The Monorail Ride mission

[voltage 0]

Hello people,

1st post here. I used to play SC2000 a lot and recently bought Sim City 4 Deluxe and is still learning the ropes. I started out with a city in a small region tile which currently have 15k citizens (1500 R$$$) and then made another with only farmland and connected the two with monorail and road. So far so good. UDIs provides endless supply of money .

Now to my problem. I'd like to build a solar power plant in my city but don't have the 3000 R$$$ that's required so I'd like to "cheat" by doing the Monorail Ride mission to unlock it.

Apparantly >20 monorail tiles and >2 stations is required. Since I have a  connection I extended it in a straight line far enough to comply (being aware that the stations replaces rail tiles). I've also checked that there are no breaks. In the "My Sim" view I can access the monorail and get to drive it if I want. Still I don't get the mission. Something is missing but what? Is there a hidden requirement in addition to the 20 rail/3 stations? I hope you pros can provide some insight.

[dghh70 5]

yeah it has to be all with in the region

[voltage 0]

Well all monorail tiles and stations are within the city if that's what you mean (I actually have 20 rail tiles and 3 stations in the farmland "city" as well but the mission doesn't come there either).

Or are you saying that no part of the monorail network can have a connection (to neighbouring city) for the mission to appear?

[bigthing 35]

Welcome to Simtropolis!

You say that the mission is cheating... it is a lot easier to actually... cheat!

Simplyh press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C in the game (within the city) and type into the bar that pops up "you don't deserve it" (without quotes) and press enter. Walah! you now have all unlockable buildings unlocked! including... the solar power plant!

The great thing is that you only put it in when you need to! because when you exit the city, everything goes back to normal!

[voltage 0]

Thanks, and thanks for your replies both of you.

I think I've cracked it. I made a 3rd city that I could fool around with properly, added residential and medium industry zoning and silly amounts of monorail loops to connect it (no roads, to force monorail traffic). No dice. Then I built the freight train needed for those missions which appeared at once.

Went on to build the passenger train stations and then the monorail mission turned up. Switched to farmland city, made the passenger train (straight line with 3 stations) and also there the monorail mission popped up almost immediately.

Finally switched to 1st city and made passenger train there. This time the monorail didn't appear at once, not until traffic on passenger train went from 1st to 3rd station - there was traffic from A to B and from B to C but not until I forced traffic from A to C the mission (for monorail!) popped. So it seems you have to fulfill the reqs for both passenger train and monorail and perhaps even make sure the some sims pass a station between start and end.

There's a problem all this though. I didn't save between these attempts and today when I did all over again in all cities just to confirm the theory, no passenger train was required to trigger it once I'd built it in the test city and saved. So I'm still at loss regarding exactly what's needed to trigger monorail ride mission but if someone else have the same problem I recommend experimenting with passenger train.

[Bplax15 2]

If you have just started this game then to do missions you generallly have to do the prerequisite missions for cars, trains, planes. That is perhaps why you got it to work when you created the train tracks. I believe to do the monorail you have to do the train mission. Don't quote me on this, just a hunch. Also by the sound of it you have made your monorail a full loop, not just a straight line. This will make doing the mission much easier because you can't go in reverse with the monorail. Also make sure you have enough room in your budget for the solar power plant, it has a fairly high monthly budget.