Planification tool

Hi everyone !! In my opinion it would be great idea to add a planification tool that allow us to "paint" where we want future walls. Something similar to the planning tool in RimWorld.

This has my vote too, I've encountered a few instances where this would have helped to make better judgement calls in the expansion of my hospital.

I like the idea too. It gives you the ability to plan in the beginning like in Prison Architect or other similiar games.
This way you start as little clinic, but you have the expansions already planned.

Hi all, there's actually a system in the game that's been designed to help with this from the beginning! Try using the room markers from management mode - you can basically do the whole floor layout for free and then add walls on top of it (with some useful tools like the tile counter shown when placing rooms etc.)

Or, if it doesn't help, please tell us why!

Hi Jan! Yes, those room markers in management mode really do work. However, there is one problem with them - you can't place prefabs down on top of them because the prefabs themselves contain a room marker. So, right now we have to use the room markers to plan and then delete them to place prefabs.

Would there be anyway to fix this? It's not a huge deal, just would be a minor quality of life improvement.

Sure, actually we can probably remove the whole 'prefab blocked by room' rule at this point - with the original implementation placing rooms would delete all overlapping rooms which you can imagine can be pretty annoying, but now, as other rooms get only cropped, there isn't really a need for this...

That would make it a lot more useful and user-friendly, yeah.

jan.oxymoron wrote:Hi all, there's actually a system in the game that's been designed to help with this from the beginning! Try using the room markers from management mode - you can basically do the whole floor layout for free and then add walls on top of it (with some useful tools like the tile counter shown when placing rooms etc.)

Or, if it doesn't help, please tell us why!

Not OP but can share from my experience:
I did use the room markers in the managment mode to plan out further expansion and it worked relatively fine. Though I mostly used corridors as the rooms for hospitalisation and departments you have not unlocked yet are hidden (except the stat lab in emergency which is grayed out). This also means that until you have learned which departments have which rooms you are left in the dark a bit - of course seeing all rooms grayed out might overwelm first time players but then also would give players an idea what is coming down the road and help to think and plan ahead.

Mapping out rooms and filling them with items later works very well for the more basic rooms like GP, toilet, trauma etc. For the more advanced rooms containing many different items particularly if that involves beds (so wards, ICU, observation) it gets a bit trickier. Its usually a lot of testing and moving around to see how many beds you can fit in an X by Y space. While a planning tool might help here, I think a simple quality of life change to how you can select and move items would already be a big step and potentially suffice (talking about moving items on a table or a cupboard under a monitor, things like that)

And yes being able to place a prefabs over marked rooms would be a great - I usually mapped out all departments first before I place things like toilets, so I constantly had to go back delete the room marker to be able tp place my custom toilet prefab etc.