Here we go!

Welcome to Block'hood, the neighborhood simulator where your goal is to create a harmonious and interdependent microcosm.


The unique thing about this game is that at its core it's really an arcade-style open-ended puzzler.
it's not SimTower where if you want to build a certain cool thing you grind your way towards affording it financially and once you build it it makes money or some other thing happen. Maybe it costs you money to provide a service to your population but ultimately money is the basic resource of the game. Not in Block'hood.

In Block'hood the types of "Money" you have to earn and spend wisely are multifarious. Money is everything from literal money to fresh air and clean water to dirty water and pollution. At this point in early access there is no limit or penalty to accumulating huge amounts of anything be it vegetables or toxic sludge. So essentialy, they function like money does in other games, except most of them are entirely optional. You don't have to create pollution or grow vegetables if you dont want to, it just means you can't build certain blocks that require those things. I mean you CAN, but you will find out the hard way that everything dies unless it's needs are met.

So the thought process that goes into the game is crucial to not seeing your towers crumble. Like I said, it's a puzzler and it also plays out in real time so you don't have the opportunity to pause time and freely build whatever you have in mind. However, with the right style of gameplay, your experience can be very chilled and relaxed as you thoughtfully manage little bits of the puzzle at a time and enjoy seeing it grow. Trust me, once you get the hang of it you'll be having as much fun as a kid in a sandbox.

So let's jump right in!



I started up a 6x6 grid for a nice compromise between not having enough room and having an overly complex or cluttered layout. It's a good size for beginners, and for the purpose of this demonstration it will help showcase some space-saving techniques.



The first thing we do is open up the resource window. It shows resources you have and their production. By default production is indicated by a blue up arrow for generating and a red down arrow for depleting. (and zero production is still a red arrow, which is misleading) I learned to play the game with the default arrow stats but once I discovered the Resource Per Second (RPS) toggle I found the game a lot easier to grok. RPS shows you how many of a given resource you are producing or losing per second. It allows you to plan ahead better by knowing what resources you need most and exactly how much, as well as which ones you have in abundance and exactly how much of it you can spend.

I feel like the problem some folks are having with getting the hang of Block'hood is the money thing. You start out with 150 units and no immedialy available means of generating it. If you begin by building a lot of blocks that input money such as corridors, elevators, water towers, and windmills to have inputs for your apartment buildings, the money is slowly being slurped away while you work and if it runs out the blocks that depend on it start shutting down, sometimes catastrophically. If you do it this way you have to work quickly to start generating money and make yourself sustainable. It's not terribly hard if you know the blocks well and have a plan, but you can make things even easier for yourself. It's totally possible to create whatever you want without having to worry about money at all during your start-up phase.

The trick is to not build anything that requires money inputs. Your go-to blocks for generating necessary access and resources with little or no input should be sand, well, solar panel, and cactus. The water and electricity outputs are meager, but we can switch to better methods of generating them pretty soon into the game without having to cover the map with wells and solar panels.


So here we've made a well. It generates 1 water per cycle with no inputs. Take note, however that its cycle is 10 seconds whereas most cycles are 20. So the RPS readout shows that we make .1 units of water a second. 1 unit of anything with a 20 second cycle equals .05 RPS. Say you need 8 units of wheat for a baker, divide by half (4) and move the decimal. (.4) This means if the RPS for wheat reads greater than +.4, you can build the bakery and it will have enough of that input. Doing a little math never hurts in Block'hood.


Now let's build some solar panels. Notice that two panels next to each other create synergy for each other, as indicated by both a sound effect and the blue up arrows coming from the tiles gaining it.

Synergy is important to the gameplay because it increases the output of the affected tiles by a percentage. There is a complete synergy chart by Brad77450 that you can find here[docs.google.com]. Find it in the "grouped synergies" tab at the bottom.





Sometimes you get synergy from placing alike blocks next to each other, like panels, trees, crops, plazas, schools, offices, and factories but you also get it forom blocks that naturally compliment each other and are part of the same product chain. Greenspace next to housing, playgrounds with schools, cafe and sitting area, etc.

Synergy comes from the four tiles directly adjacent to any given tile.
Diagonal ones do not produce synergy.

Next we build a cactus because we want an apartment so there needs to be some fresh air and leisure. Cacti don't require much water to generate these.

The apartment is a building that requires access, so it must be rotated to where the entry indicated by an arrow in inspect mode faces a tile that gives it access, or the edge of the grid. The blue person in the circle at the top right of the inspect window tells us it has access, the red person would tell us it's not accessible.You can rotate blocks in inspect mode with a right mouse click or by pressing R and E either before placement or in inspect mode while hovering over them.

I do not recommend putting apartment buildings at the edge because you lose a chance to create synergy. There are buildings that gain no synergy from any access tiles that would be better suited for the edge or you can just use the edge for access and synergistic things like I do.

Note that also at the top right of the inspect window, the red gear tells us that this block is not producing. This is because it was built before the cactus has had a chance to go through 1 cycle and produce fresh air and leisure, so they appear red in the inputs column.

You will also notice the red gear if you inspect right after placing a block even with access and input requirements met. Don't freak out! It turns to blue as soon as the block has completed 1 cycle.

Thats a good start right? We got our first inhabitants, all our current resources are in the blue except for money, which isn't required yet. We will need it soon, however, if we plan on making a tower of some kind. Elevators and stairs are gonna cost us money, and it's a little tricky to make a tower out of grassy ramps to provide access to upper floors. (Though its a fun challenge I tried and gave up on. Someone try building 20 stories on a 6x6 with 0 money inputs and show me, I'll put an image of it here.)

Ok, lets make some moolah!

So one of the easiest routes to getting money going is to produce 6 consumer (.3RPS) for a retail shop. There are certainly other ways, like generating enough youth and labor to have either schools or libraries with office buildings to generate income. You could generate enough power to run a bunch of neon signs too but it would be horribly inefficient. Let's stick to what's easy.

So our small apartment puts out 2 consumer which means we need 2 more to have 6. Let's place them next to each other and give them cacti and a palm tree which will give it lots of synergy. This means that instead of producing the exact amount of resource the shop needs we will produce more and generate a surplus.


Oh but what's this? Our electricity and water are depleting!

Rather than build more panels and wells, we should recycle the greywater produced by the apartments. The handy thing about small and large apartments (as opposed to corner), is that they produce more units of greywater per unit of fresh water. (???) By choosing these we can use the recycling process to eliminate our dependence on wells or water towers.

Algae farms input greywater and turn it into fresh water and algae, which can be put into a biomass generator to produce electricity. Place these next to each other and away from apartments to take advantage of synergy. Biomass generators also output fertilizer, which we can use to grow things later.

Next we can place that retail shop we wanted by a plaza. Only the plaza gets synergy, but the shop will get it next to other shops. So let's create the necessary inputs and make one more retail shop.

So now we have some large aparments complimented by dense trees, and since we produce more greywater we need more algae farming and we've also started using our organic waste to feed an anaerobic digestor. These produce biogas which can be burned for fuel and they synergize with algae farms and the gas generator.

Looks like we've got ourselves some money flowing now but at this point the ground floor is getting pretty used up. We're also breaking even with our power generation so that should be our #1 priority going forward if we want to go up using elevators.

They say what goes up must come down, but in Block'hood that rule doesn't apply if you build it carefully the first time. Your ground floor layout is going to be important because it becomes more difficult to replace or change blocks on this floor after you build a second, third, and subsequent floors. I believe the next release will give the option to replace blocks, so that will be good. Also, certain blocks can only be placed at ground level including the water well, oil well, and oil tank. Another reason to plan carefully is the structural physics. Buildings have the ability to bear loads above them and even overhanging around them but the more overhang the weaker the structure. It think this produces more chance of destruction if nearby tiles decay but I haven't tested this. Finally, the ground floor should provide access to the upper floors in a way that makes sense. I like repeating patterns where the access map for each floor is very similar. It makes things look more coherent and it's easy to expand.

So it pays to spend some time rearranging your blocks when you reach this point to optimize everything. The easiest way to shuffle things around is by using the mode hotkeys 1, 2, and 3. Pick the Block you want to place, mouse over to an occupied tile where you want to place it, hit 3 and click to delete, hit 1 and click to place your block. Hit 2 to inspect/edit (right click puts you in this mode - I use that more often than the 2 key) where you can right click to rotate or use R and E.


Make sure everything has access before moving up and covering over your lower floors, or you're gonna have a bad time. Access arrows typically turn blue when you have access but not always, like when you provide access with a block that has only two or three access-providing edges. You can trust the circle person or go to the access data overlay in Data Viz mode.


We think we're ready to go upwards already, so lets make some elevators.
The first thing we do after building them of course, is supply them with power because they are going to drain our formerly break-even electricity budget.

Elevators are great because they give access to all directions. Stairs cost less but only the edge where access was given on the floor below provides entry to the upper floor.

Let's rotate the camera and start providing some access to the second floor.

Next we want to add to our power budget and use some of that biogas I mentioned earlier. Gas generators gain synergy from digestors, though we're gonna let this one be next to cacti.

Our new floor is going to have more apartments and an art gallery to produce tourists. Those we might want later to build hotel rooms or sitting areas. Galleries also provide through access from one side to the opposing one.

Now let's rotate the camera around and tackle the rest of this floor. You can also use the tilt slider if you want to get a top-down look at things and place blocks behind obstructive buildings.

We have almost enough Youth to make two schools, so we synergize some of those apartments with willow trees, although there is no advantage to using this tree that requires 4 water inputs.
We should add some playgrounds by the schools for synergy, but we don't have enough youth so that will have to come later.

Now we're adding a fish farm and some flowers to have fish and bees. These things will help us work towards doing some farming and opening some food businesses.

If you read that as either "fewd in the hewd" or "fudd in the hood" then you are awesome.

Right now there are wheat and vegetables in this game. Growing wheat is done with wheat farms and vegetables one of four ways. Farm, planter, hydroponic, and greenhouse. They all work a little differently but I like farms because they produce the most, although you need bees which can be farmed or attracted with flowers. We only need one vegetable-producing block and our fish for a market and for a baker we need 4 wheat fields, plus one more wheat field for a brewery. Having a baker means we can place a cafe and having a brewery means bars and beer gardens. Placing farms next to other crops is good but next to industrial things is very bad. Hydroponic farms go with fish farms, but oops too late.

After making the farms and the baker, market, and cafe we find that the labor and greywater are in the red. No problem, let's just rotate around and make some more small apartments on a new floor before we finish the brewery.

Ok now we can go back to the beer, we can't forget the beer.
Actually we have to do some infrastructure for the apartments. Then I promise we'll get some beers.

Breweries have three access points and beer gardens have two in dogleg fashion. Let's use that to our advantage as we set up the bar scene.

All right! we've created some food resources and turned them into money. Bazinga!

The rest of this guide is a work in progress, but go ahead and have fun with what you now know and discover some of the production chains and things you can do with them yourself!

Here is what our project looks like as of this writing: