SidewalkEconomy

SidewalkEconomy is a beta Schedule I mod focused on outdoor living and improvised build spaces. It lets you place buildables outside normal property boundaries, adds an under-bridge sleeping bag for early shelter, and unlocks a sidewalk tent with sleep and storage once the player reaches Peddler rank.

This release is playable, but still beta. Outdoor placement works in many common street, road, lot, and sidewalk areas, but unusual world collision can still create edge cases. The tent and sleeping bag are active gameplay objects, while the NPC and quest flow are still planned for a later release.

It is recommended that you dedicate a separate save for this mod, as it may cause unintended consequences in your main save.

Features

Outdoor build placement. Buildable objects can be placed outside the vanilla property boundaries. The mod creates the needed synthetic property data when an object is placed. Placed objects still need enough physical room and a usable ground surface; a red preview usually means the object is colliding with something or is not sitting cleanly on the world.

Under-bridge sleeping bag. A sleeping bag spawns under the bridge as an early shelter point. It provides a Sleep interaction using the game's normal sleep rules.

Sidewalk tent. Once the player reaches Peddler rank or higher, the tent will spawn on the next new day. The tent currently allows sleeping and has a 12-slot storage container for you to access.

Synthetic properties. Outdoor placements are backed by hidden synthetic properties so the game has a valid place to attach and restore buildables. These are not purchased properties and are not meant to behave exactly like vanilla properties. Nearby outdoor placements are grouped together when possible. This will help enable hiring employees in the future although that feature is not yet implemented.

Build mode recovery. If outside placement gets stuck after an overlap, interruption, arrest, death, or failed placement, try Alt + Right Click to cancel and clean up the outside placement flow.

Installation

SidewalkEconomy ships separate DLLs for the two Schedule I runtimes:

• SidewalkEconomy-Mono.dll for Mono branches such as alternate or alternate-beta.
• SidewalkEconomy-IL2CPP.dll for IL2CPP branches such as the default or beta branch.

Install only the DLL that matches your game branch into the game's Mods folder. Do not install both runtime DLLs into the same game folder.

For the default or beta branch:

Schedule I/
└── Mods/
    └── SidewalkEconomy-IL2CPP.dll

or:

For Alternate or Alternate-Beta branches:

Schedule I/
└── Mods/
    └── SidewalkEconomy-Mono.dll

Settings And Controls

SidewalkEconomy creates a MelonPreferences category named SidewalkEconomy.

• EnableOutsidePlacement: enabled by default. Turns outdoor placement on or off.
• EnableDebugLogging: disabled by default. Adds detailed SidewalkEconomy messages to the MelonLoader log.

Useful controls:

• Alt + R: rename the nearby synthetic property. (For future use)
• Alt + Right Click: recover/cancel a stuck outside placement flow.

Normal building, sleeping, and storage interactions use the game's usual prompts.

Planned Content

Reginald Iterson is planned for a later release. The long-term goal is for the tent to tie into an NPC and quest flow instead of only unlocking from player rank. The planned direction is that Reginald introduces the tent, offers a quest or exchange, and eventually hands ownership to the player.

That content is not active in this beta. For now, the tent unlocks at Peddler rank.

Known Limitations

• This is a beta release.
• The NPC quest flow is not active yet.
• Employee hiring and assignment are disabled on synthetic properties.
• Some buildables may behave better outside than others.
• Unusual collision, steep geometry, decorative meshes, or tight spaces can still block placement.

Troubleshooting

If the preview is red, move the object slightly and check for collisions with other buildables, walls, curbs, props, or hidden world collision.

If an outdoor object does not return after reload, confirm that you saved after placing it. Outdoor placements are captured during normal game saves.

If the tent does not spawn, confirm that the player is Peddler rank or higher, load into the Main scene, then pass a day or reload the save.

If build mode gets stuck, try Alt + Right Click. If that does not recover it, exit to the menu and reload the save.

Compatibility

SidewalkEconomy changes build placement validation, synthetic property/grid behavior, outdoor buildable save/restore, and custom storage behavior. It may conflict with other mods that change the same systems. If you run into conflicts, test SidewalkEconomy by itself first, then add other mods back one at a time. Basic compatibility testing is done with a variety of mods but compatibility is not guaranteed.

Reporting Issues

Useful bug reports include the runtime you are using, the game branch, what you were trying to place or interact with, where it happened, whether you saved before reloading, and relevant lines from MelonLoader/Latest.log.

Changelog

Unreleased

• Fix outside placement by routing builds through synthetic grids so stations and grow containers initialize properly.
• Prime outside synthetic grids during placement preview so valid objects show as buildable before the first click.
• Use a bounded preview-only grid while hovering buildables, then create the real synthetic grid only when placement is committed.
• Promote the active preview grid into the committed synthetic grid on placement to avoid recreating the same tile set on click.
• Make outside synthetic grids follow ground height without rejecting otherwise valid placements based on terrain slope.
• Treat road, parking lot, and other ground-support mesh colliders as placement surfaces instead of object collisions.
• Restore the under-bridge sleeping bag world spawn on Main scene load.
• Fix the under-bridge sleeping bag spawn rotation so its opening faces upward.
• Re-enable Peddler-rank tent spawning with tent ownership and storage saveables.
• Stop tent ownership and tent storage updates from forcing immediate game saves.
• Hide synthetic properties from vanilla property lists and worker hiring dialogue until they can match normal properties more closely.
• Persist outside buildables on synthetic properties using S1API saveables.
• Fix build mode getting stuck when placement overlaps with death/arrest by adding Alt+RMB cancel recovery and forced build-state cleanup.
• Prune invalid outside buildables (including incomplete pots) during save capture to stop repeated save-data exceptions.
• Fix outside procedural buildable restore timing so grow lights and similar items no longer fail when dependency tiles are still initializing.
• Add grow light placement fallback for outside suspension racks to prevent stuck red preview after a failed placement attempt.
• Add Alt+R synthetic property renaming UI so custom outside properties can be identified in save data and troubleshooting.
• Group nearby outside placements into shared synthetic properties instead of creating a new property per nearby object.
• Add one-time legacy synthetic-property migration that merges nearby split records on load and saves the migrated grouping.
• Disable employee hiring/assignment on synthetic properties due unresolved base-game instability with custom property workers.
• Fix outside regular pot growth by initializing synthetic tile light-exposure nodes for all pot-based grow containers.

1.0.0

• added stuff