A town in a video game that grows from nothing to a community, made by the Non-Player Characters who arrive there. As you progress through the game, or an element of the game, more villagers are added to a town or village and the place starts to grow. More buildings are added, there's more bustle, and you can have more interesting interactions with NPCs.
This is the basic premise of most Construction and Management Games, where the player has to establish a community from scratch and meet various specifications in order to meet level goals.
Contrast Renovating the Player Headquarters, in which the Player Character is the primary agent of change for the house or town.
See also Boom Town for fast-growing settlements in other media types.
Examples:
- Animal Crossing:
- Animal Crossing (2001), has the player join a small village with six villagers. Over time, this increases to 15.
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons: At the start, you and two NPC campers land on an uninhabited island and slowly turn it into a bustling resort town, inviting up to eight more NPCs to settle on the island, along with a number of shops and a museum.
- Baten Kaitos Origins: The town of Sedna was completely destroyed, and its pieces have been sealed into magnus and scattered across the world. When the party first ventures here, its sole inhabitant tasks the party with finding these magnus and restoring the town, which becomes a game-spanning Collection Sidequest. Later, after you restore several buildings, the new mayor asks you to find more people willing to move in, which you can do by giving immigration papers to people who express displeasure with their lives. After the town is completed, you can retrieve the final Sedna magnus and learn why it was destroyed in the first place: it was destroyed by Wiseman, the true Big Bad of the game.
- Breath of Fire II: The "Township" sidequest is about turning the run-down house Ryu and Bow hide out in at the start into a full village. This is done by rescuing carpenters in an early story quest and finding NPCs to move in (and provide services). To get the best ending, you must find a hidden machine under the town, recruit the right NPC to restore it, and rescue a certain character to power it; this allows the entire settlement to fly.
- Bugsnax: Snaxburg is relatively empty at the beginning, but as the player character brings more people back to the town, it begins to grow and become less dilapidated.
- Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia: One major subplot is rescuing the villagers of Wygol Village, the Player Headquarters. As each return and repopulates the village, they unlock various sidequests and shops Shanoa can use to upgrade her equipment.
- Chained Echoes: Early into Act 2, the party establishes an official adventuring clan called the Crimson Wings as part of a way to give official cover and license for the burgeoning resistance movement. As more people across the continent of Valandis are recruited, your initial base on Hermit's Isle blossoms into a thriving township.
- City-Building Series from Impressions Games is all about this trope: you get an empty piece of land and you have to create functional towns and then cities, fulfilling ever-increasing housing and economic requirements. In fact, it wasn't until Zeus: Master of Olympus that the game was capable of remembering cities built in prior missions, so any re-visit to the location meant a new city had to be built from scratch.
- Dark Souls 2: Many of the NPCs you meet out in the world can be made to relocate to Majula. In contrast to Firelink Shrine in the two other games in the series, characters who come to Majula usually stay there for the remainder of the game, making the village feel increasingly homely and populated. With enough company, even Crestfallen Saulden actually cheers up a little.
- Deltarune: As you recruit more monsters, Castle Town becomes more lively.
- Digimon World: This is the premise of this Digimon game: the player character is dragged to the Digital World via the game they were playing and is tasked by Jijimon to repopulate File City. The player does this by convincing Digimon to move there (in very rare occasions, battling them).
- Dragon Quest Builders 2: Each island town starts with only a few residents, but more show up as you build up the town. When you complete the chapter, some of the NPCs return with you to the Isle of Awakening to populate your settlements there.
- Ever Oasis: This is a core mechanic. The oasis starts out barren, so the player has to go out of the world and recruit new party members to live there.
- Fallout 4 has this with its settlement system; certain areas around the Commonwealth can be converted into outposts where you can invite NPCs to live and work for you, complete with the ability to construct your own custom buildings and furniture. At least in the base game, those settlements can only grow thanks to direct player involvement, but there is a handful of mods of varying complexity that can partially or fully make settlements self-governing and require players only to establish them and help around very early on.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- The hub areas for several of the tribal quests do this, growing from bare-bones abandoned sites to lavish outposts. The Omicron quests take this to an extreme, in that the location experiencing a boom in population and development is an entire miniature planet.
- Something similar was enacted with the Firmament during the 5.x patch series. Originally a part of Ishgard completely devastated by the Dragonsong War, it became a hub for players of crafter and gatherer classes to collect raw materials and turn them into items to help the restoration effort. As certain milestones were met, real-time events were held in which players could clear land, prepare building sites, and erect new buildings. Over the course of the patch cycle, the once-ruined district became a thriving neighborhood that included new sites for player housing.
- The orignal Kingdom and its countless variants operate on a simple principle: you are a king with a small purse of coins. Spending them around allows you to attract displaced villagers and keep growing your fief (offering more money in turn), but the vast majority of the gameplay and expansion is done automatically by the NPC characters, with minimal control over them.
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance Downloadable Content From the Ashes allows you to rebuilt Pribyslavitz from abandoned bandit camp into prosperous village. Game allows you also invite many named characters to work here.
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land: As Kirby rescues Waddle Dees, Waddle Dee Town grows and more shops and resources become available.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: A Sidequest has you recruit people to join Tarrey Town. As more people move in, there are more houses and shops. The quest culminates in a happy marriage, with the promise of a thriving community.
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Lookout Landing will become more populated as you complete more story quests.
- Logical Journey of the Zoombinis: The driving goal is to bring the Zoombinis to Zoombiniville. As the town gets bigger, you get more monuments to your achievements.
- Given Minecraft's nature of being a Wide-Open Sandbox, the player can invoke this by building a few houses in the middle of nowhere and bringing at least two villagers (from other villages or by curing zombie villagers) to it. Have one of them become a farmer and you can create more houses and buildings while the village proceeds to populate itself and provide more services to the player.
- Paper Mario: The Origami King: Toad Town is already built, but completely abandoned when the game starts. As you rescue more and more Toads, the town will become more and more lively, more businesses open up, and the music gets more instruments added to it.
- Pokémon:
- Pokémon Legends: Arceus: Jubilife Village. As the game progresses, more buildings appear in the village, including construction work being visible throughout, and more NPCs will appear. There's even a cutscene that entails you and Kamado welcoming a group of new arrivals.
- Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 features Join Avenue, which uses the DS's wireless communications to add new residents to the city, and lets the player determine the type of shops that reside there.
- Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity: One of the running plots of the game is the Partner Pokemon's desire to build Paradise. It initially starts out as a barren piece of land, but over the course of the game, the player is able to get Pokemon that they meet to set up shop there and expand the location to allow the building of even more facilities. It also becomes where recruited Pokemon stay.
- Potion Permit: As you help the residents of Moonbury, the town's condition will improve. Some facilities get repaired, which benefits you and the community.
- Railroad Tycoon: You don't directly affect stations in any way other than delivering various resources to and from them, in accordance to the pre-existing map buildings. However, once becoming particularly efficient in this, with no delays and the majority of needs covered, the place will expand on its own, offering additional businesses or growing additional (or new) housing. Mess up, and structures will disappear on their own.
- Rebuild series centers on a successful community of survivors in the midst of a Zombie Apocalypse. You start with nothing but the four most basic city blocks, and your goal is to secure your surroundings and provide amenities to provide for existing and attract new people into your community.
- In Roots of Pacha, contributing your farmed goods and products to the Contribution Box adds to the village's Prosperity, which lets the villagers add new buildings in it. Some of these buildings temporarily boost your stats when you use them.
- Runescape has this as an ongoing questline in the form of Fort Forinthry; your player character is tasked with raising a fort at the edge of the Wilderness and getting NPCs to staff it for you, ranging from someone to take care of a woodcutting grove to getting a slayer master to train the guards.
- Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: The "Faerie land establishment" sidequests has a High Pixie asking the protagonist to recruit fairy demons to populate a cave in Sector Antlia. Most notably, completing this grants the player the only way to manipulate the alignment outside of plot related choices note
- Starbound: The Colony system allows you to do this with a variety of Procedurally Generated NPCs. All that's needed is a light source, an intact wall, a bed, and a door, and you've got everything you need to start a small city. Some NPCs can even become vendors for you.
- Tales of Symphonia: Luin starts out as a bustling village that gets utterly flattened by the Desians partway through the game. Over the course of the game, you can donate money to help the village build back up to eventually become even more bustling than it was at the start of the game.
- World of Warcraft: Most Horde cities are this. Whereas their Alliance counterparts are centuries old, most Horde settlements (the main exception being the Blood Elf capital Silvermoon City) were founded during or shortly after the events of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and became proper cities by the time of WoW. The Cataclysm expansion took this one step further with Orgrimmar and the Echo Isles. Orgrimmar went from what was basically just a desert fort to a sprawling metropolis that rivals the Alliance capital Stormwind, and the Echo Isles were reclaimed by the Horde during a pre-Cataclysm event, and afterwards they became the Troll starting area/capital city.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 1: Colony 6 is a variant that already was a vibrant town before getting destroyed by Mysterious Face/Xord and his Mechon forces in the backstory. Once you complete a particular side-quest ("The Road Home/To Colony 6!", depending on how far in the main story you are), Juju and the refugees will move back to the ruins of Colony 6 and you will be tasked with gathering materials to slowly reconstruct it, turning it from a giant hole of dirt back into the nice town it once was, and you will also be able to invite NPCs from other towns to move there if you fulfill certain reconstruction requirements, and doing so will unlock several quests from the immigrants.
- Xenoblade Chronicles X: New Los Angeles starts off as a city built from the crash site of the White Whale's escape pod on the planet Mira. Initially only its human residents populate the city, but more xeno races who ally to BLADE's cause decide to take residence there, unlocking more missions and people to interact with in the process.
