Placement guides

Settings includes Show placement guides. It is on by default. This is a cyan wash of legal tiles, not a separate illustrated catalog in the guidebook.

What the wash covers

The tinted guide is only for tools where orientation is easy to get wrong:

• Door, including Staff-Only Door and Secure Cage Door.
• Window.
• Loading Dock.

The wash paints finished walls, openings, planned wall-ring slots, and doorable gaps. It does not tint leftover interior, and it does not show for ordinary objects, Structure, Floor, Wall, or when you have no tool selected. Stations, mailboxes, props, and parking keep an uncolored blueprint instead of the red and blue validity wash.

Story mode can force the wash on while it is teaching the current tool, even if you turned the setting off.

Parking lots have their own guideline overlay, tied to the same setting.

Ghosts, which are not the guide

• The cursor ghost is the sprite under your pointer (door, wall, dock, and so on).
• The blue drag brush is the rectangle for walls, floors, zones, and utilities. It draws above the sprite ghost so the brush stays readable.
• Door ghosts use their own validity tint. A north-south door must not leave the next object flipped upside down. Only doors keep a vertical flip.

The utility overlay (U) is a different drawing. It shows cables and pipes. See Utilities.

Other placement help

• Zone tooltips can append a recommended paint size.
• Campaign highlights flash the build button, and sometimes the world tile, for the current story beat. That flash is teaching, not the placement-guide setting.
• The guidebook is a text topic list (lobby hours, containers, manual control, roads, and the rest). It is not a set of placement diagrams.