, so you got a rectangle, not a square and it looks good.
Another example for how much a small elevation and style change can do for a building, with the raised roof guiding your eyes upwards from the 2 sheet metall roofed parts on the side, creating roughly a triangle shaped arge that your eyes follow when looking at the building, which feels a lot more visually interesting then when they can follow a straight line.
So your building got an interesting shape or atleast a varried roof design, whats next?
Before thinking to much about what you put inside, you gotta decorate whats on the outside, the walls.
This is the wall of my rather pretty australia house, looks nice doesnt it?
There are multiple factors at play here. First of, variation.
Instead of 4 times the same beton wall and 4 times the same wood wall we got only 2 that are the same each, with 1 beton wall being a gate, one having some backstage stuff , while one of the wood walls has a window and the 4. doesnt even exist and breaks up the rectangular shape.
But thats not at all.
As you can see here, i deconstructed the wall into 3 distinct part, each of them telling us something about how to pretty up a building.
First of on the left we got the blank walls. Here we again have variation. Just using two different walls for the upper and lower sections does wonders for making it look more interesting and not stale.
I also havent used the way to large 4 meter pieces here, but a 2m and a 1m piece for the beton and a 2 m piece for the wood, giving a little bit uneaven ness and a slight bottom heavy feel, making it feel sturfy and compact, with the wood as an add on on top.
On the other hand if we would have slightly more wood, it would feel lighter and less sturdy, but also higher. With 2 m and 3 m its not a big difference, but the farther it moves from each other the stronger those feelings are. Something that also might sound obvious but is really important is to pick a good color combination for the walls. The walls are the base color of the building, so while a contrast can be good, you generally dont want anything to harsh as that can be burdensome on the eye. Gentle contrasts often work really well though, with especally the light grey of the beton set working well with most other colors aslong as they dont pop to much and/or are seperated clearly.
One step to the right, i added the main feature or what i would call the main decorative motive of this building, in this case the logs with the curved wood between them.
This part quite frankly is very optional, but especally for more themed buildings very usefull to have one main decorative motive running through it.
These can be quite simple or complex, but mostly they are here to give a visual anchor point and eye catcher to the building to make it more unique. I also added a picture of the way older outback outpost, but the same idear applies here with the yellow, purple and red planks serving as an eyecatcher and living up the build by alot with only comperably low effort, as i didnt even add anything but just recolored 3 planks.
And then for the third row, we got the planks and beams. Again just like with the general building shape it all looks much better when broken up in distinct smaller chunks. These are generally pretty easy, as just framing in the walls at the top and the sides creates a very meaningfull difference. Besides the main outline you can also break it up as much as you like, where sticking to simple rectangles both gives the least headaches while placing aswell as the most consistent Patterns.
These are what seperates a fine simple building from a good one and the good use of a main motive turns it into a great one, atleast regarding the walls. Its also really easy to do in game, because you can just take one wall set, experiment with it and when you got something your happy with copy paste it around along the grid.
Extra tipp to keep headaches away, no matter what detail you still add later and want to add to other walls aswell, just copy and paste it + a grid piece around. You gotta delete the extra grid pieces afterwards but its super quick, efficent and just simply saves your brain from lots of frustration when you cant get them perfectly alligned.
Another tipp that helps alot here is to activly choose a colorsheme that fits well together and with the warms. Again rather no brainer, but having a color identity makes every building and if its across more then one building every zone or even entire zoo feel much more coherent. Personally i really like using mixes of warm earth tones like the orange, brownish red and and brownish orange for the wood and beams in contrast to very light cold tones like the grey beton and white and light brown beams, but this is something very subjective so to each their own.
Heres another example to show just how important framing your build is, with one side looking significantly better just due to 2 wooden planks.
Now your shape, roof and walls are quite nice and im proud of you, but what if you wanted to do something and it looks really good from one angle and really from another?
Easy, we just gotta do like a squirrel does with its nuts, we are gonna hide them.
Look at this viewing gallery for my gorillas, pretty cool right?
We got two distinct walls with a much higher focus on the lighter higher wall with the stone only being there to make it feel grounded in the earth as a base, we got a main motive with the logs and we got multiple beams splitting it up, but oh no, this is a circular building so ofcourse this happens.
I simply cant make it look good and cohesive from both the inside and the outside at the same time without lots of extra works as i got gabs in the stone and to short pillars!
What do i do?
As hinted before, we are just gonna hide it. We concentrate on making the actually well visible parts aka most of the times the insides look good, while covering up the outside ugly spots with plants and other decorations. This Immediatly helps with a couple of things:
1. The build is much less of an headache, because we only have to focus on aligning one side.
2. Plants look good and especally when the proplems are around the base its very easy to just slap some bushes above it to not just conceal it but also give a naturalistic feel
3. Your being forced to immediatly decorate the surroundings and factor them into your build, an inmportant factor if it will look good in the end or not.
Now the last part isnt about building itself, but about layout.
The red roofed building is my admitedly pretty ass entrance. On the right is also the australia house with the glass roof, which sadly is quite squary, but the different sections doesnt make it look that bad.
But back to the layout, something that in my opinion can really deminish an entrance area is an animal to close to the entry, for multiple reasons.
First of, your entrance is where the most visitors will pass through, so having one animal instandly next to it will not just make them flock to it and clog up the path, it also makes your zoo feel more claustrophobic then it should. Coming into the zoo is your first impression and in most cases, a large space is just right to feel free and unpressured.
Having some breathing room before the first animals automatically makes the zoo feel larger and less cramped, quite important for a place that wants you to feel excited and relaxed.
It also should allow multiple path ways and options before the first animals, again to make a good first expression of an expanisve place that your free to explore in the way that you want.
Even if your zoo is just one circle, starting in the border of the circle and being able to choose the direction you go to feels good and gives a good first impression, making you forget that your being railroaded into just one route if your zoo is pretty enough.
Meanwhile, if you first have a path way from the entrance next to a few animals before being able to choose makes it feel way more railroady as the start, the most important part, has been free of any choice.
And thats it for now, props gonna put in one the next days with some simple tipps for habitat building, i hope you liked it and the tipps were usefull and if you got any more questions or feel free to ask!
Im sure there are many great builders here that would happily answer them and help you out with your struggles ^^
Ofcourse while its called Königs Building Tipps anybody is free to drop there tipps here, i just thought beginner building tipps sounds discouraging and just building tipps pretty bland.
@Orkan hope you dont mind me answering the question here so i do not derail the what did you do today thread to much, so anyways here are some simple tipps for building buildings in this game.
You asked for entrances and personally i really dont like building those, just making something bareable and moving on, but i also learned alot since my last entrance so i might use this as inspiration to spiece mine up in the future.
So first of, lets talk about general shapes. The Nr. 1 easily fixable cause for a boring looking building is its shape, which generally means the closer it is to a square the more boring it looks, while the further away it is the more interesting it looks. Lets take a look at my unfinished gorilla house here.
Try to imagine it was only the box on right, doesnt look great does it? The fact that its elongated makes the blocky shape less jarring the more extreme one side is compared to the other, creating a more interesting shape. The same happens with the two out courves on the bottom at the right and left, giving a little more structure to the general shape and making it more then just a rectangle.
To break this up even more, having different sections with different kinds of elevations and roofs helps alot, as you can see with the glass roofs, the flat roof with the mulch beds and windows creating a more broken up and interesting shape and both the hole and square on the left. On their own each of these sections would be rather underwhelming, but together they compliment each other alot. This can also be seen in the fact, that the long mulched piece would look the best as a standalone house, not just because its the most detailed but also because its broken up more in smaller geometric shapes.
Their also is something in here that id actually mark as a mistake and thats the two leftest pieces of the bottom right glass ceiling. Atleast to me the longer i look at this pic the more wrong they feel, but why?
Simple, its because the rest of the buildings sections have a clear pattern. Every part is its own rectangle that fit together to make something more then the sum of its parts, but those two glass pieces ruin the rectangle aspect for the lower right glass ceiling. Thats also why the hole does not feel wrong but the glass does, as the hole still is clearly a rectangle.
To summarise, building anything in this game that isnt rectangular is a pain, so the best part to work around it for interesting shapes is to combine different rectangles that differentiate in roofs, height and shape to form a whole that looks as far away from a square as possible. The larger the building, the more effort typically is required as buildings with a with of 1 or 2 floor pieces generally look good enough as one rectangle thanks to the fact that even just a lenght of 2 floor pieces is double as much as 1, so you got a rectangle, not a square and it looks good.
Another example for how much a small elevation and style change can do for a building, with the raised roof guiding your eyes upwards from the 2 sheet metall roofed parts on the side, creating roughly a triangle shaped arge that your eyes follow when looking at the building, which feels a lot more visually interesting then when they can follow a straight line.
So your building got an interesting shape or atleast a varried roof design, whats next?
Before thinking to much about what you put inside, you gotta decorate whats on the outside, the walls.
This is the wall of my rather pretty australia house, looks nice doesnt it?
There are multiple factors at play here. First of, variation.
Instead of 4 times the same beton wall and 4 times the same wood wall we got only 2 that are the same each, with 1 beton wall being a gate, one having some backstage stuff , while one of the wood walls has a window and the 4. doesnt even exist and breaks up the rectangular shape.
But thats not at all.
As you can see here, i deconstructed the wall into 3 distinct part, each of them telling us something about how to pretty up a building.
First of on the left we got the blank walls. Here we again have variation. Just using two different walls for the upper and lower sections does wonders for making it look more interesting and not stale.
I also havent used the way to large 4 meter pieces here, but a 2m and a 1m piece for the beton and a 2 m piece for the wood, giving a little bit uneaven ness and a slight bottom heavy feel, making it feel sturfy and compact, with the wood as an add on on top.
On the other hand if we would have slightly more wood, it would feel lighter and less sturdy, but also higher. With 2 m and 3 m its not a big difference, but the farther it moves from each other the stronger those feelings are. Something that also might sound obvious but is really important is to pick a good color combination for the walls. The walls are the base color of the building, so while a contrast can be good, you generally dont want anything to harsh as that can be burdensome on the eye. Gentle contrasts often work really well though, with especally the light grey of the beton set working well with most other colors aslong as they dont pop to much and/or are seperated clearly.
One step to the right, i added the main feature or what i would call the main decorative motive of this building, in this case the logs with the curved wood between them.
This part quite frankly is very optional, but especally for more themed buildings very usefull to have one main decorative motive running through it.
These can be quite simple or complex, but mostly they are here to give a visual anchor point and eye catcher to the building to make it more unique. I also added a picture of the way older outback outpost, but the same idear applies here with the yellow, purple and red planks serving as an eyecatcher and living up the build by alot with only comperably low effort, as i didnt even add anything but just recolored 3 planks.
And then for the third row, we got the planks and beams. Again just like with the general building shape it all looks much better when broken up in distinct smaller chunks. These are generally pretty easy, as just framing in the walls at the top and the sides creates a very meaningfull difference. Besides the main outline you can also break it up as much as you like, where sticking to simple rectangles both gives the least headaches while placing aswell as the most consistent Patterns.
These are what seperates a fine simple building from a good one and the good use of a main motive turns it into a great one, atleast regarding the walls. Its also really easy to do in game, because you can just take one wall set, experiment with it and when you got something your happy with copy paste it around along the grid.
Extra tipp to keep headaches away, no matter what detail you still add later and want to add to other walls aswell, just copy and paste it + a grid piece around. You gotta delete the extra grid pieces afterwards but its super quick, efficent and just simply saves your brain from lots of frustration when you cant get them perfectly alligned.
Another tipp that helps alot here is to activly choose a colorsheme that fits well together and with the warms. Again rather no brainer, but having a color identity makes every building and if its across more then one building every zone or even entire zoo feel much more coherent. Personally i really like using mixes of warm earth tones like the orange, brownish red and and brownish orange for the wood and beams in contrast to very light cold tones like the grey beton and white and light brown beams, but this is something very subjective so to each their own.
Heres another example to show just how important framing your build is, with one side looking significantly better just due to 2 wooden planks.
Now your shape, roof and walls are quite nice and im proud of you, but what if you wanted to do something and it looks really good from one angle and really from another?
Easy, we just gotta do like a squirrel does with its nuts, we are gonna hide them.
Look at this viewing gallery for my gorillas, pretty cool right?
We got two distinct walls with a much higher focus on the lighter higher wall with the stone only being there to make it feel grounded in the earth as a base, we got a main motive with the logs and we got multiple beams splitting it up, but oh no, this is a circular building so ofcourse this happens.
I simply cant make it look good and cohesive from both the inside and the outside at the same time without lots of extra works as i got gabs in the stone and to short pillars!
What do i do?
As hinted before, we are just gonna hide it. We concentrate on making the actually well visible parts aka most of the times the insides look good, while covering up the outside ugly spots with plants and other decorations. This Immediatly helps with a couple of things:
1. The build is much less of an headache, because we only have to focus on aligning one side.
2. Plants look good and especally when the proplems are around the base its very easy to just slap some bushes above it to not just conceal it but also give a naturalistic feel
3. Your being forced to immediatly decorate the surroundings and factor them into your build, an inmportant factor if it will look good in the end or not.
Now the last part isnt about building itself, but about layout.
The red roofed building is my admitedly pretty ass entrance. On the right is also the australia house with the glass roof, which sadly is quite squary, but the different sections doesnt make it look that bad.
But back to the layout, something that in my opinion can really deminish an entrance area is an animal to close to the entry, for multiple reasons.
First of, your entrance is where the most visitors will pass through, so having one animal instandly next to it will not just make them flock to it and clog up the path, it also makes your zoo feel more claustrophobic then it should. Coming into the zoo is your first impression and in most cases, a large space is just right to feel free and unpressured.
Having some breathing room before the first animals automatically makes the zoo feel larger and less cramped, quite important for a place that wants you to feel excited and relaxed.
It also should allow multiple path ways and options before the first animals, again to make a good first expression of an expanisve place that your free to explore in the way that you want.
Even if your zoo is just one circle, starting in the border of the circle and being able to choose the direction you go to feels good and gives a good first impression, making you forget that your being railroaded into just one route if your zoo is pretty enough.
Meanwhile, if you first have a path way from the entrance next to a few animals before being able to choose makes it feel way more railroady as the start, the most important part, has been free of any choice.
And thats it for now, props gonna put in one the next days with some simple tipps for habitat building, i hope you liked it and the tipps were usefull and if you got any more questions or feel free to ask!
Im sure there are many great builders here that would happily answer them and help you out with your struggles ^^
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