I created this colony called Cavour City, located on the fourth planet of the Cavour System. The question is how to lay it out. Do you lay it out as a grid? Or concentric circles around the central spaceport? Where is the water source? What is its power source? A hydroelectric dam? Solar panels? All of the above? When you look at Star Wars or Star Trek, all settlements are located in one locale and there is exactly one climate? This is world building. Anyone else writing space colonization?

I think you have to do broad strokes first. How many settlements do you want? How long have people been spreading in the area? Are you going to create a unique ecosystem that is beneficial or harmful to humanity? When my mother and I were working on Quirni, there were three planets and one lacked metal, that was a large part of how the society evolved. What can people do without metal tools? Without big industrial power plants? The societies of the other two planets were oppressive to the planet without metal and that played into the story too. Part of the point of the narrative was that oppressive behavior. Do you have anything like that driving your worldbuilding?

I have the politics and history down pat. This is my space analog of the Falklands War. Note: I once read one criticism of military sci-fi / space opera is just fighting WW2 in space. To a certain extent, they are right. I chose the Falklands War instead. If you are not familiar, there are a few islands in the South Atlantic that went back and forth between Spain and England. When the Argentinians declared independence from Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, they considered themselves the successors in interest. Britain got the islands back in 1833 and has held onto them ever since. The Falkland Islanders consider themselves British culturally and they hold British passports. Argentina went to war in 1982 to get them back. The British recaptured them with a very long expedition from the UK. Argentinians today are still smarting over the loss. They always call them by the Spanish name Las Malvinas, never the Falklands. In my story, the planet was discovered by one star system but did not put any permanent settlements. The same planet was also discovered by another star system. The latter actually makes a permanent settlement and build roads and even a tramway. Legally, the international law has always favored the claims of the one who made substantial improvements. They need to balance "Right of Discovery" and the "Right of Improvement." Another legal principle is adverse possession where one person can get another person's piece of land through continuous occupation and improvements and the first person says nothing or does nothing to oust the interloper. The colony's ecosystem is a lesser problem; just humidity and summer storms. If you ever lived in the Midwest, summers are hot and humid and winters are cool and dry. This planet follows that. As for technology, it's in the 27th century and they have modern tools like electricity from hydroelectric dams.