Fixing the Syx
A bundle of quality-of-life fixes for the small frictions Songs of Syx never quite smoothed out.
A handful of independent QoL tweaks that fix the most repetitive moments of city building. Each one is small on its own; together they make planning a city much faster and a lot less click-heavy.
Vanilla lets you carve indoor industries (workshops, refineries, fisheries, etc.) right into mountain rock — the construction job auto-tunnels through the wall as it builds. Houses don’t get the same treatment: drop a house with the door tile landing on a mountain block and the placement gets rejected as “blocked”.
This mod relaxes the placement check so houses (and any other indoor room) can be placed exactly the same way industries already could. The construction job already knew how to tunnel mountain — only the up-front placement check was stopping you.
- Drop the house. The mountain tiles around the entrance are queued for tunneling automatically and the house finishes once the workers dig through.
- Works for any indoor blueprint, not just houses.
Tired of spam-clicking torches one by one along a corridor, or spacing statues by eye? While placing any decoration, the mod adds a row-placement mode driven entirely by the mouse wheel:
- Ctrl + Alt + ScrollWheel — set how many copies the next click will place in a row (1 to 64).
- Ctrl + Shift + ScrollWheel — adjust the spacing in tiles between copies.
- R — rotate the row direction: east → south → west → north.
- Click — places the whole row at once.
Default spacing comes from the actual area-of-effect radius of the item at its current upgrade — for monument-family decorations (torches and similar) it uses 2 × radius − 1 so lit/affected zones overlap by exactly one tile, no dead spots. Translucent ghosts of the upcoming copies show the whole row before you commit the click. Only items in the Decorations category get the extra behavior.
Drawing a fishery along a winding shoreline is one of the most tedious clicks in the game — the area follows the irregular edge of the river, tile by tile.
While the Fishery construction tool is active, Ctrl + Click on a shallow water tile and the mod walks the connected river region and fills the active fishery area with only the shore strip — the shallow tiles that touch deep water (or a bridge), which is exactly where the fishermen actually work and where the deep-sea bonus comes from. Inland shallow patches are skipped, and any tile that already belongs to another room is left alone.
You still confirm the room manually and place items as usual; this is purely a “draw the shape for me” shortcut. The result is bounded by the in-game per-room size and dimension limits, so very long rivers may need a few clicks at different points.
Vanilla refuses to place roads on mountain rock — the placement preview turns red and clicking does nothing. With this mod, click or drag-paint your road right through a mountain and the mod queues the tunnel job for you. Once the tile is no longer mountain (workers finished digging), the road is queued automatically.
- Click and drag-paint both work — every mountain tile the cursor passes over gets the tunnel-then-road treatment.
- The placement preview tile under the cursor is repainted green (with a small “anti” icon) so you know the click will be accepted, even though the rest of the vanilla preview still shows red.
- Works with every road type your faction can build (cobble, etc.).
- Press T while the road tool is active to toggle this ON/OFF. Useful in urban layouts (Dondorian houses with scattered mountain tiles, etc.) where you’d rather the road tool behaved like vanilla. When OFF the green overlay disappears — the absence of the green tile is the on/off indicator. Default ON, resets per launch.
Indoor area-based rooms (pastures, workshops, refiners, libraries, labs, prisons, asylums) need internal support pillars wherever vanilla marks tiles yellow (“weak support”). Placing them by hand on a symmetric grid is tedious — the larger the room, the worse it gets.
While constructing such a room, Ctrl + Click on any yellow tile and the mod plans and places a centered, symmetric grid of pillars to clear the yellows. The cluster shape adapts:
- Pasture in mountain — 1×1 pillars on an 8-tile grid. Wide-open mountain pastures don’t need more density; the mountain face already does most of the support work.
- Everything else (any indoor room outside mountain, plus all non-pasture rooms inside mountain) — “+” clusters (centre + 4 arms) on an 8-tile grid. The cross-shape covers more ground per pillar without breaking the visual symmetry.
- Placement is throttled to ~0.5s per cluster. Larger rooms finish over several seconds.
Heads up — symmetry over completeness. The grid is uniform and exact. A few yellows in curved corners or irregular alcoves may stay uncovered — easier to spot and clean up by hand than a “scattered” grid that broke its own pattern. Goal: skip 90% of the clicks, not the last 10%.
- Game version: V71 (0.71.31), Java 21
- Safe to add or remove mid-campaign — the mod stores no per-save data
- Patches are applied via reflection at script init; no vanilla classes are replaced. Should compose cleanly with other mods, including ones that add new decorations or road types.
If a feature misbehaves — wrong spacing on a decoration, a road that never gets queued, a fishery fill that picks up too much or too little, pillars dropped on a tile that didn’t need one — please leave a comment on this Workshop page describing what you did and what happened. I read every comment.
Cartographer’s Dream — settlement-map generation overhaul plus relaxed capital placement. Found your capital almost anywhere, with bigger lakes, archipelagos, sprawling mountain ranges and denser caves.
Workplace Species Filter — per-building species and class filters for workers and users. A must-have for multi-species kingdoms.
Plan Ahead — place any building before researching its tech. Tech-locked placements stay dormant until you actually unlock the technology.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
