NEWS FLASH- I have the solution for the pollution bug!

[chomusclavus 0]

Your cities might have been plagued by the all-too-infamous pollution bug. What happens is when you tear down the Akin's Air Purification Plant and/or other, similar plants that suck the pollution out of the city, in less than a year, your city becomes bloody-red with pollution.

What I mean by bloody-red is, when you look at the graphics overlay of your city, which is your city's diagram (kind of like a map), and you click on "Air Pollution" to view the air pollution overlay, it will all be bloody-red all throughout the city. On the line-graph chart, the air pollution will show a sudden spike to about ~90,000-~100,000 and stay up there.

Now, THE SOLUTION FOR THE POLLUTION:

1. Go to SimCity 4 Tools
2. Click on the "Exemplar Editor"
3. Press "Open" (an open folder icon)
4. Go to where you usually keep your plugins, or use Google Desktop Search and type in "Akin's Air Purification" if you have it but don't know where it is. (If using a different pollution-cleaning power plant, enter its name)
5. Click on a .sc4lot file that has the name of the power plant. (For me, it was "Akin's Air Purification Plant_ae47b617.sc4lot")

6. Press "Open"
7. There is a "+" symbol next to the folder with the file-name on the Exemplar editor. Click it and it will open some sub-folders.
8. Click the "Building" folder
9. Click the "Akin's Air Purification Plant" subfolder (or the subfolder of whatever name your power-plant is, if different
10. There will be a list of many settings with an icon of an unlocked padlock next to each of them. Click on the one that says "Pollution at center".
11. On the Exemplar Editor's sub-screen to the right, and right below "Air", is a number figure- "-1000000". That is where the bug comes from! Change the number to -500.
12. -500 is what I changed the pollution setting to. As soon as I came back into the game, and ran the city for a year, the pollution levels did not go up. This is probably because -500 is sufficient enough to remove the pollution from the city, because in my city, it still removed as much pollution as it did when the setting was at "-1000000".
13. Demolish the plant and wait for one year. Pollution levels will not skyrocket anymore. In fact, I noticed the pollution levels remained the same as before. The bug has been fixed!

Note that if you use one of the water treatment plants from the "Black Hole" downloaded utility building set, and demolish that, the same bug will happen with the water system. Your water pollution will also become bloody red all through town so if you have something like a "Black Hole Water Works", follow the above instructions, but with some slight changes of course.

[MayorTim 16]

I don't think people really use air purification lots anymore, especially since you can just do it with modds now, if you want to do it at all.

Still, this could be helpful for those that still do. Thanks for posting it!

[chomusclavus 0]

No problem at all! There are pollution mods now? Where can I look at them? By the way, I think many mods feel more "cheatsome" than downloaded buildings do, but I'd like to review them because I know there are some that aren't.

The fact that the Akin's Air Purification Plant was free to plop and run originally was cheatsome, so that's why I used the Exemplar Editor to make it cost 250,000 Simoleons to plop, and 2,500 Simoleons per month to run. I thought those prices would be fair for the task this power plant does.