Short Commute

Short Commute Keeps employed beavers in homes close to their workplace, measured by road distance — reassigning homes only, never jobs. Includes a commute overlay that visualizes the result and helps you optimize. What it does Each day, per district, it moves employed beavers toward closer housing: either a direct move into a nearer open home, or a home swap with another beaver when that lowers the combined road distance for both. Distance is real road distance, not straight-line. Homes only. Only Home assignments change; jobs are never touched. No beaver drops a shift, and your job layout is unchanged. Honors dwelling capacity and district boundaries, and takes the base game's adult/child housing ratios into account. All changes go through the game's own housing assignment, so saves stay valid and removing the mod leaves no trace. Commute overlay A built-in overlay (toggle, top-right) visualizes commute distances so you can see what the optimizer is doing and troubleshoot housing layouts: Houses are color-coded by their occupants' worst commute. Select a house: lines to each resident's workplace. Select a workplace: lines to each worker's home. Select a beaver: the actual path it walks from home to work. Performance The daily reassignment is built not to cost you framerate: distance results are cached and reused, swap checks are free lookups, and the work runs under a per-frame budget instead of all at once. You shouldn't notice it running, even on a large map. Install Requires the Harmony and ModSettings mods (Harmony for the overlay's rendering, ModSettings for its in-game settings toggle). If another mod also reassigns beaver homes, disable one — they'll work against each other. Credits Thanks to Bobingabout for brainstorming the design with me. Source Open source: github.com/everboom/timberbornshortcommute