A stone dais in the middle of the plaza, with stairs on four sides

The middle of the plaza was flat and felt a bit plain. I figured that if I put a stone dais in the center and moved the existing well and props up onto it, the plaza would look a lot more three-dimensional. I kept a few photos of stone daises just as a visual reference and decided to work out the details as I built it.

I put the stairs on the four sides facing the village roads (a + shape). The stalls, trees and rest spots that used to sit in those four areas got moved outward, so I kept all of them.

What I built

The dais is 7.6 m on each side and 0.89 m tall. That matches the height of the stone stairs and bases in the pack. It's higher than what pathfinding can just step over (0.75 m), so the only way up or down is the stairs.

For materials I stuck to the SUNTAIL pack so it reads as the same stonework as the house foundations in the village. The body and pillars are brick, and the base and rim are flagstone. For the top I made a new paving material with grass growing between the slabs, so it stands apart from the cobblestones on the plaza floor.

On top of the dais I put the well (scaled 1.25×) and a ring of flower beds, plus prop clusters in the four inner corners (barrels and fruit crates, flower pots, wooden crates and sacks, a washtub and water buckets). The + shaped paths from the stairs to the well are left clear.

Each set of stairs is two stone stairs placed side by side: 2.7 m wide, 4 steps, 1.54 m deep. I gave the outline a few layers. At the bottom there's a flagstone base 0.27 m wider than the body (0.22 m tall), and at the top a flagstone rim that sticks out 0.06 m (0.16 m thick), which adds shadow lines.

In the four corners I put brick pillars (0.84 m square, 0.45 m above the top surface) topped with flagstone caps and braziers. The tour camera passes over the corners, so I kept the pillars low. It's daytime, so I turned off the brazier lights, and since four fire sounds overlap, I turned them down to 0.35.

Among the original props, I moved the southeast rest spot 0.6 m south so it doesn't touch the base, and I also moved a barrel that was sitting where the dais is now. Paths connect from the south to the top of the dais, across the plaza, and to all 8 NPCs. I walked up the south stairs myself and it took 1.2 s.

Things I thought about

• Raised the tour path by the dais height. The opening tour camera circles inside the plaza at an eye level of 2.4–2.9 m. To keep the framing it had from the ground now that there's a dais, I raised the waypoints and the plaza look-at point by 0.89 m. I ran the opening and checked the camera position against the bounds of 226 plaza props (with 0.3 m of margin), and it clipped through nothing. The closest call was over the awning of the southwest stall, so I raised the waypoint before it too.
• The generator builds the mesh itself. The side patterns are based on real lengths (repeating every 1.9 m for brick, 1.5 m for flagstone, 2.6 m for paving), so the bricks line up exactly with the pack's stone bases.
• The top and stairs are marked walkable separately. That's because the area under prop clusters inherits a "not walkable" setting by default.

Rabbit hole: a waypoint got raised twice

One camera waypoint that used to be at 2.0 m had somehow crept up to 3.78 m. The rule at first was "only raise waypoints below 3 m," but it got raised again when I rebuilt the plaza. I put it back to 2.89 m and changed it so a full generation always raises them, while rebuilding just the plaza raises them only if there's no existing dais.

Rabbit hole: the brazier flames didn't shrink

I placed the braziers scaled down, but the flames stayed at their original size. The flame particles only followed their own scale. I fixed it by making just the placed copies follow their parent's scale.

Next up

• The brazier fire still burns during the day. Once there's a night setup, decide whether to turn the lights back on
• If the top of the dais feels cramped, make it wider. Then I'd need to revisit where the stalls and rest spots go too