Feng Shui is a very deep practice that has many elements and a lot of philosophy to it. Often thought of in offices and at home, yet rarely thought of in video game homes. Yet, the basic principles of Feng Shui can apply to your Minecraft, Valheim, Rust, Grounded, etc. base just as well at your apartment or house. Let’s dive into that.
The Flow of Energy
In Feng Shui the idea is that the entrance of the house is where energy begins to flow from. Pathways that everyone walks brings energy with it and manipulating that flow of energy is how you can have good energy or bad energy within a home. While this is a massive oversimplification, that oversimplification can really help to understand the basic principle here.
If you think about your base in a game, especially a multiplayer base, you can quickly see the pathways where someone may enter the base (through a portal, gate or other means) and then how they would walk through it.
You could also summarize this by reducing fatigue by having players move less through a base.
If you design for aesthetics, you can often try to place everything in a nice layout, often with everything facing the center of the base itself. This makes sense from an aesthetics standpoint. When we think of the art for villages, everything is out and open. That’s for one reason: to get a really good shot of the town itself.
Negative Energy Flow Base Design
When actually using a town, you need to think about the different paths everyone will need to take to get to everything. If we think about it as flowing energy, then in the below base we can see some obvious issues.
Let’s assume that the forge needs supplies from the storage and crafting needs supplies from the forge. Cooking needs supplies from the farm and storage. Sleeping is an activity done in an area.
In this base, everything is laid out nicely and spaciously. Cooking is in a corner to the right from the front entrance. Storage is across from the dock so it’s easy to see as you come in via boat. Crafting lets you overlook the sea as you work, same with the forge. The farm is overlooking the meadows out from the fencing. The storage is centrally located.
Yet the way everyone moves about causes the energy to just swirl in the center. To cook you’ve got to transverse the entire base. The sleeping area is so far from the entrances that it’s a jog to always get to your bed. If everyone wants to make it night, while it looks nice over in the corner, it’s going to be that many more steps.
The energy is angry, confused and fatiguing to just move around the base. Let’s try to clean it up by shortening the paths and not having all of the energy converge on top of each other.
Positive Energy Flow Base Design
In this scenario let’s assume the same thing. If you move the storage to the dock area, it’s still centrally located. The farm beside the storage allows for quick storage of the food and direct access to the cooking station beside the farm. There’s less land for the farm itself, but you could in theory move the dock over and expand the farm out some.
The crafting stations are now across from the storage, with the forge beside the crafting station. Instead of overlooking the sea, in this design it would be separating the entrance path from the working and sleeping areas.
The sleeping area is now centrally located and accessible from each entrance. This will allow players to move quickly into the base, go to bed and move out. If this was a game that the base required defending, this would put the sleeping area much closer to the walls and the action. You could even build the defense tower on top of the sleeping area.
There’s white space where the forge is that you can use for decoration or more storage for the forge. Everything is much shorter walking distance now and the energy to me feels much better.
More on Feng Shui
Hopefully this gives you something to think about when it comes to base design. If you’re interested in learning more about simple Feng Shui I suggest the following YouTube series. It actually got me interested in the fundamentals and helped me think more of how I put my bases / houses together!
