City Planner

Design your own Shadows of Doubt city instead of rolling random seeds. You decide the size, how many people live there, where each district goes and how rich it is. Then plan as much or as little of the rest as you like: choose every building and street yourself, or leave any of them to the game. Interiors and residents are always generated as usual.

Plan it loosely or exactly:

Quick: paint the districts and leave everything else on game decides. The game picks buildings that suit each district and lays out the streets itself.
In between: place the landmarks you care about (City Hall, a hotel, a park belt) and let the game fill in the rest.
Exact: choose the building on every tile, which way each one faces, the businesses inside it, and which gaps between tiles are main roads, back streets or alleys.

City Planner is what built Margin City. It also installs city packs: any mod that ships city files gets them added to your city list.

What you control

Size: how many blocks wide and tall, from 3 × 3 to 14 × 14, so bigger than the game's own largest if you want. The game adds a ring of waterfront around the blocks you plan.
Population: fewer or more residents than the game would normally put in.
Districts: where each one is, its name, its type (Residential, CBD, Chinatown, Red Light, Industrial…), its wealth and its density.
Buildings (optional): which building goes on each tile, and which side its front faces. Tiles left on game decides get a building the game picks for that district.
Businesses (optional): choose what goes in a building's shop units: the bar on the corner, the pharmacy next door, the gambling den in the basement. Units you leave alone are filled by the game.
Streets (optional): paint any gap between two tiles as a main road, back street or alley. Gaps you leave alone are decided by the game.

The plan also changes how wealth works in your city:

Homes take their wealth from their district, so a rich district is rich from the ground floor up (in the base game it mostly depends on how high up a flat is).
Clean streets in rich districts. Shacks, barrel fires and street junk stay out of them.
Themed streets follow the districts. Chinatown's gates appear where streets enter or leave Chinatown.
Optional open alleys: in districts you list, alleys become back streets without dead-end walls.

How to plan a city

Start the game, open New Game, and click City Planner. The planner opens in your web browser, on the plan the game is using if you have one, otherwise on a blank 5 × 5 blocks. Load Margin City example shows a finished plan to learn from.
Plan the city: set the size, Paint districts, then pick buildings tile by tile or leave them on game decides. Paint streets lets you paint the strips between tiles. The Checks panel flags anything the game won't allow.
Click Send to game. The game must be running; any screen is fine. If it's busy generating a city, your plan is used for the next one.
On the New Game screen, pick "Planned city (… blocks)" as the city size and generate. Keep the game window in front while it generates: it pauses in the background.

Your plan is also saved as BepInEx/config/cityplan.txt, so it's still there next time you start the game. Prefer a text editor? Write that file yourself (cityplan.example.txt in the mod's folder is Margin City's plan, with comments); City Planner picks up changes when you open New Game. city-planner.html in the mod's folder also works if you open it straight from disk.

Not happy with the result? Generate again with a different seed: your districts, buildings and painted streets stay where you put them, while everything else changes.

Painted streets

Every pair of neighbouring buildings has a road between them; you choose what kind:

Main road: a named street. Main roads run straight and change name where they cross another main road.
Back street: a quiet lane.
Alley: a narrow-feeling lane with alley dressing. Alleys that touch become one alley, so no dead-end walls split them.

Buildings turn to face the busiest street beside them, and shops prefer busy streets, so a painted main road gets the frontages and the businesses. A front you set on a tile always wins.

In cityplan.txt the streets are a [Streets] section, counted like the map (rows and columns from the top left):

[Streets]
R3 C1-C7 S = main          # the south side of row 3, columns 1 to 7
R5-R7 C1-C3 edge = main    # all the way round a 3 x 3 block
R5-R7 C1-C3 inside = back  # the lanes inside it

The gaps can't be added, removed or narrowed: every road is as wide as the game makes it. Without a [Streets] section, the game lays out all streets itself.

Businesses

Buildings with shop units show them when you click the tile: pick a business for any unit, or leave it to the game.

Unit	Businesses
Eatery (street level)	Bar, Fast food, Chinese restaurant
Shop (street level)	Pharmacy, Launderette, Hardware store, Pawn shop, Supermarket, Sync clinic
Den (back rooms and basements)	Gambling den, Loan shark, Black market trader, Black market sync clinic, Weapons dealer, Squat, Empty

Building	Eateries	Shops	Dens
Commercial Tower	1	2	5
Apartment Tower (One Fifth)	1–2	0–1	8
Apartment Tower (Netherland)	0–1	1–2	8–12
Town-house with shopfront	1	1	4
Town-house	–	–	5
Mixed Industrial	1	–	3
Fathoms	–	–	2
Hotel	–	–	4

The two apartment towers each have two street-level layouts: One Fifth has 2 eateries, or an eatery and a shop; Netherland has an eatery and a shop, or 2 shops. City Planner gives each tower the layout that fits the businesses you picked, and the planner warns you about a mix neither layout holds. The game allows at most 3 hardware stores, pawn shops, gambling dens, loan sharks, black market traders and black market sync clinics, and 4 weapons dealers. Extra ones are left to the game. If a business can't be placed, the unit is left to the game and LogOutput.log says why.

In cityplan.txt the businesses are a [Businesses] section, one line per tile:

[Businesses]
R5 C1 = Bar, Pharmacy, Gambling Den
R3 C3 = Sync Clinic, Supermarket

Settings

In BepInEx/config/sodmods.cityplanner.cfg:

Setting	What it does
`Wealth / DistrictHomeWealth`	Homes take their wealth from their district (on by default).
`Wealth / AverageStreetWealth`	Street decoration follows the average wealth along the street (on).
`Wealth / StreetThemes`	Themed street decoration follows the districts a street runs through (on).
`Wealth / ChinatownGatesAtEdges`	Chinatown's gates only where streets enter or leave it (on).
`Wealth / GritDecorations`, `GritFreeFrom`	Which street decorations count as grit, and from which wealth level they're kept out.
`Streets / OpenAlleysIn`	Districts (by planned name) where alleys become back streets. Not used when the plan paints its own streets.
`Sizes / Keep`	Every city size you've planned, so cities made at those sizes still load. Filled in automatically; never remove or reorder entries.
`Planner / Link`	Lets the planner page send plans straight to the game (on). Off: no connection is opened; copy plans into `cityplan.txt` instead.
`Planner / Port`	The port the planner page uses to send plans to the game (on this PC only). Change it only if another program needs port 47811.

Every setting only affects cities generated with a plan. Without a cityplan.txt, city generation is unchanged.

Is the planner connection safe?

Send to game goes from your browser to the game over a connection that only works on your own PC (127.0.0.1). Nothing goes over the internet. Only the planner page the game opens can use it: each time the game starts it makes a new secret code and puts it in that page, and anything without the code, such as a website open in the same browser, is refused. It's open only while the game is running.

Rather not have it at all? Set Planner / Link to false. The game then opens no connection, the City Planner button opens the page from disk, and you save plans with Copy cityplan.txt into BepInEx/config/cityplan.txt.

Safe to remove?

Not for planned cities with a custom size. A city made at a size the game doesn't have (such as 9 × 10) needs City Planner to load, and so does any city pack built that way, including Margin City. Saves in normal-sized cities aren't affected and load without it.

Compatibility

Built for the main (IL2CPP) branch of the game.
Works alongside other mods, including The Protectorate's.

Feedback

Built a city you're proud of? Share the plan or the share code on the Thunderstore page.

Made with the help of AI (Claude, by Anthropic). Designed, play-tested and released by The Protectorate.