PLACEMENT GRIDS
Construction snapped to a regular grid — square tiles, hex cells, voxel lattices — where every buildable object occupies discrete cells and alignment is automatic.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN SANDBOX · CITY-BUILDER · AUTOMATION · BASE-BUILDING
Minecraft's meter cube is the most famous grid in gaming, city builders from SimCity through Cities: Skylines zone on cells, Factorio's tile grid makes belt alignment tractable at megabase scale, and tactics games share the same substrate for movement. Designers choose grids because discreteness buys enormous clarity: adjacency is unambiguous (which machines touch, which walls seal), pathfinding and structural logic simplify by orders of magnitude, players can plan precisely (this room is 8×6, the reactor needs 4×4), and screenshots of grid builds read legibly in a way freeform clutter doesn't. The grid is also an aesthetic commitment — it produces the blocky, rational look that some games embrace as identity and others fight with rounding decorations. Grid resolution is the core dial: coarse grids (Minecraft's meter) make building fast and chunky; fine grids (Rimworld tiles, sub-grids for furniture) approach freeform expressiveness while keeping snap benefits. Key decisions: square versus hex (hexes flatter organic shapes and equal-distance adjacency but confuse rectangular architecture), whether diagonal placement exists at all, multi-cell object footprints and rotation, and sub-grid offsets for decoration layers. Pitfall: grid-inflicted sameness — when the grid is coarse and object variety thin, every player's base converges on the same rectangles, and expression dies; games that thrive on coarse grids compensate with material variety, height, and decoration systems that let identical footprints look nothing alike.