What is a Proximity Effect? Sometimes called passive effects or area eff...

Proximity effects, sometimes referred to as passive effects or area effects, are one of the most important things to understand in order to be an effective Town Star player. This game is about synergy, organization and efficiency. It's about building a sophisticated machine that grows, manufactures, and makes things that will make you money in the most efficient way possible.

Proximity effects are how certain buildings and geographic features affect the area around them. Some of these are buffs while others are negative and hurt your city's efficiency. If you can place your buildings and fields in a way that maximizes the positive proximity effects and minimizes the negative ones, you are well on your way to the realm of the Town Star Elite.

proximity effect

Before we begin to describe and explain the various proximity effects, it is important to understand how they are expressed. There is an easy way to explain how proximity effects work. It always works the same in Town Star, regardless of the proximity effect. We call this the step method.

Proximity effect 4 means that the first tiles adjacent to the building get 4 effects. The next ring of tiles gets 3, then 2, and finally 1. The diagram shows the entire proximity radius of that building's effect (be it positive or negative). Note that diagonals are handled a little differently. The first proximity effect ring includes all diagonals as 1 tile, but diagonally adjacent tiles are gradually removed from the effect radius.

Proximity radius = 4 (in this example)

Now you know what we mean when we say that a certain building "provides 3 units of oil" or that another "casts 3 shadow tiles".

Negative Proximity Effects

Let's start with the bad news. This is what you want to avoid when you can: Proximity negative effects.

The negative effect of proximity is never universal. This means that no matter how much dirty pollution or shade a building creates, its negative effects will only be felt at certain specific sites.

Now you might be confused wondering how you can know which proximity debuffs are negatively affecting which buildings. It's easier than you think and you can usually use common sense to solve this puzzle.

This poor little wheat field is clearly out of place around oil refineries and power plants. Due to pollution and shadow, we see a red arrow and a long production time.

Buildings requiring wind (windmills, wind turbines and wind pumps) are affected by wind blockage.

Buildings that require sunlight (Fields) are negatively affected by shade.

Shade and wind protection come from either mountains or tall buildings. The taller the building, the more shade and wind protection it casts.

Pollution is created by industrial production buildings and negatively affects fields in the same way as shading and wind protection.

Aggravation of negative effects

The negative proximity effects work as shown in the diagram above, but their symptoms are different from the positive effects. Proximity debuffs reduce the efficiency arrow on fields and production buildings, depending on the range of the buildings that cause them.

For example, windmills have a shadow radius of 3 squares. If the windmill is more than 3 tiles away from the nearest windmill, production will be perfectly efficient and the needles of both windmills will be green.

However, if these windmills are moved 1 tile closer together, they will begin to negatively affect each other with shadows. Now each of these windmills will have 1 negative point against perfect production, causing its timer to double from 30 seconds to 60 seconds.

Finally, if you move each of these windmills one more step closer, they stack a maximum proximity debuff of -3 points on top of each other. The result is two more doublings of the production timer, or a total of 240 seconds per production round.

Positive Effects of Proximity

The positive effects of proximity are much more fun than the negative ones. Many of the NFTs sold in the Town Star store offer the proximity buff as a benefit. We sometimes refer to this as passive production advantages.

The simplest passive production advantage that can be explained is water. Fields receive passive water when they are located next to natural water, such as a pond or swamp. Each pond provides 2 water, which means it provides 2 water for immediately adjacent tiles and 1 for the next ring of tiles.