Earthworks Tutorial Lucario Boricua's Earthworks Tutorials E-7: Hiking Trail

[Lucario Boricua 7,061]

Greetings once again!

 

Today I'm unveiling a wonderful Earthworks Tutorial for nature-lovers, we're making hiking trails!! These are a type of path located along natural areas, whose purpose is to allow for recreational walking and sometimes cycling in designated wilderness areas. These are an essential part of natural preserves open to the public, connecting visitor centers to the various amenities for outdoorsy people.

 

A. Mods and custom content required

 

• Network Addon Mod, latest version, currently the 38. Versions 34 through 37 will still be adequate despite missing some of the latest relevant features. In particular, make sure to have the NAM hole digging lots, these are super important to do a lot of the required steps I'll be showing. There are other hole digging lots available and they work just as well. One of the features we'll be using are the pedestrian mall bridges!

 

 

• Slope mode of your choice: in my case, the original BRF Tunnel and Slope Mod with some slight modifications. I recommend this one in particular because it's one of the most varied slope mods available for SimCity 4. I currently use an older version which still did not include a dedicated Real Highway (RHW) slope. In fact, for this tutorial it is especially advantageous to have a slope mod which specifically excludes the Real Highway, as the network's default slope is especially steep, it'll come in handy to shape the natural terrain around the paths. Find all the published slope mods in the main topic of the Earthworks Tutorials series!
   
• God Terraforming in Mayor Mode: if not your thing, use the cheat to activate God mode terraforming tools in Mayor Mode

 

• Your favorite sand, rock or MMP path set: once the trail path is shaped, it's great to have it look just right with the right surface to match the scene. Some players might prefer a more precise and engineered walking surface, it's possible to use path lots, so long as they're slope-conforming and that the created path alignment has flatter slopes. Below there's a few trusted options:

 

• Some outdoor recreational area amenities: benches, scenic look-overs, overhanging bridges, railings and so on. Below I'm showing the ones I'll be using in this tutorial. The best one-stop area for these is the PLEX Mountain Theme Pack! One other thing players would enjoy is getting MMP trailblazers: ordinary people (pedestrians), cyclists and/or horseback riders.

 

B. Types of terrain required: make sure to use a terrain area hosting natural features: streams, waterfalls, cliffs, mountains, lakes, coastlines, dunes--anything other than a featureless flat terrain. The more rugged, the better! Plan out your trail to include starting points (the trail heads), important stuff where amenities might be found, crossings and terminations (either another trail head, major outdoor facilities or a notable scenic destination).

 

C. Take me to the trailblazing steps now!! Now that everything is set, we're ready to start our trail building!

 

1. We start by finding our scenic natural area! This time I'm in the Alba River Gorge Natural Heritage Preserve in the Town of Zacien, Kingdom of Rota. Here we have some impressive cliffs, roaring waterfalls and a refreshing pine forest, highly accessible by road, rail and even air travel (close to the Kingdom of Rota International Airport!).

 

2. The full trail should look like this (not exactly, depending on how we adapt to the terrain), although given the extreme level of detail involved in this tutorial, we'll end up building only the eastern half. The western half will be used for another upcoming tutorial! Location A is our visitor center to the Natural Heritage Preserve, where I'm using the Halfway Hut as the building where forest conservation activities are headquartered. Location B is a spot we'll be preparing for future outdoor uses, we will only prepare the terrain but not build anything in this tutorial. Location C will be the location of a spectacular scenic look-over for this amazing waterfall descending from the White River.

 

3. When starting our trail, we will find it easiest to start with a small flattish area we can use to create a switchback, a sharp turn to help trails go up and down steep terrain. We flatten the area by placing road pieces, and keep them in place to start a rising path. We also dig below to prepare our area to start building the trail downhill.

 

4. After digging down, we remove these pieces and start building a path segment going downhill. To keep things looking interesting, don't limit the paths to orthogonal segments, use diagonal and fractional angle alignments to better line up with the hillsides.

 

5. Once we reach the lowest part, we can flatten the terrain to create a larger activity area for future use. At the same time, we may notice that the landscape doesn't look quite right, we can fix that!

 

6. We can re-shape the natural terrain for a better look. Here I'll be using the Real Highway 2 (RHW-2) and the Street to shape the steep hillside with trees into a proper cliff face. The street can be reached with a hotkey short-cut with Alt + R.

 

7. To shape the cliff, we need relatively gentle slopes above and below where we want the cliff face, the cliff face will correspond to the steep transition between the gentler inclines.

 

8. One important benefit of the Street and RHW-2 is that they can be removed using the de-zoning tool. A quick way to select it is using Ctrl + V, saving valuable seconds of menu-loading time.

 

9. We now return to our original path. To ensure a consistent incline, we flatten an area uphill of our next curve or crossing, and then create an inclined portion at a higher elevation than our intended path from below. I'm using the road network (hotkey R to activate) to do this, don't use overly steep networks for the paths because our trailblazers could be discouraged by dangerously or tiresomely steep hiking!

 

10. We then demolish the cells for the uphill terrain raising and then build a FAR-2 road. Build 4-cell long segments which overlap 2 cells, continue until reaching the desired elevation. Once there. place the road pieces again to create the next horizontal stretch.

 

11. We then reach a spot where a depression would come in handy to make the landscape more interesting! Prepare the area by removing at least 3 road squares for the gorge gap.

 

 

 

     Continues to Part 2 below!!!     

[Lucario Boricua 7,061]

   Continuing with Part 2!!    

 

12. Now with the gap site selected, we reach over to our Hole Digging Lots! We're using the bulldoze-free terrain raising and digging lots from the Network Addon Mod, available with version 37 or later. Older versions of digging lots require dragging a transport network to activate, those are more cumbersome and take up space, we're in a tight situation here by preserving the natural land's layout!

 

13. When selecting the hole digging lots, use the TAB key to change the elevation, and the Home/End keys to change from raising (blue) or digging (red). Elevation options include 7.5m (L1), 8m, 10m, 12m, 14m, 15m (L2), 22.5m (L3), 24m and 30m (L4). We'll keep things simple and use the default 15m digging distance.

 

14. Once set, we click on the spot where we want to dig!

 

15. Once the depression is dug, we shape it with road pieces and by adding upstream inclines. We could have a small creek or spring flow out of here!

 

16. After creating that gap, we resume the trail alignment. We can use different transport networks to get different inclines. We can follow the terrain more closely when alternating these grades, it also keeps the path from looking unnaturally straight.

 

17. We make a pause and zoom out to watch our trailblazing progress, until we realize that the trail has not yet reached our trailhead between the mesa and the power lines!!

 

18. We go to the trailhead segment and start flattening and grading another segment, using the techniques demonstrated before.

 

19. At other locations, we might want to smooth out the side slopes of the trail. For this task it's best to use any single-tile network with native diagonal support. It's possible to use the street network with the pre-fabricated diagonal segments, but those only work if the space is plentiful.

 

20. Once again, to keep things looking natural, we can re-grade from a different position to make a more natural-looking slope.

 

21. We can also use different networks to get different inclines, depending on how precipitous the drop below is.

 

22. When working in steep cliff areas, there's gonna be some occasions when the terrain is simply too flat to shape! We have a solution for these tight situations.

 

23. Find a portion of the cliff where there's boundaries between cells. Try placing some road squares here to decrease the elevation. Remove them and resume shaping the terrain from our original alignment.

 

24. We'll now create another deep gap across our terrain, We start with the same steps of the first one.

 

25. Unlike the first one, here we use the hole digging lots for a greater depth, in this case the 30 meter drop.

 

26. At this time, you might be wondering what we're doing with this mess of disjointed road and rail pieces along the trail. We don't demolish them just yet because they'll help us with reforestation! Given the limited size of our area, we'll be using the God Mode flora brush.

 

 

    Part 3 up next!!     

  Edited November 30, 2020 by Lucario Boricua  
Disclaimer removed

[Lucario Boricua 7,061]

    Part 3? We're almost there!!     

 

27. We now re-plant the forests! Every part where road and rail pieces cover the terrain is masked from the indiscriminate planting. We can now demolish them to get some nice barren terrain to pave or tamp down to build our paths.

 

28. Remember the gaps? We can use these to place pedestrian bridges! An easy option is the PEG Swing Bridge in its Ski Resort Path variant (no ground texture). This bridge is flexible for any gorge depth and, but it's limited to cross the narrowest caps of 3 cells in width. Placing it just requires rotating it (Home/End keys) and then plopping it. Make sure to plop the anchoring lot to the flattest side, makes it easier to do the next steps.

 

29. For other gaps we might be better off with the NAM PedMall pedestrian bridges. We use the TAB key to select the various pieces, we're specifically looking for the ped bridge over blank terrain and the ped bridge on-slope transition.

 

30. When placing these bridges, start with the on-slope pieces, with the arrow pointing towards the depression.

 

31. Complete the bridge by placing as many intermediate pieces over blank terrain as required. Compared to the PEG swing bridge, this one is more versatile to cover gaps of variable width, just add as many intermediate segments as necessary. They're more limited in terms of vertical placement. To get the level bridge, use a 15-meter depression, or get slight curvatures by making the gap deeper (up to 20 meters) or shallower (down to 10 meters). More advanced placement can also involve slight elevation differences between each side, this bridge model can accommodate them.

 

32. Alright, where's the paths? We pave them now with our choice of MMP sand, MMP stone or path lots. Here I'm using the HBS Grey Light Sand. As a rule of thumb, natural-looking paths should use rock or sand whose color resembles that of the nearby cliffs.

 

33. We carefully place the sand along the graded path right-of-way, making sure to get smooth curvature at the turns and junctions.

 

34. We can now start furnishing our paths. We'll place a PEG scenic point, corner variant, pointing at the 3 waterfalls to the left!

 

35. Add any more path surfacing to reach the scenic point. To make sure our Sims don't get lost, place wayfinding signs at strategic locations: trail heads, trail junctions, near recreational facilities, major natural attractions and/or city borders. We're using the ones included in the PEG Ski Resort kit.

 

36. Our scenic look-over is constructed! If it looks too barren, get other MMPs to add hikers and more natural beauty to exalt the scene.

 

37. We retreat once again to appreciate our hard work come to fruition!

 

38. Rotate the views to check that everything is in order, and make any last adjustments and finishing touches before calling the project complete.

 

39. From this angle, we can experience the breathtaking panorama of the waterfalls in this canyon. Be on the look-out for the next tutorials and for how I finish furnishing this amazing natural heritage preserve!  

  Edited November 30, 2020 by Lucario Boricua  
Content added

[City_Slider 2,716]

Like we call it in German:  Leck mich fett (no translation possible, sounds like: very very cool).