Optimal Marketplace Placement

The marketplace is the single most important building for your layout. Every burgage plot needs to reach its stalls, and food and goods stalls draw from the nearest granary and storehouse. Put it wrong, and you'll spend the mid-game tearing down half your town to fix it.

How marketplace stalls actually work

A marketplace on its own does nothing. What matters is the stalls that families set up inside it. When a burgage plot sits within reach of the market, an idle family member walks over and opens a stall, then keeps it stocked by hauling goods out of the nearest granary (for food) or storehouse (for fuel, clothing, and other goods). Surrounding plots then collect what they need from those stalls instead of trekking across the map.

Each stall services a limited number of homes, and a single stall only distributes one category — a food stall, a firewood stall, a clothing stall, and so on. That is why a healthy market needs a well-stocked granary and storehouse beside it: starve those of food variety or firewood and the stalls run dry, approval drops, and your burgage plots stop upgrading.

Three rules

1. Center it on your housing, not on your production. Workers walk to their workplace; townspeople walk to the market. The closer your plots sit to the stalls, the less time families waste fetching food and firewood.
2. Granary and storehouse close.Stalls are stocked by the nearest storage workers — long hauls mean half-empty stalls and shortages even when your warehouses are full. Treat the granary, storehouse, and marketplace as a single tight triangle.
3. Leave one side open for expansion.A market's service area is generous but not infinite; planning a future second market means leaving room on the opposite side of town rather than boxing yourself in with production buildings.

Why central placement beats a pretty town square

It is tempting to drop the marketplace on a scenic spot at the edge of the map. Resist it. The market wants to be at the center of mass of your homesso the average walking distance to a stall is as short as possible. A central market keeps approval high, keeps stalls stocked, and — crucially — lets you grow outward in every direction without leaving a ring of plots stranded outside coverage.

Marketplace size scales with your plots

The marketplace footprint is flexible: you drag it out like a zone, and it grows to hold more stalls as your settlement adds families. A bigger market square supports more simultaneous stalls, which matters once you have a dozen-plus plots all demanding food, fuel, and clothing at once. Plan a square with room to breathe — a cramped market caps the number of stalls and quietly throttles your growth.

The common mid-game rebuild mistake

The classic error is placing the first market right next to your starting resources — on the forest edge or against a river — because that is where Year-1 production lives. It works for the first handful of homes. Then the town grows the other way toward open building land, your housing drifts out of coverage, and you are forced to demolish and re-lay an entire district. Place the market where the town will be, not where it starts.

Late game: run multiple markets

One market cannot cover a large town. As your region pushes past a few hundred residents, split it into districts, each with its own marketplace, granary, and storehouse. Distinct supply triangles keep walking distances short across the whole settlement and prevent the single-market bottleneck where stalls can never quite keep up with demand.

Don't forget firewood and clothing stalls

New players obsess over food and forget that homes also pull firewood and, at higher levels, clothingfrom the market. A market with a full food stall but no fuel stall will still leave plots cold in winter and stuck below Level 2. Make sure your storehouse carries firewood and basic clothing so those stalls can open — coverage on the map means nothing if the goods behind the stalls aren't there.

Use the walking-distance heatmap

In the planner, toggle Walking distance. Tiles colored green are short walks from your marketplace; red tiles are far. Aim to keep your burgage plots in the green band, with production at the warm edges — a quick visual sanity check before you commit a layout in-game. Pair the heatmap with the three rules above and your first market will still be in the right place fifty homes from now.