Suspected Garbage BUG

[grudy 0]

For some reason, garbage in my 200,000 person city is stuck at 16000.  It is as if simcity is reading 16000 as "0."  I have 5 waste-energy plants running well-below capacity (averaging around 100tons/month each).  I also have 4 recyclling centers.  If I remove one incinerator, the amount of garbage in the city rises, and if I put it back, it drops back down until 16000 and then levels off.  I have also noticed from looking at the graphs that over the past 500 years, I have had other periods of garbage leveling off (until the city becomes large enough and there is a short spike in garbage before I build another plant), and that this leveling off value has risen incrementally (although I don't remember ever noticing this in the past).

What's the deal with this?  Is there some type of structure in my city that has an associated amount of garbage with it that cannot be removed?  One thought was that each waste-energy plant has a set value of garbage that hangs around it, but I don't remember this happening with any of my other cities.

[Jazzmaster 716]

Do you have any landfill zones? If so then that is the problem. If there's garbage in a landfill then technically garbage is still present, so it'll show up in the graph, but not in the data view.

[grudy 0]

no landfill.

garbage data view shows no spots with garbage.

[cogeo 960]

That's really weird. The average garbage production is some 90 tons per 25,000 residents per month. That is two W2E plants should be more than enough. Your recycling centers reduce the garbage produced by 25,000 residents each by 20% (100,000 in total). This means that your garbage facilities should be able to serve a city of >700,000 residents.

The reason may be some custom lots generating much more garbage than normal (that is badly modded BATs/Lots). It doesn't happen only to novices, this has occured even to renowned BATters/lotters, sometimes such settings can just escape their attention. Cobb's plaza has been notorious for this, but there are many many others... I would suggest that you download and install the stats fix packs by T Wrecks, they contain stats fixes for many BAT/Lots (of course they don't cover everything).

Also get the Graph Mod by Tropod, it's a mod that adds more graph plots to the game's graphs. There is an updated version in my Incinerator lot (link in my sig).

How to read the graphs: The Garbage Capacity and Total Garbage plots are quantities, that is tons. The former is the garbage that your landfills can hold, while the latter is the total garbage deposited in the landfills + the garbage on the streets. Garbage Pollution is the garbage in streets, and all other plots are "garbage processing rates", that is tons/month. Displaying all these together in the same graph may be confusing; a graph with two Y-axes (each displaying a different unit or scale) would be much more preferable, but unfortunately SC4 does not support such graphs.

An indication of existence of garbage on streets would be a nonzero Garbage Pollution plot. This may happen, even if you don't see yellow or red spots in your garbage dataview (but you may notice some little darkened spots). You may be surprised that garbage left on streets do disintegrate too, like in landfills. That is your streets can act like a giant landfill... The rate of disintegration is proportional to the quantity.

So my guess is that you have some badly modded lots and your garbage processing capacity is lower that the total garbage produced. Thus garbage do accumulate on streets, until the quantity gets big enough so that the disintegration rate equals the capacity "deficit". What can you do? Experiment! First of all backup your city (better copy the whole region folder somewhere else). Then try putting more garbage dispsal units (Total Garbage should decline), or a landill (check the Garbage Pollution only, Total Garbage would remain the same). But basically check the stats of your custom lots. some are really bad.

[villagemayor 0]

I think it is a bug because it happens to me too. It happens in my cities when I have lots of garbage piling up (I am not a bad mayor ok) in my city. After cleaning the city up, there is always a few hundred tons that will never go away. Nothing happens, the numbers don't decrease or increase, just stays at that level forever. It doesn't hurt the city. It doesn't look realistic, and I just ignore it. But I'm sure cogeo's solutions might work.

[cogeo 960]

Can you make the following test? Backup the region and try buldozing sections of the city to see if the garbage reported is reduced back to zero. I also suspect that if the garbage facility are far away (esp if connected only by a street), parts of the city may not be able to dispose their garbage (but this is just a hypothesis).