Most buildings for which a particular adjacency makes sense have an icon in their descriptive text indicating which sides the adjacency has an effect on. Such an adjacency always means an adjacent side above, below, right or left, never diagonally / across corners.

---

---

All boosts work in my experience even if the boosting building is unmanned or (in the case of processing buildings) turned off. The adjacent location is all that matters.

---

---

• Modern Rustic Home: needs parks or other Modern Rustic Homes on any three sides to get a 15 quality bonus. “Park” can be any park or garden, such as: Park, Botanical Garden, Sculpture Garden, Pond Park, Fitness Park, Otherworldly Zoo or Otherworldly Garden. Aquariums don’t work and Herb Gardens neither, although the Medicinal Herb Garden merges with Parks and other Gardens.
  
• Mechanical House: needs a machine parts factory on any side to get a 50 quality bonus.
  
• Mansion: Two mansions merge into one large one, each gaining 25 quality.

• Restaurant: The restaurant merges with culinary herb gardens on both sides and is boosted by 20 gastronomic entertainment happiness from each.
  
• Herb Garden: The culinary (brown) herb garden can boost a restaurant by 20 gastronomic entertainment happiness on each side.
  
• Fitness Park: The effect of the fitness park (increasing people’s life expectancy) “is increased if there are parks next to it”. How high the increase is (or how high the effect actually is) is not yet known to me, nor whether parks on both sides increase the effect more than just a park on one side. Nor do I know which parks this statement refers to. But I assume that it refers to the same parks that come into play in the Modern Rustic Home.

• Farm: Can be boosted on all sides by labs (these boosts are cumulative). Each farm can operate one farm byproduct processor (FBPP) on any of its sides.
  
• Tree Plantation: Can be boosted on all sides by labs (cumulative).
  
• Lab: Both upgrades do not apply to the lab itself, but only to neighboring buildings. This means that each lab should only get the upgrades for which it has the right neighbors. Otherwise, especially in the early game, it would be a waste of resources. The lab has the option of “auto upgrade,” which automatically buys all laboratories in the city the upgrades they need for their respective neighbors. Always use this option, only use this option!
  
• Machine Parts Factory: Can boost a mechanical house with 50 quality on each side.
  
• Stone Mine: The miners need stone. Every morning they go into the mine and get their tools. Then they go to the nearest rock or boulder and work. In the evening they return to their mine and put their pickaxes aside before going home.These routes should be as short as possible (see my guide on commuting time). That's why you build the stone mines right next to the rocks at the very beginning. Later, it makes sense to build the mines around the rock teleporters so that the workers from all mines have a short route to the next meteorite.
  
• Experimentation Lab: The Experimentation Lab can boost a Refined Metal Factory above and below. It also merges with these buildings, which makes the boost visible.
  
• Refined Metal Factory: The RMF can be boosted from above and below by Experimentation Labs.
  
• Superheated Refinery: This bonus building from the Pioneers’ Hut can be boosted cumulatively on four sides by machine part factories. And it should be, because with just three of these boosts it produces as much as a regular RMF. Only the fourth boost makes it better than its standard counterpart.
  
• Graphene Factory: The graphene factory uses one stone and 10 knowledge to produce a sheet of graphene. However, if it is built to the right of a rock teleporter (and only there!), it merges with the building and no longer uses any stone.
  
• Alien Farm: An Alien Farm can be boosted by up to four Alien Houses (one on each side) and then produces more than a regular Indoor Farm. It can’t be boosted by Labs, though but still can provide Farm Byproducts for an FBPP.

As this inexpensive and very comfortable house, which is available early in the game, needs other MRHs or a park on at least three of its four sides in order to be able to exploit its full quality, I usually build them en block and then surround this block with botanical gardens (left in the picture).
In fact, it is enough to simply place a park in each corner of the square so that the conditions for all houses are met. It can then just be difficult to accommodate elevators (right).
The MH is also available very early in the game and costs very little. Unfortunately, it urgently needs to be in the direct vicinity of a machine parts factory because without one it offers very low living quality.
In the early game, I therefore like to build my machine parts factories in rows and place mechanical houses above and below them (in the middle of the picture I replaced the MPFs with colored blocks to make the pattern more visible).
In the past, I used the so-called “hashtag construction” that you can see on the far right of the picture in order to be able to build the maximum number of MHs per MPF. Of course, you can use any other building you like instead of the spaceship tunnels. I've since moved away from this because it requires a lot of space, which isn't available early on in all scenarios.
Mechanical House
The MH is also available very early in the game and costs very little. Unfortunately, it urgently needs to be in the direct vicinity of a machine parts factory because without one it offers very low living quality.
In the early game, I therefore like to build my machine parts factories in rows and place mechanical houses above and below them (in the middle of the picture I replaced the MPFs with colored blocks to make the pattern more visible).
In the past, I used the so-called “hashtag construction” that you can see on the far right of the picture in order to be able to build the maximum number of MHs per MPF. Of course, you can use any other building you like instead of the spaceship tunnels. I've since moved away from this because it requires a lot of space, which isn't available early on in all scenarios.The mansion can merge with exactly one other mansion, which gives both a quality boost of 25. Since it is the only residential building that usually comes in a double pack, I like to use it to build brick walls. Unfortunately, the game specifies that the left mansion is always merged with priority, which is why I resort to a trick so that the residential blocks don't look too boring. This is purely cosmetic, of course.

A restaurant offers 90 gastronomic entertainment, a culinary herb garden to the right or left of it increases this by 20, herb gardens on both sides by a total of 40.
So you need three buildings and six employees for 130 entertainment or use restaurants instead: two buildings with four employees for 180 entertainment.
Herb gardens are therefore only profitable until they have reduced your population's food consumption by 20%. Until then, however, your restaurants look a little more varied.By the way, you need about one HG per 125 citizens for the 20% reduction in food requirements. But since you need one MHG (Medicinal Herb Garden) per 500 citizens anyway to achieve the 20% possible medical happiness, six additional CHGs per 1000 citizens are enough.
As I wrote above, I don't know exactly how the fitness park's life-extending effect works. But I have observed that even citizens who exercise tend to be lazy: they usually only visit the fitness park that is closest to a teleporter. So it's best to build them all right next to a teleporter.Fascinatingly, this also applies to the oldest tree in the universe. If the next teleporter is just one building away, almost no one goes there, whereas if a teleporter is right next to it, it's completely overrun.

---

---

All of the neighborhood patterns listed here include hyper elevators and some teleporters. You can read why this is the case in my guide “Keep your commute short”.

---

---

For a long time, I surrounded each rock teleporter with eight stone mines. I thought this was effective because it meant that the largest possible number of miners had a path of a maximum of 2 blocks to each teleporter.
A player in Discord then noticed that a teleporter cannot accommodate an unlimited number of miners. I haven't managed to determine the exact number yet, but the unlock conditions of the Mining Research Center give a clue: 3 rock teleporters and 15 stone mines seem to indicate that Florian (the developer) thinks 1:5 is a good ratio. That's why I'm now building more rock teleporters in my mining complexes. Here is a picture with examples of 1:8, 1:5 and 1:3 ratios. Each complex is 9 blocks wide. The left one contains 60 stone mines, the other two 63 each.
The elevators in between shift the ratio a little in favor of the rock teleporters.

If you get the graphene factories later in the game, replace the stone mine to the right of each rock teleporter with a graphene factory so that it doesn't use up stone: In the left complex, 9 SMs were replaced by GFs, in the middle 15 and in the right 22.
Each farm can receive boosts from up to four laboratories and each laboratory can boost up to four farms. Therefore, a checkerboard pattern of farms and laboratories is recommended from the start. Since in my opinion farms produce the more important good - namely food - I have gotten into the habit of always placing elevators in my farm complexes in the position of a laboratory. This creates this pattern:Farm byproduct processors (FBPPs) can process the byproducts of up to four farms (and then produce more wood than regular woodcutters do). However, each farm can only provide byproducts for one FBPP. Therefore, each FBPP should be surrounded by four farms, but each farm should only be adjacent to one FBPP. If we expand the structure from above, the following pattern emerges:Laboratories basically work with tree plantations in the same way as with farms. Therefore, a checkerboard pattern makes sense here too.
The two employees of the tree plantation grow the trees (they actually grow unattended, but probably not as quickly) and then cut them down. They can get support from woodcutters when felling them. That's why I usually put the Woodcutting Centers directly at the tree plantation facilities.

I haven't tested the second pattern (on the right in the picture) yet, but it occurred to me while writing this guide. It basically places some of the lumberjacks in the position of the FBPPs in the farm pattern. This way they are even closer and can get to the plantations with "mature" trees faster.
If you regularly catch your lumberjacks in nearby - or perhaps even not so nearby - forests, that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have enough tree plantations for them. It could just as well be that your tree plantations are simply too similarly timed.

I'm not sure if this can be prevented, but you can try it: build your tree plantations at different times. Some in the morning, some in the evening of the same day and some again the next morning. This way the trees have a different rhythm from the start and your woodcutters should be constantly busy with plantation trees.

Connecting regular refined metal factories to experimentation labs is actually quite simple. You start with Exp. Labs at the bottom and then alternate between adding RMFs and more Exp.Labs on top. (In fact, you only build rows of RMFs at the beginning. Exp.Labs have very high unlock requirements and are disproportionately expensive at this point. You only add them later, one by one.)

However, since you usually build these complexes when you want to boost your computer chip production, I recommend building the CCFs in the same complex so that you can get an immediate impression of the ratio of RMFs to CCFs.

For example, you can interrupt the ExpLab-RMF sequence at regular intervals with rows of computer chip factories (left) or build the CCFs into some of the elevator columns (right).
It is important to remember that each worker in a fully upgraded CCF consumes approximately the same number of RMs as a worker in a fully upgraded RMF can produce. But since CCFs have three workers and RMFs only two, you should always have significantly more RMFs than CCFs.

In numbers: Two CCFs consume the production of three RMFs.
However, since you will also need RMs for purposes other than just producing CCs (for example, for building more Exp.Labs, CCFs or even residential buildings), it is recommended to have at least twice as many, preferably 2.5 times as many RMFs as CCFs at any given time.

Factory Pubs are a good way to shift the ratio in favor of RMFs (as I did in the example on the left), but I would advise against relying on them exclusively, as they can be upgraded but not boosted.
The superheated refinery needs a machine parts factory on each side for full efficiency. Therefore, it is also easiest to build it in a kind of checkerboard pattern. However, this means that you build a very large number of MPFs at the same time that you may not even need. And at the edge of this pattern, the ShRs have to be replaced somehow, since they have to be surrounded by MPFs on all sides and thus may only be in the middle of the complex.
I usually use mechanical houses for this, since they like to be between MPFs anyway.
This may create the following patterns:
On the right you see a broader build, once with a inner elevator and one with elevators only at the edges. You can see that it is complicated to fit elevators inside without destroying the pattern. You could decide here if you place the middle teleporter directly under the elevator or rather place an MPF there and move the teleporter one space down.
In the middle you see a slim build that I doubled right of it to show a (in my opinion) better way for a broad build. Since the pattern is really complicated I show it again schematically for better recognition on the right side. In the schematic I use an alternative teleporter positioning, but I can’t recommend. You need one teleporter less and don’t waste the one boost of one ShR per teleporter but instead add 10 minutes to the commute of every single worker in that complex (did I mention you should read my guide on commute? 😉).
Alien Farm with Alien House and FBPP
The alien farm discovered during a rocket mission needs alien houses on all four sides to actually be more effective than a normal indoor farm. Although it cannot be boosted by labs, its byproducts can also be processed by an FBPP.
This creates this pattern:
The farms are built in a checkerboard pattern in an alien house residential complex, but similar to the ShR, not on the edge. Elevators and FBPPs are used in the same way as in farm-lab complexes.

• The transport connection is essential for all of these construction patterns. If the workers only arrive at their workplace after an odyssey lasting hours, all of this is completely pointless. So install the elevators and teleporters as (or similar as) I show and read my guide on commuting times.
  
  
• If I have forgotten a building, please let me know and I will add it.
  
  
• I would like to point out that I do not guarantee that these construction patterns are actually the most effective possible. They are very effective for the reasons I have given and (except for those where I have mentioned otherwise) have been tested many times by me and other players on the official Discord server.
  
  
• I have only developed a few of these patterns completely myself. Most of them have arisen in discussions between various players, whom I would like to thank here without naming them personally (you know if I mean you).
  
  
• If you have had different experiences and think other patterns make more sense, please tell me. In the comments under this guide on Steam or on Discord. Especially when it comes to this game, I'm always excited to learn something new.
  
  
• I write all my guides in German and then translate them into English as best I can. If you find a translation error, please let me know.
  
  
• If you want to translate one of my guides into another language, I hereby give you permission to do so (Steam will ask you when you upload). You don't have to let me know (although that would be nice), I just ask that you identify me as the original author.