🏘️ Which structures get roads¶

Every structure in your world is one of three things to the road network:

	What it is	What the roads do
Settlement	a town — a village, a city	roads are planned to it
Landmark	somewhere worth seeing — a pyramid, a ruin, a tower	no road is planned to it; a road passing near it bends a little to go by it, keeps off its footprint, and signs it
Ignored	underground, at sea, or not in the Overworld	nothing at all

Which is which is yours to decide, and there are three ways to say it, from the one almost everybody wants to the one for pack authors.

What a road does beside a landmark¶

It goes around it. The road steers clear of the structure's real footprint, never through the middle of a ruin. Where a landmark fills the only way through, the road still gets built.
It passes by it. A landmark close to where a road is heading pulls the road over a few blocks so you walk past it. A road visits at most one, the one nearest its line, so roads don't zigzag.
It signs it. Where the road passes, a signpost beside it names the landmark. A structure from a mod the sign doesn't know is named from its id, so it still reads as a name.

A structure from a resource or data pack that you want roads to pass by, rather than reach, is simply a Landmark in the checklist below. Each of the three behaviours has its own option under Towns & Settlements. They apply to worlds created with them and to ground that has not generated yet.

The Towns & landmarks checklist¶

The ROUTES tab on the create-world screen carries a checklist built from the structures your world actually has — every mod and datapack you installed, grouped by the mod each one came from. Every row reads Settlement, Landmark or Ignored; click it to cycle.

It is built from your world, not from a fixed list

The checklist is generated when you open the tab, so a settlement from a mod nobody has ever heard of appears in it the same as a vanilla village.

Each row starts on the automatic answer (see the order things are decided in), so you only touch the ones you disagree with. This is the way to do it. The two below exist for cases the checklist cannot reach.

The structure lists, by hand¶

Two lists in the config, one per role, with the same grammar. Both add to the automatic rule rather than replacing it:

route_city_structure_tags — what counts as a settlement;
route_landmark_structure_tags — what counts as a landmark, among the things that are not settlements.

You write	It means
`minecraft:village_plains`	this exact structure is one
`#bca:villages`	every structure in that tag is one
`-minecraft:village_desert`	this one is not, whatever anything else says
`-#minecraft:village`	nothing in that tag is

The - prefix is what the checklist writes when you move a row off a role, and it is read before everything else — so an exclusion always wins, including over the built-in rule that says a village is a settlement. A structure excluded from both lists is Ignored.

The allowlist, for total control¶

gen2_settlement_allowlist is different from everything above: the moment it holds a single id, it is the whole truth about settlements. Only the ids in it are settlements, the automatic rule stops applying, and route_city_structure_tags is not consulted at all.

It is all-or-nothing, and that is the point

Put one gym in it and your world's villages stop getting roads. Leave it empty — the default — unless you want to hand-author the complete list yourself.

Connect all structures¶

connect_all_structures is the opposite extreme: every surface structure becomes a settlement, not just towns. Underground ones are still skipped, so roads do not dive for a mineshaft.

It makes for a very dense network. It is there for map makers and for seeing what a pack contains.

The order things are decided in¶

Routes first asks "is this a settlement?", and stops at the first rule that answers:

The allowlist, if it has anything in it — that is the whole answer.
Connect all structures, if it is on — every surface structure is one.
Your settlement exclusions — anything you wrote with a -, or moved off Settlement.
The village rule — anything in the #minecraft:village tag.
Your settlement inclusions — the ids and tags you added.
The name rule — an id that calls itself a village, a town or a city.

Anything that is not a settlement then gets the second question — landmark or ignored:

Your landmark exclusions — Ignored.
Your landmark inclusions — Landmark.
Otherwise it is a Landmark, unless it is not in the Overworld, every biome it can generate in is ocean, or its name says it is built underground — a mineshaft, a stronghold, a dungeon, a buried or sunken thing, an ancient city, trial chambers. Those are Ignored.

The reason exclusions sit above the village rule is so moving Villages off Settlement actually works: without that, the village rule would answer first and the change would do nothing.

/routes structures writes every structure of your world to routes_structures.txt, grouped into the three roles, so you can see exactly what these rules decided.

A note for pack authors¶

A road is planned to a settlement's street layout, not to a point — the connector walks the road tip to the nearest real street piece and hands over there. A structure with no streets still gets a road, it just meets it at the edge.

Structures that only exist in the Nether or the End are never connected: roads are an Overworld thing.