House Slots

Introduction
Slot is a word used here for a place-holder for game items. For example, current Inventory has 1500 slots in which a player may store game content; Dino habitats have from two to four slots for possible occupation by dinos; the Dino den has one slot free for active hatching. Individual houses have from two to six resident slots for individual tiny villagers but those slots are never empty. The village has a variable number of active slots for villager residences. These house slots may be empty until houses are added to the village. This article seeks to illuminate the variability in house slots for the village, not for the resident slots in homes.

Entries on the Houses page

 * There is an entry on the Houses page called House Slots where a convenient partial list of relevant decorations is displayed. Beginners should start there.
 * A warning on the impact of moving such items to the inventory is also on the Houses page.
 * Some trivia about slots is also on the Houses page.

Listings on sortable tables
For the most up-to-date information, players should consult the tables on the Stores and All Decorations pages where columns can sort game items by the number of house slots which they add on construction. Stores add from zero to four slots to the limit, most will add at least one. Generally, decorations do not add slots but those which may will add one or two.

Detailed explanation
The concept of a "house slot" allows a calculation of a theoretical limit on the number of items called houses or homes which may be placed in the village at any one time from the village shop or inventory. The slot represents a place reserved for a possible residence in the village. All gold and purple homes are exempt from this calculation and may be purchased with crystals instead of coins. Those premium homes also permit a larger population by housing more residents, up to six per unit.

The slot limit number varies, established by summing the default limit and the extra slots allowed by the previous placement in the village of particular decorations and stores. The upper limit may exceed the number of houses which are possible in the village.

For example, the current default is two slots and if a Small Water Fountain were constructed in the village then the limit in the shop would become three. A player will encounter that limit if the shop is used to attempt to build a fourth villager residence. That player is not allowed to construct a new house or to replace a previously constructed home now in the inventory until the slot counter number is increased. Their shop would show 3/3 in the "Houses Built:" counter in the top right hand corner of the Houses section of the village shop.

New slots are permitted by a new construction or placement from inventory, usually from the better shops or stores. Some decorations will add one slot. Some game content will increase the limit by values higher than one; such relevant stores and decorations are often priced in crystals.

So far, no one has reported an upper boundary on this limit but the value may exceed the current constructions many times over. For now, the ridiculous 0/4877 seems possible in a village with no homes -- only a magic rock and a market and a warehouse surrounded by Venus fly traps. (The minimalist lawn at Drew3400 seems to demonstrate this space and that purchase of decorations requires less than fifty million coins.)

In some circumstances the slots used may exceed the slots allowed and will be displayed in red. For example, after building the fountain in the example mentioned above and adding the third house that player might put the fountain into the inventory and so decrease their slot limit below the number of placed homes, from three to two, displaying 3/2 on the counter.

A practical limit of house placements is determined by a village size since only a certain number of 3x3 items will fit in a village; the current maximum for a village of 71x71 is 602. Village population will therefore vary between 0 and 3612.

The term "Limited House" refers to the availability of a house in the shop and not to the maximum possible of that type and not to this slot limit calculation. Such homes are only purchased with crystals, normally only during a weekly challenge but Bingo has included houses as prizes.

Getting there by User Interface
The user interface for house slots is rarely mentioned on the wiki since it is obvious to all but beginners. What is not self-evident -- to people who have yet to play the game or to see it in action -- is that tapping on the mallet (hammer) shown on the play screen will bring up a menu of the main categories of game content (as shown on our home page) and tapping on the Houses icon there will bring up a horizontal slider menu for house purchases. There the slot limit counter will finally appear beside the text "Houses Built:" as a fraction of used slots. The game tutorial will quickly and briefly expose the novice player to these facts which are not mentioned in the game-play article on this web site.