Farm Sizes Potentially No Limit?!

[Leo -- 186]

Hello everyone I was experimenting with SC4 growable size limits for bigger farms and this mega farm grew out of a 98x49 zone ...

So this got me thinking is there no size limits for farms since it just a building with a field 

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

As far as I can tell, there is no limit. The only trouble you'll run into is when some of the field is too far from any street/road connection and you may get the no road access zots. I typically try to keep one of the two dimensions within 18 cells of any given road/street, but I've had farther away work fine too. Should you have the zots appear, you can trick it by plopping a network enabled lot near the zot. I recall reading that peeps use something called Peg's Dirt Trails (or paths) or something like that. In our own modding, @Cyclone Boom and I have made some of our diagonal and square tree filler lots be NE'd just for that purpose since I do a lot of irregular shaped fields and they are more prone to having that glitch.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

There is a "no zots" cheat I use, if the farm is just window dressing. There are also plop crops that are basically parks, if you really want to expand out. That building, I think is Bartholomew Stables, one of the bigger Maxis farms, but there are much bigger custom ones, and you can also make one in LotEditor. I'd ask why you have 4 large fire stations bordering it...but, nah! ...I don't wanna know.

[Nathaniel Herapen 17]

I've tried creating giant and more realistic sized farm lots. So far I've found that the game freezes expecting to build a farm and fails to do so when it was larger than half a mid sized city so larger than 1km x 2km seems unable to be constructed. Will run some more test to ensure that it wasn't due just to my computer.

[Leo -- 186]

16 hours ago, Nathaniel Herapen said:

So far I've found that the game freezes expecting to build a farm

I also had the freezing problem. Also my mega farm outputs almost 700 trucks a day and contributes a ton of farm population.

But I have to ask why did Maxis impose a limit that can be easily bypassed? Maybe it was lag and balancing issues?

Also @SIM-ple Jack I just spammed fire stations.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

21 minutes ago, Leo -- said:

Also @SIM-ple Jack I just spammed fire stations.

I figured!

Another prob with mega-farms...miss just one tile when zoning, zone it when you find it, and it will not grow to match the rest of the field, no matter how many times you delete it. You have to either rezone the whole thing, or put trees on the missing tiles. It is good for making designs in your crops tho.

[Propfam 2,286]

I did an experiment and you technically can zone agriculture how large you want. But it comes with an expense of long computing time, which could make your computer freezing. Make sure you try first on smaller size and scale up as much as your computer can.

[rsc204 21,806]

On 31/08/2020 at 2:44 PM, CorinaMarie said:

As far as I can tell, there is no limit. The only trouble you'll run into is when some of the field is too far from any street/road connection and you may get the no road access zots. I typically try to keep one of the two dimensions within 18 cells of any given road/street, but I've had farther away work fine too. Should you have the zots appear, you can trick it by plopping a network enabled lot near the zot. I recall reading that peeps use something called Peg's Dirt Trails (or paths) or something like that. In our own modding, @Cyclone Boom and I have made some of our diagonal and square tree filler lots be NE'd just for that purpose since I do a lot of irregular shaped fields and they are more prone to having that glitch.

The same glitches occur with mech + out buildings for regular industrial, I guess this problem is related.

You can just place a PedMall, run the simulator until the zot disappears, then remove it once more. That's what those "dirt trails" are, PedMalls hidden at the end of the Tab-Ring.

[Terring 6,473]

I can confirm the freezing issue, which depends on the size of your zone. The larger the agricultural zone, the more time the computer needs to fill it, the longer the freeze. I've also discovered that those freezes also depends on the farm fields themselves and if they only contain simple textures, like dirt or grass, or entire props too, such as trees or greenhouses.