Revision 1

Building is a core feature of My Time at Evershine and the biggest structural change the series has made. Earlier games confined construction to the player's own workshop yard while the town stood fixed around it. In Evershine, the player is the Governor, and the entire settlement is theirs to lay out, raise, and upgrade. The familiar rhythm survives at the core: receive a blueprint, gather materials, put the thing together. The scale around it is new. The game is unreleased and this page reflects announced, in-development design.

Placing buildings

The Governor decides the placement of every building in the settlement. Want the smelting factory next to the mine so residents reach work faster? Fine. Want a resident's house right beside your own? Also fine. The stated rules are that a building needs a path and must sit within the set buildable range. Pathea has been explicit about the intent: this is your settlement, and you have the final say in everything that gets built. In the current design, the buildable area spans nearly half of the entire Area 1 map.

Staged construction

Construction went through a public redesign. The brick-by-brick building style shown during the funding campaign was cut for town buildings; after testing, Pathea concluded that placing every block of every building stops being fun at town scale and starts feeling like a second job. The instant pop-up buildings in the alpha build are not the final answer either; testers said buildings popping into existence broke immersion, and the studio agrees.

The replacement is staged construction. You approve a building request, supply the materials, and watch the project go up in visible stages. Most buildings are planned to take one to two in-game days, with early infrastructure finishing fast to keep momentum and late game projects taking longer. The numbers come from a March 2026 development update and may still be tuned.

Material tiers and upgrades

Buildings evolve through three material tiers as the town grows: simple tents first, then sturdy wooden structures, then stone architecture. Each building carries two to six upgrade levels. Upgrades are approved at the Governor's Desk, and the town visibly transforms as they complete.

Functional buildings

The current design includes more than 20 functional buildings, and Pathea stresses they are tools rather than decoration. A meal at the restaurant grants a combat boost, a comparison the studio itself draws to Monster Hunter's cat meals, and a soak in the hot spring restores stamina and clears fatigue. Buildings also drive recruitment: build a smithy and a blacksmith will settle in, opening access to their forge and a new source of items.

The player home

The Governor's residence keeps the series' freeform touch. The player can pick prefab designs for quick results or construct the home piece by piece, with every wall, every door, and even the style of the roof borders customizable, and the yard remains free build space. Pathea plans to grow the home into a proper Governor's Mansion, far larger than a standard house and fully customizable, with a system that auto-saves the furniture layout across upgrades so leveling the mansion does not mean redecorating from scratch.

Build mode controls

Entering build mode shifts the camera to a top-down view for a clear look at the whole layout. Placement supports both a Free Mode for loose, creative arrangements and a Grid Mode for players who want every fence and storefront aligned, and Pathea is exploring Recommended Layouts that snap together a functional town plan. The studio has admitted the building interface in its previous game was too complicated and says it studied other games to land on something easier to learn. Alpha testers still flagged floaty, imprecise placement, which the grid system and the camera work are meant to address.

Construction and the story

Pathea has said the construction system is being developed with the plot in mind. Free interior customization of public buildings could break scripted scenes; a restaurant conversation about food gets strange if the player never installed a ceiling or tables. Custom construction for buildings beyond the player home is therefore being considered as an unlock after a certain amount of the main story. The team has also floated a feature for sharing and downloading settlement designs after release. Both ideas were described as under consideration, not commitments.

In co-op

In multiplayer, up to four players construct the town together from scratch, with shared money and shared materials unless items sit in a player's personal inventory.