I'm fed up with garbage collection costs

[TheMurderousCricket 5,085]

Hi,

I always find the waste disposal costs in SC4 to be completely off the hinges. Prima guide purports that landfills are the cheapest method of waste disposal available. I don't think so.

For towns as small as 5000 citizens, waste disposal usually amounts to already 60% of all fucking utility costs (you should excuse the wording) when run with full funding. This usually means monthly expenditures of about 300 - 400$ a month. This involves the "cHeApEsT" form of disposal which is a landfill - 6x4 tiles large.

I would like to know if you could point me to an exemplar or file where the waste disposal cost per garbage unit can be modified. I'd like to simply reduce it and be done with this infuriating issue. If you have some other advice, I'd be happy to hear it (except for custom garbage disposal buildings - I am familiar with them all).

[rsc204 21,859]

Well I do think it’s worth considering how most small towns probably don’t have exclusive facilities in real life. I try to have waste handled by one city in the region only. When you do that it rather changes the cost because just as with say a large power plant, such a resource is not going to exist in small communities. Where it does, it’s unlikely to uniquely serve it.

Of course far be it for me to tell you how to play your game, if indeed the general cost can be altered, nothing wrong with doing so. Can’t help on that, never heard this come up before, so I think you may need to do some digging around SimCity_1.DAT. Best would be to use the Reader’s Navigator function, it should present the data in more easily searchable form.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,085]

41 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

Can’t help on that, never heard this come up before, so I think you may need to do some digging around SimCity_1.DAT. Best would be to use the Reader’s Navigator function, it should present the data in more easily searchable form.

That's ok. I found the exemplar where collection costs can be found.

However, regardless of the values I enter there, the expenditures do not decrease. I also tried to increase the capacity of the single landfill tile and it also doesn't take effect in game. I tried it on an existing and new city. I also tried it as a separate .dat in plugins and even through direct editing of the game files. It just won't take effect.

[rsc204 21,859]

Sounds very much like it’s locked in the .exe then. 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,085]

Pretty much looks like it.

I'm just furious because yesterday I made some research and it definitely looks like Maxis has greatly underpowered landfills as a disposal system...

Apart from the costs involved, one of the main problems that I have discovered is the issue of the waste density per cubic meter of the landfill space.

A study by the German GIZ development aid firm (which I am familiar with on a professional level) claims, that a well-maintained, sanitary and modern landfill can store about 700kg of waste per 1m3. This involves squeezing or rolling waste into tight blocks, rather than just scattering them over a place.

Now, if we assume that a single landfill tile in the game is 16x16x5 meters, then it means that a single "full" landfill tile is 1280 cubic meters large.

This means, that a total amount of garbage a single, vanilla tile should hold is 1280x700 which is 896000kg or 896 tonnes of capacity. This is almost three times as much as the default in-game value!!

What is more, landfills are rarely just put over the topsoil. Rather than that, first a pit of about 20m is dug first and only some garbage lay above the ground level.

This means that a realistic and modern-managed landfill tile in the game should have a space of 16x16x30 cubic meters and an even greater capacity than the mere 300 tonnes per tile. The space available in the SC4's vanilla landfill zone is more akin to a dirty cesspit somewhere in the poorest parts of Asia. Certainly not an even moderately eco-aware nation.

[rsc204 21,859]

We’ve been here before, the game is not designed to be realistic, it’s designed to work and be a fun experience to play. Hence, most basic realism had to be modded into the game. If Maxis had made realism their priority I am sure we would not be speaking. Because the game would’ve tanked so hard commercially that no community would exist to get into these things. Again I feel your complaint is Maxis didn’t make the game I wanted how I wanted it. 

[as 2]

I have taken to using a garbage incinerator right away and forgoing ever using a landfill. Just set the budget very low and raise it as the city grows. Obviously not very good for pollution but that's what map corners and neighbor deals are for

[Brad 343]

there are several options. some are much cheaper than the old landfill.  there are rural pickup spots and mods that put the garbage on trains to be hauled farther away. these work well to dispose of it without the pollution of a landfill. 

[Simizen 1,100]

to be honest, the quickest and easiest way to deal with this, would be to make a mod that alters the capacity, per tile, of the landfill zone. Given the information in this thread, 3x it's original capacity, may very well be the amount we're looking for.

I think one of the biggest issues in the game, is simply that there's data involved, that's not only carried over from SC3K when they made it, but also new data that's essentially broken how the landfill work. In SC3K, they were meant to cover an entire huge city, which is the equivalent of a default region in SC4 (4x4 large city tiles). But with the advent of a more detailed city, it's likely buildings produce more garbage as a result, but with the capacity still being the same as SC3K, then it can't handle these new amounts.

And given that SC4's region based, it's likely that you're meant to utilize a handful of cities to provide various utilities, much like in real life, where power plants and landfills would help to cover multiple cities/towns.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,085]

On 27.02.2024 at 6:24 AM, Ryuu Tenno said:

I think one of the biggest issues in the game, is simply that there's data involved, that's not only carried over from SC3K when they made it, but also new data that's essentially broken how the landfill work.

Oh yes. I remember that in SC3K it was also possible to employ "rotational landfill" scheme in which one could have three distinct landfills and use just one of them at a time, until it was filled. One could then just cut off the road access to said dump and connect one of the remaining two to the city. Usually, by the time you got back to the first garbage dump, all waste would already dissolve and the cycle would repeat.

Like I said, the game files do have properties for garbage dump capacities but the required, changed variables there are ignored by the game. Some, like decomposition speed, are accepted though so mods like this one can at least "pretend" that a garbage dump uses compactor and is more spacious without actually altering the per tile capacity.