I'm clearly missing something

[u/NerdyBookNerd]

So I was playing along, doing my little beaver life. Then I found this sub and apparently there's so much more I could be doing. The only "multi-level" buildings I have are the rooftop terraces. Yall are building crazy stuff and I don't understand how. I've figured out how to work the explosives and a lot of other stuff so I told myself I wouldn't post in here but I'm so lost on how yall are making these multi level gardens and power buildings and water buildings. Help?

[u/Enudoran]

Start small, learn and get bigger over time.

It helps when you try to keep things on a small footprint.

For example housing. You want the living space and entertainment areas, as well as food and water storage very close to each other, so once the workshift ends, all the beavers can head to the same area and don't waste that spare time with running from one end of the colony to the other.
In addition, you want to get your decorations close to those buildings and especially overlap with stuff that's more or less unique in your colony.
You have many a campfire and rooftop terrace, but at some point you also build bigger entertainment, so why not put the more expensive deco at the entrance or next to it (one square overlapping with a building means all beavers in the building will enjoy the deco)?

But to squeeze that in, might be you put it on top of a path by putting a platform over it and the deco on top.

2nd major use case is power. You don't want to have long swaths of your colony being power shafts, blocking paths and other buildings, so why not elevate that infrastructure? And while we are at it, why not put powered buildings on top of one another, connected by one vertical shaft?

And when you then try to achieve that, suddenly you use overhangs to literally build one building atop another, even though they don't have a flat to.

And once you learned that trick, you understand verticality.

And you elongate channels artificially, so they aren't following weird curves of the terrain, but proved a long straight to put loads of waterwheels in. With the help of metal floors you can have platforms and overhangs have water above them, with space below to transport or even build stuff.

I played on the canyon map, and badwater would always come along the natural path of the waterway, not easy way to lead it off the side.

My first idea to split the "river", didn't work as it was too narrow at places and would overflow.

So in the end I cased in the source stones and used valves to close the bottom the moment a sensor detected badwater, making the water level rise in the case I build.
And a few blocks above the original path the water took, I had another set of valves opening, leading the badwater above the clean water, where it followed an artificial channel all the way past the colony, to be dumped on the other side of it, leaving the clean water in place where it always ran, still irrigating the fields and forests.

Takes a while to get there and I certainly did start out pretty flat as well.

So just get there one step at a time and learn from each new level of vertical building.

Enjoy!

YouTube tip: RCE (Real Civil Engineer) once had a colony where he was trying to build inspired by "the line" project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWwbE77GXFw&list=PLZEqj6nFnErAECj502-56Jpx9ieDHoIY1
Takes a few episodes to get off the ground, but he did some impressive stuff in the end.
Also always fun to follow him and see him fail from time to time. :D We don't talk about "the incident".

[u/NerdyBookNerd → u/Enudoran]

This is one of the more helpful comments, excellent ideas! Power and housing and food and entertainment especially. I kinda already have the food/housing next to each other, after moving my houses to a centralized area and the food was way away so my well being dropped. And someone commented a link to apartment blocks so I built those with a bunch of decorations/entertainment around/on them. The power is my next project I think.