Building a house

Use a building kit from your inventory and a ghost of the piece appears. Wall, slab and roof kits first ask which shape you want, and shapes you don't have enough kits for are grayed out. The outline turns green where the piece can go and red where it can't, and the bar says why.

Controls

• Hold Q or E to turn the piece, and hold SHIFT to turn it slowly.
• G switches snapping on and off.
• LEFT and RIGHT change the style, such as red brick or fieldstone.
• With snapping on, UP and DOWN move a house piece up or down a whole story. Other pieces rise or drop a little.
• ENTER or left click places it, and BACKSPACE or right click cancels.

The pieces

• Walls come in Masonry (brick or fieldstone), Concrete and Clad Timber, as a plain wall, a doorway or a window wall, and as long walls that use five kits.
• Floor Slabs make floors and upper stories. An upper slab has to rest on a wall below or butt against another slab.
• Slate Roofs need a wall under their edge. Build the room first.
• Staircases, Doorsteps on the edge of a ground floor, Fireplaces backed onto a wall, Garden Walls and Rail Fences.
• Doors drop into the nearest doorway on their own.

House pieces snap to a two-meter grid set by the nearest piece of the same house, and a story is about three meters tall. You don't need a hammer to build, but you do to repair and upgrade.

How much they take

Concrete is the toughest, then masonry, both at the concrete grade: melee does nothing to them and bullets barely mark them, so a raider needs explosives. Clad timber is a reinforced grade and takes less than half the punishment. The dead never attack floors or roofs.

Finishes

You or your squad can look at a wall or floor to hang wallpaper (a roll per two meters, one side at a time), lay tiles (a box per two-by-two meters), fit window frames and put bars on windows. Stripped wallpaper and tiles are lost, but frames and bars come back.

Shelter

A roof or floor over your head keeps the rain off and cuts the wind to a third. Walls all round you as well stop the wind completely. You sleep better under cover, and a fireplace heats a closed room. See Power, doors and furniture.

Build the walls, then the slab, then the roof. A roof with nothing under it won't go on.