Right now villages have a problem:
They generate being split by ravines, running into hillsides with half-buried buildings, or straight off cliffs with paths dropping off too steep to be walked.
Furthermore, there's no practical reason for why villages even exist where they are.
These are structures supposedly built by people on purpose. Just doesn't feel good.
There is a solution:
Attempt to connect arbitrary points of interest in the world with roads using a pathfinding algorithm seeking 'paths of least resistance'. They will attempt to minimize slope, discontinuity, and disruption.
If you do this, you will see a pattern emerge: convergences upon wide, flat, level, stable areas of ground...
Perfect places to build villages.
Settlements exist because they provide a place where suppliers of materials, producers of goods, and performers of services can congregate, socialize, work, and trade. These 'arbitrary points of interest' in the wilderness could optionally represent where some of the villagers get their raw materials for their professions. There doesn't even have to really be anything there in order for the effect to be achieved, but it would be pretty neat if some kind of resource were actually present. Fodder for later expansion perhaps. Especially the possibility of leveraging such a framework to someday connect villages with roads to facilitate the aesthetic impression of 'trade' happening (even if it isn't actually happening!)
...which could help control wandering traders.
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