Fixing Cities Afflicted by Phantom Sliders

[z1 566]

Recently, the problem with phantom sliders has been mentioned in a number of posts.  This problem occurs when you have lots containing sliders (typically civic lots), and you plop a lot that has the identical ID as an existing one, except that it has a different capacity or funding level.  Depending on which direction things have been changed, over a period of months the sliders on all buildings of that category (for example, all education buildings) will slowly creep up or down, until they are stuck at either the maximum or at zero.  Resetting the sliders helps only temporarily.

 

This can be fatal to a city, either bankrupting it when all the sliders hit their maximum, or denying it a crucial service when all the sliders hit zero.  Fortunately, and contrary to what many people believe, this problem can always be fixed.

 

If you have plopped just a single building that triggers the phantom slider bug, the fix is simple:  Simply remove that building.  If you're not sure which building it is, you can try removing various buildings until the phantom slider bug goes away.  Once it goes away, it doesn't come back unless you plop another conflicting building.  If you want to use the settings of the new building that caused the phantom sliders, then bulldoze all occurrences of that building (new and old) in your city.  Then run the game for a couple of months, verifying that the phantom slider bug is gone.  At that point, you can plop either the new or old version of the building (but not both!), and the phantom slider bug will not return.

 

For the case of a single building that's causing the phantom sliders, this fix will work even years after you plopped the building.  This is the most common case.

 

What is happening here is that the game keeps a record, updated frequently, of each type of building and what the costs and capacities of that building are.  It uses the sum of the resulting cost figures to compute the total budget for the category.  However, the game cannot keep track of a building type that has two different costs or capacities, so it uses only one of them.  As a result, the total budget for a category is different from the actual total costs of all the buildings in that category.  The game notices this, and tries to fix it by raising or lowering the funding for all the buildings in the category.  But like a dog chasing its tail, this just moves the problem to another level, and the next time around, the game ends up having to make the same type of fix in the same direction.  This continues until the slider reaches one end or the other of its range.

 

Occasionally, this problem cannot be resolved by removing the offending building.  The circumstances under which this happens are not completely clear, but it appears likely that this happens when two or more buildings that trigger phantom sliders are present in the same city.  The game appears to calculate total costs incrementally, which makes sense from a computational point of view.  However, that leaves it vulnerable to becoming completely confused if multiple buildings that cause the phantom slider are placed.  In such a case, removing all the offending buildings doesn't help, as the game's basis for computing the costs of that whole category have been corrupted.  Not only does removing all instances of the offending buildings not help, but removing all custom buildings of that category doesn't help.

 

It's at this point that many people give up and nuke their city.  However, this is not necessary; the city can be saved, although it requires a bit of effort.  First, be sure you have the

loaded.  Then delete all the buildings of the affected category.  For example, if your schools were showing phantom sliders, you would have to delete all schools, universities, museums, libraries, and any other building that is classified as educational.  Fortunately, you can see where each one of these buildings is located in the Education Data View.  Before deleting each building, use the TerrainQuery cheat to find its location.  Write this down, along with the type of building you're deleting.  When you've deleted all the buildings in the relevant category, the corresponding Data View will be completely empty of all green dots and circles.  And your Phantom Slider problem will be gone.

 

Why?  Once you've deleted everything, the game notices that there are no buildings in this category, and therefore no capacities and no expenses.  This conflicts with its internal data, but since its internal data is calculated, it merely resets it.  So this reset effectively undoes the cause of the phantom sliders.  You should run the game a couple of months or so to give it time to notice that the entire category of buildings is gone, but then you can start replacing your buildings.  As long as all buildings you plop of the same type have the same capacities and costs, the phantom slider bug should not return.

Update (9/28/21):  It turns out that there are many cases where the fixes above are not sufficient to remove a Phantom Slider bug.  These appear to all involve multiple buildings of the same class (such as all education buildings, for example).  @CorinaMarie has written an excellent post detailing how to fix the bug in these cases.  If you have a Phantom Slider bug that involves more than one building, or that does not go away easily, I recommend that you go straight to the method described in her post.

[AcronShinra 60]

5/5, strong post.

[Bdub01 201]

The thing is this slider bug problem I had no idea. Now that I know what it is I have noted on occasions that a hospital or school slider will be different from where I "swear" I had it . Now I know why... Yet it's never been so bad that I've gone bankrupt or anything, but I check my sliders quite a bit as well.

[infamousjbe 593]

The thing is this slider bug problem I had no idea. Now that I know what it is I have noted on occasions that a hospital or school slider will be different from where I "swear" I had it . Now I know why... Yet it's never been so bad that I've gone bankrupt or anything, but I check my sliders quite a bit as well.

 

But what if you change the slider in the budget control menu, doesn't that effect all buildings globally to a degree as well?

 

Swear I've noticed sliders being set differently but only after changing the budget menu slider. None of the buildings ever seem to keep moving in any direction till maxing out either way. Which is the ultimate result of the slider bug if I'm correct. 

[z1 566]

But what if you change the slider in the budget control menu, doesn't that effect all buildings globally to a degree as well?

 

Yes, it does; it affects all of them proportionately.

 

Swear I've noticed sliders being set differently but only after changing the budget menu slider. None of the buildings ever seem to keep moving in any direction till maxing out either way. Which is the ultimate result of the slider bug if I'm correct.

Changing the budget menu slider is quite safe, and will not produce phantom sliders.

[Magneto 316]

Very useful info here. Should be stickied.

 

Thanks z

[Nesral Sredna 62]

Bumping, just to say: "Indeed it should be.."

[infamousjbe 593]

Finally got my first infliction a few days ago while messing around with a fire station's budget. Need to remember to bulldoze the dang things before I start modding/testing to reduce the chances of this happening and having to worry about fixing it.

 

It should be sticky'd in the bugs&tech section of the forum. 

[z1 566]

It should be sticky'd in the bugs&tech section of the forum. 

 

Personally, I think that would be an excellent idea.  A lot of people lose cities unnecessarily due to this bug.

[infamousjbe 593]

 

It should be sticky'd in the bugs&tech section of the forum. 

 

Personally, I think that would be an excellent idea.  A lot of people lose cities unnecessarily due to this bug.

 

Especially those who fiddle around with the Reader. 

 

In the process of creating a mod for all the pyro's out there like me that crave more frequent fires, of course there has to be a bit of radical altering of exemplars, and you're bound to hiccup sooner or later.

[JohnHarold 0]

Hi there, I tell you what this bug is hard to get rid of. I have followed your instructions exactly and I still have this problem. I have waited years after removing all the buildings from a category and the slider still goes to 0. I feel like ripping my hair out...

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Make sure you have all the custom content from the STEX with the word fix in the title.  This applies especially to the Opera House Fix which is often the cause of this problem.  Out of bounds civic custom content will usually be found to be the cause of this problem.  Playing with the Reader is one of the other causes.

[SimJungleman 11]

I was having the slider issue, deleted all buildings and noticed an "ERROR: NO NAME." I went to the spot where an elementary school once stood and nothing but gods green earth. I've buldozed, attack with every disaster, nothing!! How do you get rid of this phantom no name school? I don't want to obliterate the city, for it is one of the key cities in the region.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I was having the slider issue, deleted all buildings and noticed an "ERROR: NO NAME." I went to the spot where an elementary school once stood and nothing but gods green earth. I've buldozed, attack with every disaster, nothing!! How do you get rid of this phantom no name school? I don't want to obliterate the city, for it is one of the key cities in the region.

Too bad.  I guess you don't have the With this kind of error you should always look at this forum.

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

On 6/27/2013 at 10:21 PM, z1 said:

Update (9/28/21):  It turns out that there are many cases where the fixes above are not sufficient to remove a Phantom Slider bug.  These appear to all involve multiple buildings of the same class (such as all education buildings, for example).  @CorinaMarie has written an excellent post detailing how to fix the bug in these cases.  If you have a Phantom Slider bug that involves more than one building, or that does not go away easily, I recommend that you go straight to the method described in her post.

Thanks for the shout out.

I've learned way more since then and have perfected a method to fix any Slider Bugs with a scientific approach to determine exactly what's needed for the counter amounts. CB and I had planned to write a thorough tutorial elucidating the methods, but then other projects came up. Btw, there is one in the medical group with my method which needs one lot left remaining as it's handled internally different than all others. (Said all others can be totally fixed and no extra lot needs to stay.)

Also, I believe @smf_16 can do it much easier by direct editing of the city save file.

[z1 566]

9 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Btw, there is one in the medical group with my method which needs one lot left remaining as it's handled internally different than all others.

Which lot would this happen to be?

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

16 hours ago, z1 said:

Which lot would this happen to be?

Any medical lot with the Local Funding (top slider) bugged. The Ambulance Funding can be countered with no extra lot needing to remain (which holds the offset amount).

Additionally, another insidious problem can arise: If the lot has sliders (of any kind) and it does not have a PluginPackID (or duplicates the ID of some other lot) and the city tile is saved whilst the original is not in plugins, the save data loses the internal link to its info so my method cannot counter it with the no lot staying present method.

In both cases, that's when we need a plop that must always remain to hold the offset cost amount (whether negative or positive value).

Edit: @z1 I tweaked the above a wee bit as I hadn't quite described the differences as well as I could have.

In summary:

Any slider bug can be fixed with the proper offset funding done in two sets of bulldozing, tweaking, plopping, and bulldozing and no lot has to remain to hold the info with the exception of medical with the top slider bugged.

For all except medical there is a separate totaling entry in the save game data and we can force it to be set back to zero. For medical, it doesn't have that, but always adds up the individual slider costs as when plopped and compares that to the total as seen in the current exemplars.

Then there is the other, rarer exception scenario of saving a city while a lot with sliders which does not have PluginPackID is out of plugins, but the game saved. (This can happen when one decides to remove content and they believe they have bulldozed all such lots before removing, but missed one or more.) This, too, can be fixed, but a single lot containing the cumulative offset amount has to remain in the city tile.