Idea: City-building features by earning the 'key to the city' from Mayor

[iamSpacedad]

New item - Key to the city

By completing certain objectives on behalf of the city, and earning your trust and admiration of its residents, you eventually are given the Key To The City item by the Mayor. The key to the city will not function if the player's naughtiness accumulated from offending the township is at a certain level.  (A substantial fine of oincs can be paid to the mayor to reduce this.)

Holding the Key to the city allows you to: Access a 'City Building' Menu, which allows you to move existing buildings, build houses/shops/guard-towers, upgrade existing ones, craft city decorations, and even build new city features.

It could also be possible that new avenues of gameplay open up once you've earned the key to the city, such as city-management that lets you produce a daily supply of goods from farmers and other workers in the city.  Or important new buildings that can only be built through earning the key.  What those buildings could potentially be would deserve some further exploration.  But some possible examples could include: A fountain, a park, a tavern, a hotel, a museum (where you can store certain items or put special items on display), a library, a sporting arena, a soldier barracks (in case there might be a city-invasion mechanic the player might have to deal with in the future), a hospital (where the player can purchase medicine or receive treatment from a pig doctor), a graveyard (which might provide the player with a single-use resurrection), a fishing pond, a town-portal teleportation waypoint (super-advanced materials required for this) and so on.  The catch of course is that a lot of the more useful or exotic stuff you can build requires materials that the player needs to thoroughly explore to get ahold of.

I think turning the endgame into a kind of Simcity-lite by earning the key would be quite fun.

[metallichydra]

there's already an item called: key to the city...

it enables you to craft items from the "city building" tab, which contains pig houses.
 

Spoiler

you get it by giving a royal scepter to the pig queen on the second island.
then you get a royal gallery key, which can unlock "key to the city"

 

[Rhovious Aran]

Are you aware that there is such an item in the game that you can obtain

Spoiler

if you hand Pig Queen Malfalfa either the crown from Mant Queen or the Regal Scepter from the Rocs nest?

It gives you access to a crafting tab that allows you to craft all the pig houses and the turfs as well as lanterns. You can build your own mayor office even after which your own pig houses will give you taxes.