The tavern and inn interior: a sunken hall and a fireplace pillar

I collected a few reference screenshots of inns and decided to go with a similar layout.

I'd already decided that interiors in the village shouldn't repeat layouts. The guild was already "flat hall + second-floor gallery" and the smithy was "L-shaped rooms + exposed roof," so the tavern had to be different again. The village tavern's exterior is a big rectangle with a door on the south, so I made the inside a 17.6 × 16 m rectangular hall too. The goal was to bring the reference layout over with SUNTAIL assets and make the interior you'd most want to hang out in.

What I built

Coming in through the south door, you're in a raised entryway. To the right (east), in an alcove between thick pillars, there's the inn's reception counter, run by Sophia.

Going down 3 steps with octagonally beveled corners from the entryway, you reach a stone-floored hall (9.6 × 7.2 m) 0.72 m lower. In the very center of the hall, a 2 m square stone pillar runs from floor to ceiling. The side facing the entrance (south) is a fireplace, and the other three sides have big shield crests. There are two 3 m long tables on either side of the pillar.

The raised areas on the east and west each have 3 booths. Low stone walls act as both high backrests and dividers. On the raised area to the north is the bar counter, tended by Marco, and on the wall behind it 11 barrels are stacked on their sides.

The ceiling is 9.6 m high with a grid of thick beams. 3 braziers hung on chains, 12 lanterns on wall brackets, 4 lanterns at the stair corners and the fireplace light make 28 lights in total.

Pathfinding routes connect all the way from the arrival point to the bar, the reception counter, the door, the corners of the hall and the spaces between tables, and the village ↔ tavern door transitions and talking to Sophia and Marco work too. 0 compile or runtime errors. This felt good enough, so the tavern interior is final as is.

Things I thought about

• Set it apart only with elements I haven't used yet. Spaces at different floor heights (the sunken hall), a central pillar, booths and a beam grid are all firsts among the village interiors. The point is to keep the layout from overlapping with the guild and smithy.
• Shrank the pillar to 2 m square. There needs to be at least 1.3 m between the table chairs and the pillar for the character (movement radius 0.5 m) to get through.
• The floor is a mesh I built myself. The raised areas are "room rectangle − octagon," split into 8 pieces. They're all collision meshes, so pathfinding (NavMesh) walks the stairs as they are.
• Left out the dartboard area. It was in the reference, but SUNTAIL had no model that fit.

Rabbit hole: the hanging braziers blocked the view

At first I hung the braziers at 5.4 m, and they blocked a big part of the screen every time I crossed the hall. The camera is 4.93 m above the feet, so it was passing at the same height as the braziers. I raised the top of the brazier hooks to 6.9 m to get them out of the way.

Next up

• There's no way up to the inn's second-floor rooms. I could add stairs you can only look at, but they shouldn't repeat the guild gallery stairs
• From the entry view the center pillar hides the bar (you can see it once you walk into the hall or turn the view)