Make crop fields a soft forbidden zone

[silk edge]

What I mean is allow the workers to route through to plant and harvest, but have them not allow others to route through and create paths. This would be super nice in early game if you're still gathering resources for other building projects and can't or just don't want to have fences around them and don't want to bother with bordering them with a forbidden zone.
If you want a path through the middle of the field then you could cut a path out by erasing that section with a smaller brush 🙂

[misty lodge]

I just put stone walls around them. 🙂

[jade grove]

Pretty sure that's the purpose of walls no?

If you put just one access way to a field, the only ones going in it are the workers, anyone else won't have a reason to go through it

[bronze temple]

I'd just be okay with builders not leaving a pathway.

[silk edge]

I mean if you don't want to or can't put walls yet because you're saving your wood/stone for other projects. There's a lot of times I'd rather not have to use the forbidden zone paint

And like Ames said, it'd stop the builders from leaving a path even when building the fence

[misty lodge]

You can place the wall and pause its construction. They will honor that new "wall" 😄

[bronze temple]

I do this far too often as a future-planning thing for my city-centers.

[jade grove]

Idk i think that breaks immersion. I would love however a terraforming thing where you could make workers either dig or make a hill for example, and in this case could instruct them to replant grass

[gleaming plinth]

I don't think it breaks immersion for builders to not step on the crops. IRL fence builders don't walk on the crops, because that's rude.

[jade grove]

Yea that's true

I'm saying them not leaving a pathway breaks immersion

Not that they telling them not to go there doea it

[bronze temple]

I sometimes think of the roadblocks the old Sierra games had.

[silk edge]

But then you're stuck with the ghost of the wall

[silk edge]

This aids my suggestion. I build a village wall and instead of going inside the gate they built the builders chose to walk through my farm and there is a fence there. They decided to build a fence through a fence, from the farm's side

[drowsy temple]

Ok I will now be doing this all the time!!

[spice halo]

I also think this should be a thing. Rather than "Soft Forbidden Zone", make it "harder to path through". Increase the terrain's unfriendliness to pathing so that they would rather walk around the farm if it happens to be less unfriendly. Meaning, in the case of the last image shown, it would be far more likely that someone would walk through because even at a higher unfriendly value that farm is too wide for the route around it to be more friendly. But this would stop people from cutting off the corners of my farms and such.

[barren sand]

I create a field, build a stone wall around with the only access at the farm, then put forbidden over the field until the wall is built. the builders then walk around the edges to build the wall. I found if I didn't forbid the field the builders were leaving path marks across it that the farm workers then later used and made worse