Hearth / Kitchen — a interaction in the city builder.
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_[Screenshot of the Hearth / Kitchen interior — replace this placeholder with an in-game capture.]_
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The Hearth / Kitchen is an interior floor layout that turns a residential or food-prep building into a hands-on cooking station, where the player tends a central hearth and passes finished plates across a service counter.
Triggers
Entering a single-room residential interior opens the Hearth / Kitchen shell. A working station sits at the centre with a service counter to one side; occupant motes drift along the lower queue lane while the room is active.
Controls
The shell uses the shared four-anchor station layout: a Primary station at the centre work area, a Support station to the left, a Service station to the right handoff, and a Queue lane along the bottom edge for occupant motes. The player taps the primary station to start a cooking round and locks each plate as it reaches the service pass.
Outcomes
A clean round produces a finished plate and a short comfort buff for the building; the operation readout in the top-right slot reports the producing status and a "buff ready" flag. A missed or timed-out plate simply yields a plainer result — nothing is destroyed and the round can be retried.
Accessibility
A no-dexterity path is always available: one tap auto-resolves the whole layout to a fair, solid-but-not-perfect result, so a player using switch control, VoiceOver, or Reduce Motion never has to time the service pass by hand. The hearth ring, counter edges, and service pass stay visually distinct when the room is entered.
Related buildings
Residential buildings — huts, cottages, domus, insula, and similar homes — host the Hearth / Kitchen layout. See the Thatched Cottage and Domus pages for examples of buildings that open into this shell.
Screenshots & static variants
The shell re-skins by era material — wood in the earliest age through glass and synth in later ages — but the floor layout and anchor positions are constant, so a single screenshot represents the interaction across every era.
Version history
Documented as part of the interior interaction backfill. No gameplay changes are recorded since the shared room-kit shell was introduced.