City Tile Disappear or Missing

[KD2 1]

I had this happen to me this morning. The tile just disappeared and became a blank space on the region map. I looked for a fix but unable to find one. System restart did not work and I had no previous versions or a back-up. Been working on this region for about a year so did not want to have a blank tile on my map, had to do something.

 

Found a fix. Started a New Region with the exact same layout (this is key), and gave it a name. Save and exit, go to  documents, SC4 folder/regions and copy the cities from the old corrupt region. Do Not Copy the corrupted file, config, or region files. I did not know the name of the city that I lost, was only landscaping at the time, it was New City something, so I just deleted all of them with that name. Paste into new region and worked. I lost all the landscaping i had done, but got back all my old cites.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Glad you were able to recover.

 

The cause of this problem is a corrupted save.  This is usually the result of switching away from the game during a save.  You must not ALT+TAB away when a save is in progress.  This program is very sensitive to lost focus, and sometimes does weird things when that happens.  This is true even if you are doing a save and exit.  You must wait for the game to go down.

[Compdude787 916]

If you watched Haljackey's "Building a city from Scratch" videos, you'll notice that he often takes focus off of SC4 while saving, since he has two monitors. So the city tile in region view won't show up, but the city is still playable. I know this is so because he did this all the time.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Losing the city snapshot in the region is one thing, and recoverable.  Having a hole in the region in place of the city indicates a corrupt city.  The usual cause is switching away during a save.  Other possible causes are a hiccup during the write or NTFS general failure due to lack of maintenance.

[Jimmy Buzaid 53]

It seems as if SimCity 4 freaks out with loss of focus in general. I run it in windowed mode and it takes a minute or so to load the window when I take focus off the game.