Advanced Industrial Plot Type

The advanced industrial plot type allows your settlers to build structures that generate specific resources for your settlement. Some of these are existing resources like wood or water, while others are completely new and unique to Sim Settlements.

How it Functions

Like regular industrial plot structures, each advanced industrial plot will act as a job for a single settler and will generate “resources” for your settlement. However, advanced industrial plot structures are designed to have a much larger impact and influence on the direction of your settlement builds.

They can provide new benefits, unique and rare resources, and access to new technology but they also come with consequences and additional “costs”. They can both positively or negatively impact a variety of traditional settlement aspects including (but not limited to) happiness, defense, food, water, power. In addition advanced industrial plot structures can (and will increasingly) impact Sim Settlements dynamic needs mechanic.

Advanced Industrial vs. Regular Industrial

The overall idea of advanced industrial is to add more functionality, style of play options, and uniqueness to your Sim Settlements. However, advanced industrial is not a replacement for regular industrial - they are intended to work alongside each other.

The major difference between advanced industrial and regular industrial lies in “when” you should be building each.

The regular industrial plot structures are designed to be used at any time throughout your playthrough. They are especially useful early on to generate more scrap/basic resources so that you can continue to build up your settlement. The idea behind advanced industrial is that over time as your settlement becomes more of a thriving town/city you'll start knocking down some of those old regular industrial plots and replacing them with advanced industrial plots to gain access to the higher end technologies.

Another big incentive to use the regular industrial plots early on and then switch to advanced industrial later is that from a resource production point of view, the regular industrial plot will actually create you more overall “resources” (quantity) then the advanced industrial plots will create you in terms of specific resource items (quality). So early on when you just need “stuff” you're going to get more out of regular industrial plots and then later on, when you can afford to start focusing your settlement on specific trades (and your settlement can support the increased resource use), you can do things like swap them out for things like the advanced industrial plot type’s lumberyard to specifically generate lots of wood.

Plot Size(s) / Foundation Options

The advanced industrial plot come in the standard 2x2 plot size. Like the regular industrial plot type, advanced industrial’s available foundations are none and concrete.

Multiple Upgrade Levels

Like every other Sim Settlements plot type, structures built at an advanced industrial plot will have the ability to upgrade to level 2 and level 3 versions. However, unlike other plot types, advanced industrial plots have a branching upgrade model (customization options at each upgrade level)

So, rather than simply building a structure that generates more of the same resource type(s) and looks different at higher levels, advanced industrial structures have different “options” when they upgrade. These “options” lead to very different buildings with very different purposes and effects on your settlement.

In addition, advanced industrial structures will often interact with and influence each other’s available upgrade paths. For example, an upgrade options for one structure may not show up as available until another structure has reached a certain level. This is called the “tech tree”.

Like every Sim Settlement plot type, advanced industrial plot structures will use more of your settlements resources as they upgrade (food, water, defense, etc.). However, advanced industrial plot structures will use much more settlement resources than other plot types.

How to Upgrade to Higher Level

Upgrading advanced industrial is much the same as upgrading regular industrial in that there are 4 basic requirements to trigger an upgrade in an advanced industrial plot’s structure’s level (1) they require power, (2) they must have a settler assigned to them, (3) you've got to have a full defense meter, and (4) need to have your settlement at certain levels of happiness.

Completely new and unique to the advanced industrial plot type is a “resource” requirement for upgrading. So in addition to the basic needs, you will need a certain amount of a particular resource available in your settlement (usually the same “resource” being produced by that advanced industrial structure).

The idea here is to make the upgrade process more interesting and logical - first you'd mine a basic resource and then at level 2 you convert that resource into something more advanced (wood can be turned into paper for example) then at level 3 the building will make use of that advanced resources to do something even more advanced (or completely game changing). To facilitate those upgrades your settlement needs to have a good stock of the previous resource and that's where the “stockpile” comes in.

Advanced industrial plots have a new mechanic called “stockpile”. What this means is that for whatever resource a given advanced industrial structure is producing, only part of that output total is put directly into the workbench for use elsewhere, the other part is actually stored in/with the advanced industrial plot itself as a stockpile to be used for an upgrade.

Sim Settlements Base Mod

While the core Sim Settlements mod has the capability of advanced industrial plots (and provides support for advanced industrial plot “building plans” from Sim Settlement addons), there are currently no “building plans” for advanced industrial plot structures included in the core Sim Settlements mod.

Thus if you have only the core Sim Settlements mod, the advanced industrial plot type will not show up in your workshop menu. However, as soon as you also install one of the addons that do have advanced industrial plot “building plans”, the advanced industrial plot type will show up in your workshop menu.

Sim Settlement Addons

Industrial Revolution: comes with 5 advanced industrial plot “building plans” (2x2 plot) and a tech tree that allows for 35 different buildings by level 3.