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City-owned housing: founding districts, Merchant Quarters, Grand Villas and Auto-Hunt.
Once your city reaches Town Hall Level 4, industry draws people. Word spreads that the mills and quarries are hiring, families load their wagons, and your city stops being a workshop and becomes a home — it gains a population of Residents who are not players. Residential Districts are city-owned neighbourhoods you found to house them.
Residents are not Citizens. Citizens are the players who build and run the city; Residents are the NPC families who live in its districts. The two are always counted separately — Residents drive prestige, not City Score.
Open /city and tap 🏘 Districts, then Found a Cottage Row. Only the Mayor or a Minister of Zoning can found districts. You'll see a full breakdown first: the build cost, the per-family move-in cost, and the upkeep the district will draw once families arrive.
Founding a district doesn't spend your stockpile all at once. Each hour, the city automatically builds the district from surplus — the materials it has above your reserve floor. It never spends below that floor, so essential stock is always protected. A district rises over several hours with no further clicks.
While a district is still going up, the 🏘 Districts panel shows its progress and a Needs line of exactly what materials it's still short on. Tap the district to see the full list — how much of each resource is left to build and how much you currently have spare above your reserve to feed it. A ⚠️ means a material has no spare above the reserve right now, so the build is waiting on it — gather or trade more of it in to get things moving.
Tuning the reserve floor. The reserve floor is the per-resource cushion your districts never draw below — 750 by default. Lower it (Mayor or Minister of Zoning, from the 🏘 Districts panel → 🛟 Reserve floor) to let your districts build and feed themselves faster from a thin stockpile — even down to zero. Raise it to hold more back for your own crafting and exports — there's no upper limit, so you can set it as high as you like to keep a big glut safe from the district sink. To jump straight to a big floor instead of tapping the ± steps, use ✏️ Type an amount — you can write it loosely, so 99,000,000 or shorthand like 99m both work. Your districts never spend a single unit below whatever floor you set. Luxury goods are the one exception — Diamonds, Silk, Dyes, Glass and the rest are never held back by the reserve floor, no matter how high you've set it. A district only ever needs a few of them at a time, so the floor (sized to protect a big raw-material stockpile) would otherwise lock those small amounts away for good.
Your own building projects always draw in full. The reserve floor holds back your districts only — it never limits your own city builds. Upgrade to a Masterwork or raise any landmark and it draws the whole stockpile it needs straight away, regardless of the floor. If a hungry build leaves your districts short of upkeep that hour, their happiness simply dips until you restock — families never leave. Your active build comes first; the districts take what's left.
/resources lists exactly which materials are missing — including the luxury goods a Grand Villas family expects. It shows two numbers: what the very next family still needs, and what it would cost to settle every family you currently have room for — so "460 families on the road" comes with the real total, not just the price of the first one. If more families are waiting than you have beds for, it tells you they need another zone, not more materials.Residential Districts turn a fully-industrialised city's overflowing raw production into something permanent. All that surplus timber, stone, grain, and fuel goes into homes and the families who live in them — a growing town you govern rather than a stockpile you watch overflow. They pay you back three ways: prestige (which lifts every citizen's wages), treasury (resident taxes, every hour), and the leveled 🏘 Boomtown city medal (Bronze through Diamond). Your city's Residents and its living census of family names appear on its public web page.
A district isn't just "Cottage Row III" forever — once construction finishes, it earns a real neighborhood name (things like "Willowmere Cottages" or "Thornfield Row"), and every screen that mentions it — the Districts panel, your hourly report, the city feed, your city's web page — uses that name from then on.
Don't like the name it picked? The Mayor or Minister of Zoning can change it from the district's page in the 🏘 Districts panel: tap 🎲 New name for a fresh AI-generated one (50💸 treasury), or ✏️ Custom to type your own (500💸 treasury, only charged once you submit a name).
Districts run on materials, and the higher tiers run on leather — which only comes from pelts. Once your Hunter's Lodge reaches Level 4, it starts supplying that leather on its own: the Lodge hires standing hunting parties that mount a full expedition automatically every hour, with no taps and no queue slot. You come back to a stockpile of fresh pelts ready for the Tanning Rack.
Auto-hunt spends a bundle of your city's surplus raw materials (timber and stone, mostly) each tick — and, like your districts, it only ever draws from above your reserve floor, so it never touches what you're holding back. It's a steady pelts-for-leather faucet and a permanent drain on your raw glut, the same way districts are.
Your hourly report shows the haul and what it cost. The parties bring back game, measured by weight — the Lodge dresses it into pelts on the next tick, so the line reads like "brought back 584 lbs of game … becomes 85 pelts next tick" rather than pretending the pelts already exist. It also shows the total spent in supplies — that word means the whole bundle of raw materials together, not any single resource — followed by a 🔧 Drew from surplus line naming each material and amount, just like your districts' draw.
It's a pure pelt supply — no trophies, medals, or hunting reputation. All of that still belongs to hunting by hand via 🏹 Hunt. Automation feeds your leather; the chase stays yours.
Auto-hunt is on by default for every Lodge-4 city. Your Mayor or Minister of Zoning can toggle it off anytime from the 🏘 Districts panel, and the same reserve floor that governs your districts controls how much the hunting parties may spend.
The 🏘 Districts panel also shows a typical haul range for your hunting parties' next hour. That range is genuinely wide, because the parties bag a mix of small and large game each trip — an hour that lands near the bottom of the range is a normal, if unlucky, roll, not a sign anything's broken.
Once you're comfortable with Cottage Rows, you can found a 🎩 Merchant Quarter — a wealthier neighborhood for better-off families. Where cottage families live simply on raw materials (timber, grain, stone), merchant families expect finished goods: their homes are furnished, their tables set, their larders stocked. That's the difference — a Merchant Quarter runs on refined Tier-2 goods, not raw.
Five new goods arrive with the tier, all craftable at your Workbench and producible in bulk by your Masterwork (or bought in by trade):
The easiest way to keep a Merchant Quarter supplied is to assign these recipes to your Masterwork — its NPC workers make them every hour from your raw stockpile, no clicking. You can also craft them by hand or trade for them; a district happily consumes them whatever their source. As always, if the goods run short one hour the district just goes quiet until you restock — nobody ever leaves.
Merchant families arrive as your city grows. Build up your cottages and prestige, and a trickle of merchant families takes to the road — you'll see them waiting in the 🏘 Districts panel, a nudge that it's time to open a Quarter for them. Founding one is Mayor / Minister-of-Zoning only, same as any district.
One honest note: Furnishings need leather, so building out a Merchant Quarter is leather-paced. Once your Hunter's Lodge hits Level 4, auto-hunt (above) supplies that leather steadily on its own.
The highest tier of all: 👑 Grand Villas, a small (8 families), wealthy neighborhood for a city's most aspirational residents. Where merchant families want finished goods, grand families want the finer things — their homes are richly furnished in leather, and every family that moves in brings home a few luxury goods from your stores.
Grand Villas are a deliberate step up:
As with every district, founding a Grand Villas is Mayor / Minister-of-Zoning only, families arrive as a trickle once you've built up the tiers below, and a district that runs short on upkeep just quietly dips in happiness until you restock — never eviction, never anyone leaving.
If your Grand Villas are short a luxury and you can't get it by trade, a licensed Tycoon can bring it in for you. An NPC caravan delivers the missing goods straight into your stockpile, and your city treasury pays the toll — 500💸 per unit. Your citizens never touch this cost personally; it comes straight out of the city's Treasury.
Trading is always far cheaper. Importing a handful of units to unstick an otherwise-finished neighborhood is a routine, occasional expense — but importing everything a whole zone needs would run your treasury dry for weeks. The toll is deliberately steep so a neighbor is always the better deal; the caravan is there for the last mile, not as a substitute for trade.
It only ever fires against a real shortfall — nothing is ever bulk-bought or purchased on demand, and if the city can't afford the toll (or no Tycoon happens to be carrying that luxury right now), nothing is charged and the family simply waits, exactly as it always has.
Founding a Grand Villas now warns you up front. The founding screen shows which luxuries you're short of, the toll per unit, and the worst-case total cost if you never trade for a single one — plus a warning if your treasury couldn't cover it. A Grand Villas zone is a big stone investment; you should know the luxury bill before you commit, not after.
Imports are on by default so an away city's zones don't stall while nobody's watching, but your Mayor or Minister of Zoning can turn them off from the 🏘 Districts panel if you'd rather always wait for a trade. Your hourly report calls out any caravan that arrives, naming the goods and the toll paid — and if a luxury couldn't be imported this week because no Tycoon held a Letter of Credit for it, your report now names that too, so you know trading for it is the way through rather than waiting on a caravan that isn't coming.
Founding and pausing districts can be delegated. A mayor can appoint any citizen as Minister of Zoning (a city role unlocked at Town Hall 4) to manage the city's districts — separate from the Minister of Urban Development who handles building projects.
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