Locking objects in place

Locking pins something you are happy with, so that neither an edit gesture nor the generator can touch it. Everything else on the plan carries on as normal around it.

What a lock does

A locked object cannot be dragged, rotated, reshaped, retyped or deleted. The rotate keys [ and ] and the Space spin do nothing to it, moving it with the 3D gizmo snaps it straight back, and Delete refuses with a message naming what is locked.

It also survives a rebuild:

• 🏙 Generate Site carries locked houses and locked roads across verbatim. Any freshly generated house that lands on a locked one is dropped instead, and a locked road is put back after the bends are swept and the centrelines re-splined, so its shape stays exactly the one you drew. Its tarmac counts towards the Green % and the cost report, and new houses are fronted onto it like any other street.
• 🏠 Refit houses clears and re-places every house on the current roads — except the locked ones, which stay where they are.
• 🅿 Generate Car parking drops any house that now falls inside a car-park area, a landscaped area, an existing building or a pond — but leaves a locked house alone even there.

A lock holds the object; it does not reserve the ground. The generator is not routed around a locked house, so a new street can still be drawn through one. That is visible and easily put right by hand, which silently deleting the house you pinned would not be.

Locking and unlocking

Select the thing in Edit, then use whichever of these is nearest:

• The padlock badge on the object itself. Every lockable selection draws a small round badge beside it: an open padlock while it is free, a closed one while it is locked. Click or tap it to toggle. It is the quickest route, and the one to use on an iPad.
• The 🔓 Lock button on the selection toolbar. It reads 🔒 Locked while the lock is on, and the selection name beside it gains a “locked” note. The button belongs to the 2D plan; in 3D it is not offered, although a locked object still refuses to move there.
• Right-click ▸ 🔓 Lock, which reads 🔒 Unlock when the object is already locked. On an iPad the same row sits under ⋯.

Two kinds keep a switch of their own as well: a water body has a Lock tick in the drainage panel, and a schedule on a sketch sheet has a Lock button on its own toolbar. Locking is an ordinary undo step, and the lock is saved with the design.

How a locked object reads

The padlock badge closes and turns blue on everything. A locked house and a locked schedule go further: their selection outline is drawn blue rather than yellow. Where a handle would be the plainest lie it is taken away — a locked house loses its rotate handle, and a locked road, aisle or driveway is drawn as a dashed blue line with no anchors or tangent handles at all. A locked parking space keeps its rotate handle, but dragging it does nothing. Clicking still selects anything locked — that is how you unlock it again — and dragging simply has no effect. Controls that would change it are disabled too: Flip and the house-type dropdown on a house, the width box on a shared drive, the rest of a schedule’s toolbar. Drag a locked schedule and you pan the drawing instead.

A driveway or parking space sitting on a plot normally travels with the house. Lock the driveway or the space and it stays where it is while the house moves.

Locking zones

The areas you draw can be locked too: event zones (arena, campsite, production, welfare, bars & traders, entry), green and landscaped areas, car-park areas (the event car park included) and existing buildings. Select the zone in Edit and lock it the same way as anything else — the padlock badge, which sits inside the zone just clear of its label (or just outside its top-right corner when the zone is too small on screen to hold it), the 🔓 Lock button on the selection toolbar, or right-click ▸ 🔓 Lock.

A locked zone keeps its shape and place:

• It cannot be dragged, and its corners cannot be moved, added or removed — dragging a corner or Alt-clicking one does nothing, and the outline is drawn blue with no corner dots.
• Delete refuses with a message naming the locked zone.
• An event zone’s kind cannot be changed: the Zone kind list on the toolbar and the right-click row are disabled until you unlock it.
• A car-park area cannot be exploded into editable aisles. When several car parks are exploded at once, the locked ones are skipped and the message says how many stayed.
• On a retail scheme, Generate will not replace a locked car-park area. It says so instead of laying out a new one.
• The spaces in a locked car park cannot be edited one by one: Alt-clicking a space (or a long press on a tablet) does not remove it, a removed space’s ghost cannot be put back, Edit the spaces is unavailable, and the accessible, EV and island tools leave its spaces alone.

The lock does not touch the zone’s annotations. The label can still be moved, resized, rotated, aligned and re-worded, and an event zone’s Build · Live · Derig phases can still be switched, the same way a locked house keeps an editable plot number. A car park’s bays are worked out from its outline and the parking settings, so changing a parking setting for the whole scheme — the bay angle, bay size or the car-park cycler’s options — still re-solves the bays inside a locked outline.

The badge only appears where the zone itself is drawn. A zone that the current phase view hides, or that is switched off in a sketch view, shows no padlock and cannot be toggled from the plan.

Locking several at once

With a group selected, Lock acts on the whole set and settles on one state: if anything in it is unlocked, everything locks; if they are all locked, everything unlocks. A half-locked selection is never scattered further.

Locked members are skipped rather than treated as blockers. Move, rotate, delete or change the house type of a selection and the locked ones are left alone while the rest go through. Deleting and retyping say how many stayed behind; moving and rotating just leave them — the toolbar summary already counts the set as you select it and adds “· 2 locked”, so you can see what will not follow before you drag.

What can be locked

Houses, roads, footpaths, shared drives, parking aisles, driveways, single parking spaces you have placed, library objects and groups of objects, water bodies, schedules on a sketch sheet, and the store in a retail scheme.

Fences, walls and panel runs cannot be: a run is stored as a plain list of points with nowhere to keep the flag, so a lock on one would disappear the next time the design was saved. Lock a mixed selection and the fences in it are skipped, with a count of how many. An object that is part of an array cannot be locked either — the array works out where its members go, so it owns them.

Zones — event zones, green and landscaped areas, car-park areas and existing buildings — can be locked one at a time (see Locking zones above). A box or Ctrl/⌘-click selection picks up houses, fences and objects, not zones, so a zone is never part of a group lock, move or delete.

Copying or duplicating a locked object gives you an unlocked copy. Zones have no copy or duplicate, so there is nothing to carry over.

There is no keyboard shortcut for Lock; use the badge, the toolbar button or the right-click menu.