This guide will explain how to build houses that are very close to each other, even closer than using the square brush and painting minimal sized zones. At the end it will look like this :

First of, you need a pristine area. For villager to place down a house, they need 3 things :

• The painted area needs to be big enough
  
• There must be no path or dirt present
  
• There need to be a need for house at that location

We will use the forbid brush, paint a zone big enough to fit all the houses you want.

Next to that location, you can build lot of gathering hut, this will create demand for housing in that area. I found out that helps a lot.

To paint a perfect square, you can use the square brush and the WASD keys

The minimal size for a house to be placed in a zone is a size 12 brush. From the smallest square brush available, you need to increase its size 11 times with CTRL + mouse wheel

Now we can start building the grid. Use the forbid brush of size 12 to allow a square, then paint a house zone in its place


As you can see, someone is going to place the house even without having access to it. If the house is not placed within 30 seconds of making the zone, there is probably something wrong (see the 3 rules above). Don't allow anything until all the houses are placed.

After the first house is placed, you are going to paint the next house but the brush will overlap, this will take some practice but I found the smallest possible zone is where the brush limit touch the "end" of the house that has been placed.


Slowly, houses are placed one by one.


If you want to see the houses before building, you can use the building tool to see houses as ghosts.

There is nothing much more to it, now you can allow villagers to build houses. Later, you will be able to place buildings and decoration between houses to save even more space ! But they need to build everything to dense housing before you place something, or the house might disappear

I added 1 city watchtower and 2 patrol tower with 1 guard each for this square of 9 houses.


You can add watchtowers, decoration, wells or even market between houses for ultra efficiency !


The end.