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Project settings, section by section

Nine sections describe your site to the app. Nothing in them is mandatory and everything can be changed later — but they are what the AI reads, so an empty section is an agent answering from nothing.

1. Where settings live and what the green check means

Open a project, then Settings — from the project card footer on My Projects, or from the Settings step on your Project Map. The page is a left-hand sidebar of nine links and one form at a time. Each link gets a green check the moment that section has any saved row at all — it is a "you have been here" mark, not a "this is complete" mark, and Project Basics carries it from the start because the project itself is its data.

You do not have to fill these in by hand

Run the AI site analysis first and it writes its own estimates for climate, soil, topography, hydrology and vegetation into these sections from your location. Then come back and correct what it got wrong about your actual ground. That is far faster than starting from nine empty forms.

A walkthrough of the settings sidebar, one section at a time.

2. What belongs in each of the nine sections

Project Basics

Project name, project owner or client, Project Scale, a chip picker for Primary Goals, Project Area Size in your chosen unit, Historical Land Use & Ownership, Project Phase, Project Timeline & Phasing and Budget & Funding Sources. The name is what the search box on My Projects matches, so put the site in it.

Design Preferences

Existing Structures / Infrastructure, Design Goals and Preferences, a chip picker for Preferred Building Materials / Techniques, Future Infrastructure Development and Design Constraints / Site Limitations. The constraints field is the one that pays back most: it is read as a hard boundary rather than a preference.

Climate

Annual average temperature and rainfall, the four seasonal temperatures, minimum and maximum, humidity, Evapotranspiration, average sunlight hours per day, UV index, average wind speed, prevailing summer and winter wind, Last Spring Frost and First Fall Frost dates, extreme weather events and microclimate details. Temperatures are in °C, rainfall and evapotranspiration in mm, wind in m/s — the app is metric throughout. The two frost dates are what the seasonal planner counts your growing season between.

Soil Characteristics

This section has two halves. The Observational Assessment is what you can see and feel without a laboratory. Lab samples are separate records, each tagged with a depth band — 0–30 cm (topsoil), 30–60 cm, 60–90 cm, 90+ cm — holding soil composition percentages plus primary, secondary and micronutrients. You can add several samples for one project; only composition is required on a lab sample, everything else is optional.

Water

A chip picker for Primary Water Sources, then Water Availability, Water Storage Options, Water Quality, water table depth in the dry and wet season as two separate figures, and free-text observations. The two water-table depths matter more than either alone — the gap between them is the seasonal swing an agent reasons about.

Hydrology

Where water goes: Primary Drainage Features, Flood Frequency, Runoff Intensity, Erosion & Sedimentation, Primary Water Flow Direction (a plain-text bearing, "North to South"), and Seasonal Variability in Flow. Water is where it is stored; hydrology is where it moves.

Topography

Overall site elevation, highest and lowest elevation each with a location note ("Northwest corner"), Slope Gradient, Slope Aspect, Primary Landform Type and a chip picker for additional landform features. Aspect and gradient are the two the passive-solar agents read first; getting them right changes what the floor plan pipeline proposes.

Vegetation

Overall Vegetation Cover (%), Dominant Vegetation Types, Dominant Species, Native/Endemic Species, Invasive/Non-native Species and observations. The native and invasive lists are what the Plant Guild Designer works around — it will not suggest something you have listed as a problem on the site.

Expertise

This one is about you, not the site: Technical Proficiency Level, a chip picker for Areas of Expertise, Level of Guidance Needed, previous experience, Collaboration Interest, then Top Challenges, Available Resources, Risk Management Approach and Stakeholders Involved. It changes how much the agents explain and how ambitious their recommendations are, so answering it honestly beats answering it well.

3. Which sections feed which tools

If you want good answers from…	Fill in first
The AI site research and its findings	Project Basics, Climate, Soil Characteristics
The Plant Guild Designer and the seasonal planner	Climate (both frost dates), Soil Characteristics, Vegetation
The passive-solar floor plan pipeline	Topography (aspect and gradient), Climate, Design Preferences
Water and drainage recommendations	Water, Hydrology, Topography
Advice pitched at the right level	Expertise

4. How to fill them in without stalling

Name the project properly and save. Thirty seconds, and it is the field you will search on later.
Run the AI analysis. Let it populate climate, soil, topography, hydrology and vegetation from the location you picked. AI research tools
Correct what you know is wrong. Your own frost dates, your own water table, the invasive species you actually have. Local knowledge beats an estimate every time.
Fill in Design Preferences and Expertise by hand. No analysis can guess your constraints, your materials or your skill level.
Leave the rest empty and come back. A blank field is honest; a guessed figure is repeated back to you as fact for the life of the project.

Guessed numbers do not stay guesses

Everything in these forms is treated as ground truth by every agent that reads it. An invented pH or an invented rainfall figure does not degrade gracefully — it produces confident, specific, wrong recommendations. Leave it blank instead.

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