Best build and vertical layout

The 10 June demo announcement says foundations were reworked: construct buildings and connect them with roads to function. The 16 June update separately simplified road placement and fixed stairs-related road issues. These are dated demo-era rules, not evidence for an optimal release layout.

Screenshots show the colony as a vertical stack on the cliff: habitats with warm windows, cyan greenhouses, turrets facing the open side, solar on the brighter rock. I call that a screenshot pattern, not a designer mandate. A practical reading is production and storage near the shafts, housing and the hospital nearer the Core, guns outward. If you want named buildings, start from the buildings table.

One player recommends 4×4 clearance for spiders after a stuck hull. That clearance note is one player reply, shared with the spider page. Road Network asks for 250 metres of road (34.2% of players). City Architect is 30 buildings in one scenario (73.5%). Metropolis is 80 (37.0%). Human Anthill is 5.2%. Those are milestones, not a target to pave in circles for the achievement.

Warehouse stacking from one report: with the +50 storage research, three small warehouses held 300 and one large held 250. The large one saves footprint. Whether it survives acid rain better is not shown. I leave that cell open.

Defense facing follows the wave panel. If the next wave is mostly ground, the missile launcher’s ground-only description (player-quoted) matters. If it is flying, machine guns and spider response matter more. See Zyrex defense. There is no published “best” ratio of turrets to houses.

Use the resources guide for the published stockpile goals. Output and watt fields have no published numbers, so the site does not score or rank a layout by invented rates.