SimCity 4 Lore

[Haljackey 17,303]

Everyone is welcome to add and expand the lore listed here. Just reply and a mod or myself can edit the list!!!

 

Inspired by this reddit post:

 

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I decided to make a forum thread for this so it isn't lost as easily. A compilation is below. If you have more to add, or want context for something, reply to this thread and I can add it.

Edit: I continue to add more as it comes to my mind or it's sent to me by others, and added a ton of links. You can also google search a lot of this for context.

Edit2: this list is now split up into 3 sections: Items / events, members and honourable mentions

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Items / Events:

.Dll Files have exposed that all the patches that used to be used to stabilize the game such as launch parameters (CPUCount:1) are completely broken and do not fix the problem

.Dll mayhem / renaissance-  A DLL (Dynamic Link Library) is a type of file containing code that can be used by multiple programs at once. The advent of DLLs gives the ability to modify the game in ways that were previously thought impossible.

$5 sales-  SimCity 4 can frequently be found on sale for $5 USD

10mb upload limit- This game came out in the mid 2000s when internet data usage was different than today. Due to the era in which the game came out, sites like Simtropolis had a 10mb data cap on uploads to the site, both due to dialup internet constraints and because of the cost of data storage back then.

2008 Simtropolis Site Hack - A hacking of the Simtropolis website that occurred between May 23 and May 28, 2008. According to the SC4 Wiki, a hacking group originating from China inserted malicious code into the site, and caused data like City Journal entries to be lost or damaged.

3D Camera Mod - For years it has been a running gag to request a 3D camera mod for the game. This was thought of as something that would enhance a 20-year-old game but that was impossible to implement. On April Fools 2024, @memo released a 3D Camera Mod for the game which everyone thought was a joke at first, but when they installed it they realized that it was a real mod that actually added a 3D camera to the game.  It's release on April fools was made even better because of the fact it was preceded by a hoax by @pcwhiz24 almost a decade before.

4GB Patch-  A third-party patch designed by NTCore to allow old programs to access 4GB of RAM on 32 bit executable files. A lot of programs from the 2000s were designed with 2GB of RAM and this limits how long one can play the game due to data constraints. The 4GB patch doubles the amount of RAM making it easier to avoid crashes and data limit issues. The patch is not limited to SC4 but can also be used on other programs with the 2GB cap.

50 Million Sims Population video- A milestone reached in @Haljackey's mega-region which comprises of cities and regions imported as far back as 2003. It gained noteworthy attention on online gaming circles and the media at large, with many sites reporting on the achievement (one example). While other players have reached regional population numbers far higher, they are less detailed, connected & realistic-looking; often going for sheer population figures rather than appearances.

9-9-9 tax plan-  Herman Cain was a candidate for US President on the Republican side in 2012. During his campaign, he proposed 9% taxes for three categories: Personal income, federal sales, and corporate taxes. In SC4, the default tax rate is 9% residential, 9% commercial and 9% industrial. Some accused Cain of copying SC4 for his tax plan.

Abandonment, abandoned due to commute time-  A common issue that seems to happen constantly in SC4 despite one’s best efforts to avoid the issue. The game is unable to find a path for Sims from residential lots where they live to commercial or industrial lots where they work, causing their residences to become abandoned. There are ways to minimize this issue (such as installing NAM for improved commute routing, and mods such as the Less Abandonment Mod and Industry Quadrupler mod, etc) but the issue is very hard to avoid completely and arguably one of the game’s most frustrating issues.

Acronyms / Glossary for in game names, mods, forums. @simmering has put significant effort into his SC4 Dictionary. The SC4 Wiki is also a good place to consult

Adding water not at sea level / Waterfalls-  Typically in the game “sea level” is hard programmed into it. Water is supposed to only appear when you lower the land a certain amount. But using various water puzzle piece mods you can add things like small rivers, canals and waterfalls at different elevations. 

Adding your own songs to the game's track list

Additional Building Styles- Building on the experiments of the CoriBoom team, a DLL mod was created to allow for additional building styles beyond the 4 Maxis created. But the community was unable to find a consensus on how to organize a set of community building styles.

Advisor images actually being really creepy

Advisor popups-  Just like in a real city, in SC4 you have seven mayoral advisors who give you advice on different areas to improve your city such as utilities, finance, city planning, etc. Whenever there is an issue in your city, there will be a popup window on the screen alerting you of the issue at hand. This can be very annoying, as this is a relic of the 2000s when things like popup ads were more commonplace and can interrupt gameplay. However there is a way to turn off popups in the game’s settings.

Advisor reactions when things go to shit-  The SC4 advisor avatars are animated, and when something bad happens like a fire or power shortage, the avatars look enraged. It’s very dramatic and funny

Air Purification Plant- An exremely popular download which helps players out with air pollution problems in their city

Aircraft land nose gear first in SC4, a nono for most planes, including every commercial jet I can think of

Airplanes clumping together in region view- Fun visual bug that often occurs in large regions

Airport Tram - A small lot created by @joerg that acts like a full airport in your city. This helps your city with cap relief issues and makes your region look more realistic by reducing the number of airports you have close to one-another. It is also a space saver for players who want to cram as much as they can into their city.

AmbiguousAmphibian's crazy SC4 scenario videos-  Ambiguous Amphibian is a youtuber who does silly challenges in video games, mostly ones from the late 90s and 2000s. He has several videos of challenges done in SimCity 4.

Anduin Valley Revisited- A legendary City Journal by @Darmok

ANT- Additional / Alternative network tool-  this was a network that Maxis created but never completed, with high speculation it was going to be a dirt road. It was left in the game in a locked state, and the NAM team used it as a basis for the RHW.

Anyone could upload to the STEX, but not the LEX- Simtropolis had a open policy where any member in good standing could upload files to the STEX. On SC4D's LEX, members had to submit their files to a committee who reviewed the content to see if it was of sufficient quality to be hosted. These members were known as LEX scrutineers, which was mostly comprised of BSC members. Content that passed was often 'LEX certified', whereas content that failed to pass the review either had to be resubmitted or uploaded on sites like Simtropolis instead.

April Fools news- Such as EA buying Simtropolis in 2004 or the NAM Team in 2013.

April Fools releases-  Over the years, there have been many mods that were released on April 1 as a joke, such as the SC4Undo plugin (which just prompted a popup that said “Happy April Fools” when you tried to use it) to a Disaster Addon Mod (DAM) to expand the types of disasters in the game, all of which were fake. The most famous April Fools Joke is the 3D Camera Mod, which subverted everyone’s expectation by being an actual real mod.

Area 5.1- If you complete enough UDI missions for Dr. Vu, he will reward you with a special airbase called Area 5.1- a spoof of Area 51 as some of the UDI vehicles you get to pilot include a flying saucer.

Arthur Burghardt Expressway- A hilarious modification to some RHW networks created by @Tarkus that removes half of the total lanes on the highway (example a RHW-8S would have 4 lanes, 2 each way), mimicking the 'wide lanes' of the fictional Arthur Burghardt Expressway featured in a Seinfeld episode called The Pothole. It was released as a April Fools spoof, and continues to be updated as additional widths for the RHW mod are released (such as the RHW-12S having 6 lanes, 3 each way)

AVGN Loading Text Mod (18+)- A hallarious, exploitive mod by @Terring that adds additional text when loading cities from region view. It was inspired by the Angry Video Game Nerd's review of SimCity SNES.

Balloon Man

BAT4MAX- Gamma corrections in the alpha channel

BATs using stolen models-  Early on in SC4’s history, it was not uncommon for some modders to use models from other modders’ BATs without permission and upload them as a new file to download. Stealing other BATers’ models is frowned upon, and many of these lots have been removed from sites like Simtropolis to prevent stealing.

BATs with broken / overpowered stats-  Since BATers can make the stats of a lot whatever they want, it’s possible for them to release a lot with super overpowered stats that impact the game in unpredictable ways.

BATting School

Best City Journal- Arguably the most iconic Trixie award, going to the most prominent City Journal of the year.

Best of STEX discs-  One or more of the STEX discs are given out to people as a small incentive for donating money to Simtropolis. Each disc contains a curated collection of mods from of the STEX from a specific time period, with a small number of mods which were exclusive to the discs. These BATs are made by lots of well known/prolific creators like @JBSimio, @mattb325, @Jasoncw, etc. A similar disc was offered from SC4D for supporting the site for a time.

Beta / cut official content-  There is a lot of content that was in the game in beta copies that never made it to the final release. One example is how the City Hall was supposed to have three stages of growth, but it was replaced with a singular building. There are also other models and features that were never made available in the final release.

Big Dig-  This is a mod created by @blahdy (Later enhanced by @Tyberius06) to make underground roads and highways utilizing the game’s subway network. It is named after the “Big Dig”, a major civic works project in Boston that turned a downtown elevated freeway into an underground one. It was the basis to form the failed @freewayexperts splinter group from NAM team and it still has some unresolved issues.

Black Hole Bug- When your building / lot has no base texture, usually due to a missing plugin / dependency file. The ground often appears black or transparent. 

Blank RCI ploppables

Blow Your Socks Off NAM teasers- These were hype posts by the @NAM Team that showcased content nearing the end of development prior to a new release of the mod. It often meant that a new version of the NAM was coming soon (@Tarkus often using the word 'imminent') as the features displayed in images appeared complete and fully functional. It was first called BYSOI (Blow Your Socks Off Interchange) by @Ryan B as a way to introduce the MIS network- a ramp component essential to making realistic interchanges with the RHW mod.

Bottleneck- Term to describe when a wide road / highway or transit network terminates, causing your sims to continue their journey on lower capacity routes. This leads to congestion where the narrowing / merger occurs, and can cause spillover effects creating a domino effect of congestion in your city. 

Bonus landmarks, hosted on the official SimCity 4 website-  Maxis/EA created several bonus buildings that were not released in the main game, but were available for download on their website. This includes both real-life landmarks (like the Seoul City Hall and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago) and fictitious ones (like Shorty Burger and Lucky’s Hang Ten). Over the years the official SimCity website was updated and the official download links were lost. However, the files have been preserved and can be downloaded today from Simtropolis.

Breaking the grid-  SC4 has a fixed camera view and only allows zones to face in cardinal directions, even on diagonal streets. As a result the game is heavily based around grid city designs. Breaking the grid is a strategy to circumvent the game’s grid-based core to make more meandering street designs. This is desirable from a realism standpoint as there are lots of places that don’t have gridded streets (such as old European cities, post-WWII US Suburbs, etc.). Some BATers, like @EffTheGrid, specialize in this sort of grid-breaking content.

Bridge Building being super annoying. Can't place two bridges together, can't build diagonal bridges (without a hack)

Bridge too low for ferries (Despite being really high)-  When building bridges, there is an indicator that tells you if ferry boats can go underneath or not. However, you have to elevate your bridges very high to make them compatible with ferries, which makes bridge building frustrating.

Brown boxes / Present boxes showing instead of buildings that grow / plop when you don't have all the dependencies installed. A mod exists to eliminate them, but you'll no longer have a visual queue to tell you are missing files to correct the problem(s)

BRT for the NAM- Since the version 32, the NAM includes the possibility to build Bus Rapid Transit networks using an adaptation of the RHW which also included stations.

BSC becoming elitist / controlling, leading to their downfall- The SC4D LEX had a 'scrutinizing' team mostly consisting of BSC members. They went through files with an overly fine-toothed comb that they burnt themselves out and stopped making their own content as a result. Since the lack of fully-certified non-BSC uploaders on the LEX was virtually nil, that entire content ecosystem was almost entirely dependent on the BSC assembly line running full steam ahead. When it started grinding to a halt, it irreparably reversed the balance of power between SC4D and ST in ST's favor, leading to the downfall of the BSC team

BSC Cleanitol-  A tool for removing nonessential filies from your SC4 Plugins folder. A new version of the tool was released in December 2023 with expanded functionality. Cleanitol is a popular tool that improves game performance.

Bugs caused by playing SimCity 4 at its minimum specified RAM (512MB)

Building a City From Scratch- Popular YouTube series by @Haljackey, a prominent SC4 player.

Bullet Train Mod (BTM) / Shinkansen- The monorail network is rarely used by players, becoming more of a novelty network than an efficient form of mass transit. The latter is very much true, as Maxis developers gave it an insane base speed of 225km/h. This is around the minimum threshold for high speed rail (depending on which source you consult) and close to the operating speed of the 0-Series Shinkansen (bullet) trains. This mod completely replaces the appearance of the monorail to look like a elevated bullet train line, and spawned associated projects including the HSRP and HRW.

Can't find it? Ask here!- All-encompassing thread where members will ask were to find certain items from the game- giving whatever screenshots / clues they can to help others assist. Since the thread is so frequently visited, what is asked for is almost always found. If it can't be found, due to the item no longer being hosted on a site that no longer works, BUT someone else still has it on their own computer, STEX moderators will often work with that member to upload the file in good faith, providing as much information as possible to credit the original creator(s). 

Cannot place over occupied tiles- But there's nothing there???

Capitalsimcity- A Spanish-language city-builder fan site that is still active to this day. It has several BATs that are only available on this site.

Car-free cities- A method of building your city without road networks, forcing your sims to walk or take transit to work. Industrial zones are not possible in these cities, as they require a road network for freight trucks to reach freight rail stations, seaports or the edge of the city tile.

CDs being so scratched your PC wouldn't read it, necessitating multiple purchases of the game.

CDs no longer working-  Due to the advancement of technology, CDs from the game’s release do not work on modern hardware (plus many modern computers don’t even have CD drives). Most modern players use digital copies of the game to play.

Census Repository- A building that you can plop that gives you expanded city statistics, as well as some regional stats

Cheat Code History - It appears that SC4 was intended to remember used cheat codes in the city save file, similar to how SC3K tracks the number of cheat codes the player uses. A Maxis typo broke that functionality.

Christmas lights on Simtropolis site, breakable by hovering the mouse cursor over them. Spawned an intense competition in 2024 for who could break the most bulbs, complete with it's own story line and lore

Cityplannerplays- A spinoff from the urbanist Youtube channel City Beautiful, who is a real-life city planner. This showcases how to build cities realistically, with an emphasis on pedestrian and transit networks over car infrastructure.

Cities Skylines release- The bar was set low for a new entry in the city building genre after SimCity (2013)'s disastrous release. Cities Skylines filled this void, but many still consider SimCity 4 the best city simulator (still true after Cities Skylines 2 release). Paradox sought to seek notable SimCity 4 players and modders to help test the game, and incentivized them to continue playing. A fresh, modern game in the genre attracted many SimCity 4 players to it and the community experienced its single biggest drop in activity to date. While some have returned to SimCity 4 after finding Skylines somewhat repetitive and boring, the scar left on the SimCity 4 community is permanent, with most Skylines players and modders using sites like Steam, Reddit & Patreon to share their creations rather than forums like Simtropolis.

City Journal-  A visual documentation of SimCity 4 players' endeavors in the game.

City Journal Hall of Fame 

City Journal pages vs forums-  Originally this was just a section of the Simtropolis forums. But City Journals later became their own section of the Simtropolis website. There was (and still is to a certain extent) competition between the two formats.

City Journal unions / alliances / nations-  A collaboration where people use SC4 images to narrate an imaginary nation and conduct diplomatic role play. An example is the Alliance of Independent National (AIN), one of the first CJ unions. As time went by, City Journal Unions went out of fashion and only a few active unions remain

City Journals with Photobucket hosted images-  Sites like Photobucket and Imageshack were some of the more popular image hosting websites. However, over time due to link rot, many of these old images have been lost to time, making these old city journals incomplete. Today, Imgur and Imgbb are the popular image hosting sites. The main reason, more than link rot, was photobucket ending their free hosting service, which most people here used

City Spread means trouble ahead (Advisor note about sprawl being bad)-  This popup annoys people because there isn’t really any issues in the game with building a sprawling city, and it’s actually advised to build out before building up. It's become a prominent message of anti-car culture which aims to curb sprawl.

City states - A trend, especially in city journalism, in which players present / consider their cities as small, independent nations, republics, duchies etc.

Clicking around like a madman- There are stability issues with many of the new networks introduced in the NAM, although they have become much more reliable in recent years. At times the network will fail to properly override- such as a TLA-3 reverting to a road, or a Level 2 RHW-10S showing as a level 0 RHW-2. Sometimes clicking on the network you made close by is enough to force the game to recognize what network it should be, but clicking on the problem spot will not. You will often need to click all over the place to see if one specific tile will override the network correctly.

CMLs (Custom Member Labels) on a lot of members on Simtropolis and SC4Devotion

Compatibility glitches With a certain generation of nVidia GPUs

Constantly posting on City Journals On the forum to put them on top of others

CoriBoom Team saving Simtropolis-  @CorinaMarie and @Cyclone Boom are two prominent Simtropolis members who have a joint modding team called CoriBoom, and are currently site admins. Without them stepping in to take over, Simtropolis would have probably went offline like so many other SC4 fan sites have over the years.

Covid-19 pandemic popularity boom-  During the Coronavirus pandemic, lots of people were stuck at home with nothing to do. A lot of new and returning players turned to SimCity 4, which saw a surge of activity on Simtropolis and other social circles like reddit

CPUcount: 1- Refers to commanding your game to only run with one core to help prevent crashing. Multiple cores were found to not be the problem with CTDs, but rather the multi-threading related to the game's processes.

Crazy traffic crashes / train derailments-  - If you are playing the game and sit still and watch traffic, sometimes you will see crazy automata car crashes at intersections with high traffic usage. This might occur with trains as well, but if you go into U-Drive-It mode, select a train and go as fast as possible, you can create your own crazy train derailment.

CTD hovering a puzzle piece over a TE Lot (fixed)

CTD on Zoom- If a player zooms out too quickly, such as multiple zoom levels using your mouse's scroll wheel, it risks a CTD.

Custom content on STEX from banned users

Custom queries (& crashing custom queries)

Cutting funding Results in visuals like potholes, striking workers, criminals, etc

DAMN -  Daely's Advanced Menu Navigator - Used advisor messages to create searchable and hierarchical menus for ploppable lots, but was terribly hard to configure, using an external tool, either the SSPtool or the DAMN manager, to modify .sc4lot files to remove ploppables from their menus and make them appear on the DAMN. @Daeley

DarkNite-  A popular mod by @SimFox that alters the look of night mode in the game. There are a lot of BATs that are designed to work with this mod specifically.

Datpacking-  The process of packing many small mod files into fewer, larger, files, with the main goal of increasing the loading speed of the game. This is optional for Windows and LInux users but is required for Mac users, as their game can only have a certain number of files in the Plugins folder before it crashes

Defunct English language sites - In terms of English-language sites that no longer exist: SimPeg, Working Man Productions (WMP), SimCity 4 Mods (AKA Gizmo's site), CSGforums, SimCityCentral, Simphoni, SimCity Community, SimVision, SimMania, SimCities (the old BLaM-run site), The Planning Pages, SimCity Mild Enthusiasm, City Builders, and TG Columbia.

Demand cap, cap relief- After reaching a certain figure / number, demand for certain types of jobs (such as high wealth commercial office) will plateau and it is difficult to grow new buildings of this type. This is known as 'demand cap' and it is a major annoyance for players. Some buildings, such as airports, can provide cap relief and alllow you to grow more, but it is unrealistic to have an airport in every city tile in a region (even moreso if they're medium or small city tles). Mods exist to raise or outright eliminate cap, but this often leads to way too much demand, which can cause problems of it's own.

Demise of SC4D, rise of SC4E-  SC4Devotion was one of the main English-language SC4 fansites, alongside Simpeg and Simtropolis. In June 2023, the website went offline. The new website, SC4Evermore, and has been slowly uploading files that were hosted on SC4D. Interestingly the new site’s name is very similar to SC4Ever, an old SimCity fan site that closed down over a decade ago.

Dependencies needing Dependencies needing Dependencies, & so on (Inception)

Dependencies? None! A phrase commonly added to items on the STEX where the creator did not use any external dependencies on their file. This was a marketing ploy advertising the ease of downloading since most files on the exchange require several dependencies to work, which was very frustrating to people wanting to download buildings quickly and easily. Other variations include 'this file has no dependencies' or 'no dependencies required'

Dependency-  A file that is required by that Lot for it to appear in the game. Without that dependent file(s), the lot will either appear as a big brown box, or show up with strange or missing props or textures.

Dependency debate- A discussion so heated the thread got locked. It surrounded who was allowed to use / own certain files in their own BATs / mods and what the 'legal' rights were in terms of crediting someone, or directing them to a related file to download a requirement / prerequisite dependency there. This sometimes led to a long string of downloads where if a player wanted to download a new building, they would need to also download related files that also needed other props/dependency files of their own elsewhere, sometimes those needing their own additional dependencies.

Destruction De Saint Orano-  A YouTube video from 2011 by showing the destruction of a city called Saint Orano. Utilizing both SimCity 4 and The Sims 3, the animation is very impressive and looks great to this day.

Diagonal Bridge Enabler (DBE) removing all water- People ignored all the warning text that the DBE removed water, even as the warning was made larger, bolder, redder, more underlined and then bombarded the NAM Team with "where's my water?" questions for at least a couple months straight (one example). Eventually, what stopped it was actually changing the name of the file to "Diagonal Bridge Enabler (Removes Water)".

Digging a 'hole to China' if a puzzle piece isn't placed on flat terrain- Mostly affects fractional-angled RHW puzzle pieces, both regular stretches and ramps. If the defined terrain isn't perfectly flat, there is a risk a sinkhole to the bottom of the lowest allowed elevation in the game will be generated. This is due to the 'ConsLayout' section- which deals with terrain behavior under the vicinity of the piece. The easiest way to fix this is to use the level terrain tool which will eventually raise the sinkhole back to your elevation, and then continuing to use it to flatten the area you want the pieces to be. Using a restrictive slope mod can also help prevent the issue, as the variation in terrain is less per tile, but it isn't guaranteed to fix the problem.

Dirk / Dirktator Having to personally upload mods larger than 10MB. This included every new NAM version which had to be coordinated with his availability @Dirktator

Disappearing cars- Road traffic in SimCity 4 randomly seems to spawn and despawn, which makes it difficult for players to follow vehicles or create large traffic jams. This was done as a way to reduce the demand the game had on your computer, as SimCity 4's minimum system requirements were quite high at release. This 'bug' continues to this day, with no solution found. Some mods to exist to help extend the time traffic is on the road, and the NAM also improves this somewhat. Traffic generators can also be plopped to generate additional congestion, but this automata is random and unpathed.

Disasters-  In the game you can inflict a number of different disasters upon your city. Some are realistic, like earthquakes and tornadoes, whereas others are more fantastical, such as UFO invasions and automotive dinosaur rampages.

DollyLlama-  Cheat code that turns the in-game advisors’ avatars into llamas.

Double Network Override

Dr Vu-  A madman / evil genius / supervillain introduced in the Rush Hour expansion. He is the subject of various “evil” UDI missions that you can do in your city. He is likely based on Dr. Evil- a character from the Austin Powers movie series which was popular at the time of SC4's development. Successfully completing UDI missions for Dr. Vu will unlock certain reward buildings, such as Area 5.1

Dr Vu's breasts- Dr. Vu was created for the Rush Hour expansion, whereas the advisors were created for the base game. For some reason, Dr. Vu was based on a female advisor's persona, and his character model actually contains breasts and other female characteristics.

Dr. Vu fake Twitter / X Account by @PlanetOfHats. He's now on Bluesky!!!

Draw paths-  “Drawpaths” is a cheat code that shows automata paths on transportation networks. This is heavily used for NAM debugging as the team was using inefficient features like UDI mode for pathfinding previously

Drive-ins being built right next to skyscrapers-  Since there are only three levels of zoning, you don’t have a lot of control over what exact buildings get built in your city, leading your city to have weird buildings next to each other.

EA's official version not being properly patched on Origin for about a decade

EA SimCity Exchange Web Browser Plugin - This was installed when visiting the site and allowed Maxis to implement the city download/upload functionality. It was written in C++ using Microsoft's ActiveX technology, and as a result likely only worked on Windows OSes of that era.

EA paying to fly early SC4 modders to San Francisco to learn more about the game code, and mentioning that DLL mods could be made.

Early NAM puzzle pieces

Easter eggs- Snow on Dec 25 being one

Eaton- One of the earliest and most popular custom regions ever made. Players like it due every city tile being large, it's relatively large size compared to the default region, and it's good use of water, flat areas for farms / cities and more rugged landscapes. Many early City Journals used this region and it was interesting to see how different the play styles were when comparing.

Empty highways yet clogged roads-   In the base game, sims prefer to take the shortest route (in number of tiles) instead of the fastest route. The NAM largely fixes this issue.

ErwinNegentig's crazy techno Youtube tutorials @ErwinNegentig

Eternal Commuter Loop-  A glitch in which sims near the city border will go to an adjacent town to look for work, then go from that town to the next town over, etc. until they are traveling in an eternal loop instead of going to work. This is because the game only looks at the current tile being played and not the region as a whole. The glitch can lead to commute time abandonment. One solution is to build more job centers near city borders.

Euro textures Being demanded every time a new road network is created

Executable installers For most mods- In the early days of SC4 modding it was very common for BATs to have executable installers. While it may have made sense at the time, today it is a major nuisance as these take significantly more time to install compared to simply extracting a file to your plugins folder, especially for simple BATs with small file sizes. Most modern BATs don’t have this issue, but downloading old content still presents this frustration.

Exporting A SimCity 4 small tile to make a Sims 2 map-  While there are restrictions as to what exactly can be carried over, it is a clever piece of cross-collaboration between games.

Extra Cheats-  Source code hinting that SC4 may have been planned to release on Dec. 25th, 2003 at some point in its development.

Fireworks on New Years / city founding

Flexfly

Franklin County By Patricius Maximus @Patricius Maximus

Freeland- Term for landfill / extra land in SimCity SNES and a polerific SimCity 3000 modder who convinced others to make their way over to SimCity 4 when the game was released. This list includes prominent members such as @mikeseith, @Vanderaap, @oppie, @Pegasus & others. @fredfree

Freeway Experts- A failed spinoff that attempted to divide the @NAM Team (and ultimately failing to release any of it's own content) @freewayexperts

Fun bugs (see some here)

Fun sound effects when querying specific buildings- Usually things like hearing a doorbell when clicking a residential lot. It can be annoying with some BATs that have custom sounds

Garbage chute pushing your trash off the city tile edge-  A fun classic mod by @Pegasus that creatively utilizes the game’s tile system to create a visual gag.

Giant farm structures that look nothing like real life

Giant wild life-  The scale of the animals in this game is very disproportionate. 

God Mode in Mayor Mode

Golf Course Clubhouse being modeled after SimGolf

Graphical bugs with certain Intel and ATI integrated graphics (Windows XP era)

Haljackey's SimCity 4 Archives- Repository for content that was in development either at the very early stages or not released at all. @Haljackey

Healthare funding? This game is pandering radical left socialism! Healthcare is a public service in SimCity 4 (and all the other SimCity games) just like fire, police, education, etc. Thus there is no way to operate a private healthcare system since if funding is cut, your sims will suffer. This leads to frustration for players who want to have a right wing / libertarian style government, and some argue it puts a political spin / is propaganda for socialism / left wing government.

Helpdesk / Simtropolis Help Squad- A member title given to some members of Simtropolis who were well respected in giving help & advise to newbie players. There was also a separate chatroom known as Helpdesk to aid simple questions that often did not require a new thread of forum post. This still exists on the SC4E Discord server.  Largely replaced on Simtropolis with the Got a Quick SC4 Question?... Ask Here thread.

Hitting Reconcile Edges by mistake and losing half your city- This is a popup that generates once your city is loading from region view when the terrain of your city tile no longer matches that of one of your neighbours. The game can automatically make adjustments for you to help adjust your city edges, but if you have development near the edges they might be lost. Sometimes the area exists far beyond your city boundaries and can cause widespread civic destruction. 

Hole Digging lots

HSRP (High Speed Rail Project)

I-HT jobs bug / fix

Ice cream truck plays the SimCity 2000 theme in UDI mode

Ilive reader- Modding tool @ilive

Immortal lots / Immortal Lot syndrome / Immortality Killer- A modding error with some lots / buildings that make them impossible to demolish. A method to eliminate them was later developed, and it works with moderate, not complete success (better than nothing)

Infinite / Eternal Commuter Loop- Major bug that causes your Sims to commute to an adjacent city, only to have them go to another adjacent city, a third, and a 4th, back to their original city, just to go back to the next city. This usually occurs in the corners of city tiles, where commuters will generate heavy traffic congestion going in a loop juggling as many as 22 or more city tiles. This bug has never been fixed since launch

INFO file - A file the built-in screenshot tool generates, likely as metadata for the now-abandoned EA SimCity exchange. Contains the OS user name, city name, mayor name and various other city statistics encrypted with an XOR cypher (the XOR key is 0x7B).

Inability to install mods and custom content on old MacOS versions for some time

Industrial Thingamajig

Japanese BAT Thread

Japanese BATs and dependencies

Japanese version had Japanese-looking advisors, And they are all male as well

Jenquai Alchmey- Base industrial building named after the Jenquai- a playable human race in the game Earth & Beyond, a popular MMO at the time of SimCity 4's release

JIM / Mr. Jim- Japanese modder. Sadly his site is down but he did operate a twitter/x account and shared creations on a Dropbox account. He specialized in automata mods,  car/truck props, full parking sets, etc

Jupiter and Aurora Mod- Predecessors to the weather mod

LD files - Subfiles within a lot file which are automatically created by the Maxis Lot Editor. LD files contained the basic information for mods that were to be uploaded to the official SimCity 4 Website. They are completely useless today.

Linux compatibility, either via Wine or Proton, the game is totally playable, including mods, using these compatibility layers.

Llama everything- SimCity 4, along with all Maxis games, has a fascination with llamas for some reason, a running gag in the game. Will Wright stated Llama won a company-wide vote for Maxis' corporate mascot. The Tourist Trap reward building is shaped like a Llama. Even the game's medium speed, between Turtle and Cheetah, is called Llama. It continues on fan sites like Simtropolis, which even has its own custom llama emojis 

Loading text mod (gives you wacky tool tips when loading a city from region view)

Lot Editor lots hosted on the official SimCity 4 website

Kane Tiberium- Base industrial building named for Kane, the leader of the Brotherhood of NOD in the Command & Conquer games. Tiberium is the main resource needed for building a base and army

KREW (Klyte's Region Exporter as Webpage)- Exports your region as a HTML format webpage and includes lots of stats and can even render region transport view. It's one of the few ways to export large regions as they often crash in SC4Mapper, even with the 4GB patch applied to mapper's EXE. One such example of the webpage can be found here (horizontal scrolling is needed) @Klyte45

Mac users constantly complaining nothing works

MacOS Rep 0 bug - A bug that occurs on transit lots that uniquely affects Mac users - Windows and Linux users are unaffected.

Mayor's Diary (MD) & the hall of fame- Mayor's Diaries (MD) were SC4D's equivalent to the City Journals of Simtropolis. While many showcases were posted on both sites, there were some exclusives- many of which can be found on their hall of fame. Unlike City Journals, MDs were separated into different subfourms based on how many replies they had. There was recently published, Best Sellers and Classics. Inactive subsections were also created for MDs that had not had new activity from the creator after a certain amount of time.

Member of the Month / Employee of the Month- An award given out every month to a member of Simtropolis as well as a staff member for something noteworthy they did on the site or in the SimCity 4 community, usually happening in the previous month. Members could suggest nominations by sending a message to the @MOTM_inbox which was reviewed by a select committee before ultimately deciding who would receive the award. It would be added to the user's avatar, similar to Trixie awards. This effort was lead by @Mikeaut1.

Memes (see some here)

MMLs - Menu Management Lots - A special kind of lot, that while placed in the city, will reveal other lots in the menu. These were created in an attempt to limit the number of items that would show up in menus and thus the amount of scrolling. They were largely obsoleted with the invention of the submenus dll.

Menu scrolling - If you add lots of custom content, the menus in game get longer and longer, meaning lots of scrolling to find what you want. You had better have a good mouse wheel if you liked to add lots of mods.

Modding squads / teams

Modpacks / Modpack requests- Large folders of plugins (even even regions / cities) have been constantly requested by players since the game's inception. Due to the community rules & the amount of bandwidth this takes, it has never been supported on any site. Players resort to going to more 'dark' areas of the internet if they still want to find them, or find torrents. Issue is these downloads may contain a lot of incomplete / conflicting / obsolete files and have no support. In recent years, community-supported modpacks have finally been released to help group like-content together, making it a easier one-stop-shop vs downloading lots separately and as well as all their associated dependencies. 

Money tree- An exremely popular download which helps players out with financial problems they have running their city 

Monorail generates air pollution- Despite being electric. This is frustrating for players who might be using the monorail as a way to reduce air pollution in their cities. 

Moolah Cheat- Gives you almost infinite finances for one one mayor to do whatever they want in their city

Multi Highways- A discovery by @lakeyboy that basically splits a MHW in two by dragging rail through one of it's two tiles. A similar setup was discovered for the RHW by @Haljackey when these configurations were thought to be impossible (before starter pieces were created)

Multiplayer attempts - Early efforts towards setting up multiplayer regions involved syncing plugin files and regions over Dropbox.

Must place partial land, partial water not often working

MySims mode- Importing your characters from The Sims to live and work in your city

NAM 17- The only version hosted on a site not under control by the @NAM Team, being downloadable from Capitalsimcity due to a Spanish translation agreement

NAM 20-  The first 19 NAM releases came out in an 18 month span. The gap from NAM 19 to NAM 20 was 15 months.This was due to a lot of the founding NAMites going into retirement or becoming less active, leaving large voids that the team had trouble filling.

NAM 31 release date fiasco- This was the first (and likely only) time the NAM Team released a new version of the NAM on a date that was known to the public. The hype was palpable, with many players eager to play on the day it was released and some even moving their real life schedules to make time for it. Internally it was a disaster for the team, as issues found during development slowed down progress, with many team members experiencing burnout and felt the pressure applied. While it did launch on schedule, it did not contain all the features intended and what new content existed had a lot of bugs and other unresolved issues. Two patches for this version came out not long after, and NAM 32 was released rather quickly to get the sour taste to go away. It was quite a while before the next full version was released. NAM Team policy changed back to 'when it's ready', ensuring a higher quality product for later releases.

NAM 36 holdouts- The last 'monolithic' version of the NAM with an installer that contained items that have since been separated like the BTM. Last version that did not require the 4GB patch. Some players refuse to update their version due to installation complexities, despite the fact that a ton of additional fixes and new content has been created since, and that the NAM Team will only provide support for current version

NAM 37-  The first version where subsequent updates were delivered faster than their predecessors. It adopted the so-called agile development.

NAM 48 containing a virus On the ModDB site, team cut ties with hosting the mod there afterward

NAM 50- First version of the NAM to include .dll files

NAM 69- Estimated version number for some long awaited content on the NAM team's back-burner would be released

NAM 420- Estimated version number for some extremely niche features requested over the years to be released

NAM 666- Estimated version number for the really devilish and not currently feasible content

 

NAM DLL- A breakthrough in transportation network modding, allowing the NAM Team to correct the functionality of transportation networks such as RHW, native diagonal draggable streets, or enabling new tunnels,  as well as introducing new keyboard shortcuts, & reducing the mod's code overhead. Previously impossible configurations are now a reality with this newly-unlocked functionality.

 

NAMdoc / NAM website

 

NAM Lite- Compromise version for those who want the core game fixes only. No 'networks' to 'add on'

NAM release hype- Whenever a new version of the NAM released, there is celebration in the SimCity 4 community, with the news often spreading to other gaming sites and the media. Many players are eager to show their creations with the newly added content or how they incorporated / retrofitted them into their cities. A surge of activity floods social media, the forums and chat rooms which continue to prove SimCity 4 is still relevant / has gas in the tank despite it's age and newer competitors on the scene. @NAM Team

NDEX mods @NDEX

Neighbour deals- Exploiting them by having a super polluted city handling your garbage, power, dirty industry, etc

Nested dependencies - Dependencies that have dependencies that have dependencies. Also referred to 'cascading dependencies'. Many a player's nightmare.

News ticker

Obscenely large regions

Obsolete guides and broken images, along with 404ing links

Ocean Quigley's Blog - Ocean Quigley was an artist at Maxis who played a significant role in the development of SimCity 4. His blog contains early SC4 concepts and renders.

Of Special Interest This Month (OSITM)- a showcase of select Mayor's Diaries (MD) on SC4Devotion that rotated from month to month. It was created by a select committee to feature new and/or upcoming MDs to put them in the spotlight in order to showcase the creator's creativity to a broader audience. 

Official EA lot and BAT exchange

Official EA site using screenshots containing 3rd party content / plugins / mods

Oldshoes- His TruFax series of image guides helped many 4chan members start their first realistic looking cities. 

One more lane / track bro- Catchphrase to describe the concept of Induced Demand, where if you build it, they will come. Expanding the capacity of a network might cause a drop in congestion for a time, but the extra capacity will eventually be used up making the problem even worse than before. Road widening / transit line expansions are often very costly and disruptive and are seen as a waste of time and money if they don't fully fix the problem. 

Open SC4 - An open source initiative to re-implement SimCity 4 from the ground up in the Godot game engine. Development lasted approximately a year. There have been numerous other independent attempts at re-implementing the game, none of which have made any substantial progress. This is something that everyone would love to have but no one wants to work on.

Open source tools - Many modding tools have been made open source, but some of the most important tools used today are either closed source or have had their source code lost, like PIMX.

Opera House bug / fix

Page flip bug- Issue on the Simtropolis website where threads failed to properly load the next page. Sometimes a member would need to post several times to flip the page. This could artficially increase a member's post count and this, along with double posting, was closely monitored by staff to clamp down on inflated post numbers

Paradox campaigned on buying Simtropolis and SC4D In order to run the Cities Skylines 1 forums

Patreon / paid content being blocked

Paul Pedriana / Pedriana Pharmaceuticals-  Lead Architect and Engineer on SimCity 4- leaking some source code to help the community create DLL mods, and encouraging reverse engineering to recreate the code he couldn't share.

Pegasus Productions @Pegprod @Pegasus

Peridoic Table of Trixie Awards by @Benedict, such as this one from 2011

Phantom Slider Bug- A mod that contains a funding slider in the query (such as a funding bar when querying a police station) improperly. It can cause the department to be defunded causing a halt in city development

PIM-X'd - A term coined by BSC member @xxdita to refer to lots that have been created with the PIMX program, specifically around an effort to make existing lots compatible with CAM. Today, it typically refers to any lot whose stats were generated by PIMX, which is a good way to know if a lot has been properly modded with the correct stats.

Pirating / Illegal downloading / Torrents - The major forums take a strong anti-piracy stance and do not provide support for these versions of the game. For a long period, major torrents were distributed without the EP1 Nightlighting patch, rendering these versions of the game largely incompatible with custom content.

Players asking if their computer made 20+ years after SimCity 4's launch is good enough to run the game 

Players discovering that their computer made 20+ years after SimCity 4's launch effectively isn't good enough to run the game (Chromebooks)

Ploppable Residential Lots - While ploppable commercial and industrial lots were created early on and worked to create jobs in the game, for the longest time residential buildings could not be plopped as they would soon become abandoned due to commute time since the game never saw them as connected to the transportation network. @smf_16's work in modifying save game files led to the Growifier website, where save game files with plopped residential buildings could be converted to working residential buildings before becoming abandoned.  Later, @Null 45 built on this functionality to create the Growify DLL mod to plop residential lots with the BuildingPlop cheat that could be further growified.  Finally, @Kel9509 discovered how to create ploppable residential lots (to be growified) outside of the BuildingPlop cheat selectable in the menus, and also worked to create the functionality in PIM-X (with help from @memo and @Ulisse Wolf).   

Ploppsville- Creating a city by only plopping buildings and other downloaded content. No zoning. Very time consuming but gives you full control of what you want your city to look like

Plugin folder confusion- My documents? C/program files? Players would often install downloads into the incorrect directory and then complain nothing works

Plugin pack warning- Popup generated when loading a city that failed to find specific plugins, spewing gibberish and giving the player no clue what plugin is missing. Example being Plugin Pack 0xeeb43b9. The warning states: "Warning: The city you are loading refers to the following plugin packs which aren't available on your machine. You can continue the game in the absence of those packs, but some of the graphics and other information may be incorrect."

Plugin sharing- An extremely sensitive, intense discussion started by @Haljackey regarding the ownership of custom content that was created or downloaded and who should own the rights to share what to curb the increasing use of 'illegal' plugin sharing and torrents. After years of heated debates from one side trying to protect the established system and those who wanted progressive change to make things more free, open & available, the latter won after staff finally agreed to ease some rules and regulations. For content made before policies were changed, good faith is assumed that the creators, many of whom have been inactive for quite some time, would be ok with this and could resent any creative control by sending a reply to the notice of policy change. This later led to the creation of Modpacks, created and fully supported by site staff and content teams, a first for the SimCity 4 community (legally, anyway).  The ability to share plugins has just recently been implemented in sc4pac via a configuration file

Plugins folder size being bigger than the game itself

Police helicopter always over airport- Airports generate a lot of crime and are large lots, with players often putting them in the far corners of their cities. This makes them less connected to the road network which makes it harder for police to cover the area. If you have a deluxe police station (which contains a helicopter), it will often be found hovering over your airport, holding position and shining it's spotlight down even in the daytime.

Praiodan's Bank-   A mod that allowed you to plop a bank building in your cities and use it to lend money from cities across the region

Pre-2006 Simtropolis

Prima official guide

Project57- A NAM Team project regarding restructuring the RealHighway and Network Widening Mod, respectively, in a way that's organized and thorough in supporting stable overrides. The downside is this code required a lot more memory overhead, which is partially responsible for NAM 36 holdouts, the birth NAM Lite, and a drastic increase in loading times for the game with NAM installed.

Progen Production- Base industrial building named after the Progen- a playable human race in the game Earth & Beyond, a popular MMO at the time of SimCity 4's release

Project ZIP - An initiative largely started and spearheaded by @Tyberius06 to remove exe installers from downloads and replace them with standard zip files.

Prop Pox (Fixed)- An issue many players run into when they have too many plugins installed, but can be caused by other reasons as well. The symptoms include props failing to load on many lots and networks, which includes the little details like flower pots, light poles & benches. This makes your city look bland and dull. Sometimes it may only affect a section of your city, but it might become worse with subsequent saves and loads over time. Like some other major bugs, many thought this was something that could never be fixed, but a solution was found that mostly corrects this problem, and even 'heals' cities that suffered from it before the fix was made.

Prop / building family exemplar regulation and management

Puzzle Piece

Puzzle piece mayhem for RHW (pre-flex piece era)

r/simcity4 (top submissions)

Radical Ordinance Mod

Rage Face region

Rain Tool

Rare advisor messages

Rare song- Primordial Dream (God Mode)- Usually played only when a city is obliterated and returning to region view, or selected manually in the track list

Rarely seen animations- Cars falling when you demo a bridge, zombies at the graveyard, graffiti being made, etc

Read the readme - A running gag by many content producers to try and encourage users to consult the readme files they create with their files before they complain on a public forum for support, often about things that are addressed in the readme. See also:  and .

Recycling centres generate air pollution- The whole point of a recycling centre is to reduce the pollution generated with garbage. While not as bad as the incinerator, it is an annoying quirk players have with the game.

Rednecking- Creating a solution to a problem your city has in a way that is quick, not aesthetically pleasing & often overkill. It may not look the nicest, but it will fix it just like how rednecks stereotypically use items like duct tape and chewing gum to fix things instead of repairing them properly. These fixes can be temporary solutions and cleaned up in the future.

Region Census

Reticulating splines- One of the loading messages, callback to the message in SimCity 2000 that was audible when loading a city in that game

RHW Interchange Guide- An entire section of SC4D split up into separate entries created by @Haljackey showing how to create different interchange setups with the RHW. They ranged from very basic junctions with a minor road to large, complicated freeway-to-freeway designs. Nearly all of these guides are heavily outdated or outright obsolete due to advances in subsequent NAM releases (such as the release of 7.5m overpasses and flex pieces), and a lot of images are no longer available as they were hosted on sites like imageshack and photobucket

RHW Originally stood for Rural HighWay, as the initial releases were catered to have a more realistic-looking highway in rural environments. Two lanes each way and the ability to separate the directions with a grassy median were key goals of the project. As the mod grew in size, scope & complexity, it rebranded to RealHighway as it could now be used as a realistic replacement for the MHW in urban environments as well.

RHW Side-by-side drag method (initial versions which didn't have starter pieces)

RIMP 3.0 never being released (large airport pack hyped for years)

Roads rule but streets becoming endangered (Advisor message)

Rob's Guide to SimCity 4

RTFM - A less polite version to tell someone to read the manual.

RTMT (Road Top Mass Transit)- Bus stops and subway station entrances could now be placed right on your roads, rather than needing a separate tile to the side to plop them.

RUL / RUL2 file

Run for Senator (AKA Losing the game due to poor mayor rating, 100k+ Simoleans in debt, etc)

Sandbox- Gaming term for freedom and creativity. In SimCity 4's case, it applies to mods giving you infinite simoleons and perfect mayor rating, allowing one to express full creative freedom without the risk of losing the game or running short on funds.

Savegame

SC4 standing for Soul Calibur 4- When you search for the accronym SC4, the first gaming result is for Soul Calibur 4 instead of SimCity 4.

SC4 still the GOAT city simulator despite Skylines 1 and 2 releasing

SC4 stories making the news

SC4 Wiki

SC4's surge post-SimCity (2013)- Lots of new / returning users after that game flopped in 2013

SC4D Podcast- This was a podcast that came out every few weeks, usually hosted by @patfirefghtr & @threestooges along with associated cohosts. The podcast often had guests from the community on to give updates on what they were working on- usually new mods, BATs or CJs. Players might also open up and talk about where they live, what they do for a living, what other past-times they enjoy, etc.

SC4D reputation system- Unlike the reputation system on Simtropolis, reputation / karma could only be given by staff and select members on SC4D, making each 'point' more noteworthy. Regular members could request to award points to someone by messaging a moderator and giving a reason why. If agreed, they would receive it. Originally, it was possible for regular members to give out karma points, but that ability got shut down fairly early on.

SC4D subscriber system- A custom avatar given to members on SC4Devotion who donated a certain amount of money to the site, usually monthly. It created a bit of a paywall where only subscribers had access to certain content / areas of the site, leading to some disputes regarding site functionality between user levels

Sc4ever.com- Defunct fan-site now absorbed by Simtropolis

SC4Fix & other major game fixes

SC4Mapper

SC4pac

SC4 Picture Competition- One of the most active threads on SC4D. Two players would submit screenshots and members would vote to see which of them they liked the best. Photoshop was allowed. Tournaments and spinoffs were spawned from this thread as well. 

SC4 Terraformer

Schulmania- A popular City Journal by @Schulmanator that holds the record for the most views and replies

Scrabblebox-  Contains the notes that @paeng made for the forum attachments he had over at the now defunct SimPeg website

Submenus

Sculpting Columbia River By jeronij @jeronij

Screen resolution, Line glitch on region view (fixed now)

Seasonal MMP flora Causing CTD

Several modders being under a Non-disclosure agreement (NDA) With EA specifically for the purpose of furthering file modifications

Short runways- Ex the fire department landing strip being absurdly short for water bombers

Show Us What You're Working On- A thread created by @Haljackey inspired by Show Us Your Current Projects on SC4D. For many years, especially during the slump of SC4 activity following the debut of Cities: Skylines, this thread became the only place where many members would post their updates, barely touching the topic-specific showcase threads. It turned the thread into a one stop shop, making other 'show us your' threads a ghost town. Why bother posting the screenshots on the dedicated topic where 'no one' would notice, as opposed to publishing them where everyone's guaranteed to be present? This required an overhaul of the site, which removed the pinned status of the general showcase thread and started marketing the other threads to distribute the activity more evenly across the site.

Shut Up Advisors-  A somewhat controversial mod that turns off advisor popup notifications. Not really necessary since you can just turn this off in the game settings.

SimCity China, that website where downloading was an absolute odyssey.

SimCity 3000, SimCity 4, The Sims 2 and Spore use the same game engine called Gonzo-Rizzo - This framework was presumably named after the two muppets of the same name.

SimCity 4's Longevity- Despite coming out in 2003, SimCity 4 continues to be relevant in the gaming world, proving that there has yet to be a true successor. It often still makes headlines about breakthroughs and explaining why so many continue to enjoy a game over two decades old and lacking many of the features more modern games have.

SimCity 4 TV Commercial (& teaser with the flying cow in the tornado)

SimCity 4 vending machine In one of The Sims expansions

SimCity Central

SimCity 4 Community- Refers to the entire online presence of SimCity 4 content, discussions and creations. Since SimCity 4 is a offline single player game and was released at a time the internet was still relatively new (predates Steam, Facebook & Youtube, for example), the creation of online forum community sites like Simtropolis allowed players who had a common interest in the game collaborate, share creations, discuss the game & led to the modern state of the game's online presence.

SimCity 4 lore list- This counts, right ? It's been mostly led by @Haljackey but I've been harassing various members to aid me with this task. Big thanks to all who have helped in some way! 

SimCity Polska - A now defunct Polish language forum. Most of it's content has been preserved and re hosted on the STEX

SimCity4 has a realistic simulation of water resources But they are incomplete because they were supposed to come out in the Nature DLC that never came out

SimCity4 has the LUA module That allows you to define certain gameplay behaviors so you can create complex mods like CAM and AMPS that increase the realism of gameplay as well as the potential to create new tutorials

SimCity4 has working incinerator properties But for some reason a generator of the incinerator exemplar was not created

SimCity4 is used as a tool to generate The Sims 2 cities, and you can import Sims from The Sims 1 and have them live in your city.

SimCityBrazil

SimLabs

Simlympics- The Olympic games in SimCity 4. Sometimes a City Journal would host the games, or multiple CJs would host different venues. Large stadium districts would be created in various cities to host the games, for example.

SimMars- A major fan project started not long after SimCity 4 released to give it a 'out of this world' look and feel, like you were working on a city on another planet with a more futuristic setting.

SimMars / Memories of the Colonists, the sci-fi mod that attempted to bring a Martian environment to the game. It is a spinof of SimMars developed by @Terring for "terrestrial" environments.

Simpeg- Defunct fansite now absorbed by Simtropolis

Simish language heard by some queries and UDI vehicles such as mayor limo, police car / van / helicopter, news helicopter, etc

Sims have no life / Sims are Workaholics- In the Rush Hour expansion / Deluxe Edition, the vast majority of your sims commute from home to work and back, but don't do anything else in your city. This leads to congestion on roads and transit lines that connect residential areas to commercial / industrial areas, but little to no use on roads that connect to other areas of your city like parks, recreational facilities, attractions, etc.

SimTarkus Blog- A opinion piece regarding various on-goings in the SimCity 4 community by @Tarkus, a prominent member that just about every SC4 player knows about. Some of his entries, such as the one about Origin selling an incorrectly patched version of the game with no way to legally fix, made headlines in the media.

Simtrop- Slang for Simtropolis. Easier to type and readers understand what it is referring to.

Simtropolis Help Squad- A group led by Cheese89 / Kevin @Kevin which aimed to help new members out with basic questions about the game. It was also a seperate chat room.

Simtropolis Omnibus- A early resporitory for turorials, guides, definitions and player support. This has mostly been subplanted by wikis and video format guides these days.

Simtropolis reputation system

Simtropolis Social Lobby (chat room before Discord)

Simtropolis vs SC4D Rivalry- Simtropolis is the largest and most active website in the SimCity 4 community, with a focus on more casual city building topics. SC4D came along later and intended to focus on 'hardcore' SC4 content and discussions only. Many community members did not like the contrast between the two sites and often took a 'side', supporting one site over the other and becoming less active or completely inactive on the site they did not support. This created a rift in the SimCity 4 community, with users often having to go to two sites to find content and discussions of interest to them. It led to a lot of confusion as to where to find what, and there was not a lot of cooperation between the two sites. As the SC4 community shrunk in size over time- having two sites seemed excessive (although important from redundancy standpoints). SC4D eventually collapsed due to some controversial management decisions by the webmaster, and an effort to save the site was undertaken and eventually became SC4E. 

SimVision- Was a small site owned by @BarbulaM1, complete with it's own exchange- called the SVEX

Sketchup -> GMAX pipeline

Slopes so steep train tracks are pretty much roller coaster tracks

Solid State Drives (SSD)- The single major hardware improvement that keeps heavily modded SimCity 4 playable, by speeding up the loading process of game assets into the computer's RAM

SOMY- Legendary Japanese modder and BATter. His site is still up, and many of his creations have been hosted on the STEX

SPAM- Make your agricultural zones actually decent looking

Speed Limits- Each network in the game has a set speed limit sims travel at. For example car traffic travels at 30km/h on streets, 50km/h on roads & avenues, 75km/h on one-way roads & 150km/h on highways (MHW & RHW). Transit networks include subway at 105km/h, elevated rail / GLR at 115km/h, rail at 140km/h & monorail at 225km/h. The absurd speed of monorails is what promoted the creation of the BTM reskin, and led to the HSRP and HRW. 

Spending a full day manually downloading files & dependencies- It is an extremely tedious task to download custom content for SimCity 4, however this has made progress in recent years. The amount of time it would take a competent player to download and install enough content to have their cities look vastly different from the vanilla tile set is absurd compared to other games. This is a major pain point for players, especially those who are trying to get into custom content for the first time. Even veteran users need to take time every now and then to keep up as what they have downloaded may be outdated or obsolete, requiring replacements (and often manual removals).

SSPTool

Start-up Time and Loading Optimization DLL- Software improvement that reduces the time it takes to load components, significantly reducing the time it takes to load the game and cities from region view

Steam forum topics are mostly about getting the highest population or the game crashing

STEX Custodian @STEX Custodian

STEX Features @STEX Features

Strictoaster's gameplay videos @Strictoaster

Stupid street grids when zoning- When laying out zones, streets automatically generate when dragging out a area. These streets are often terribly laid out, causing many players to rework their zones, or zone one item at a time, to mitigate this. The streets generated get insanely wacky in diagonal areas, making it almost impossible to quickly zone these and have them look right.

Super Demand Mod

Super Demand Ordinance

Supergrid- Pressing G will temporarily create a 2x2 grid, making zones appear 4x larger

Taking 45 minutes to download 15mb patches off the official SC4 website

Terrain too steep- A common annoyance when trying to build a road or plop a building on a hill that is too steep for the game to resolve on it's own. You'll have to build it somewhere else, or use a tool like level terrain to reduce the slope issue

The Chief

The developers abandoned doing realistically scaled parking For car-centric buildings because they realized just how obscene the amount of parking was. This fact is commonly shared in anti-car / pro-transit advocacy groups demonstrating just how space-consuming car culture is on cities.

The Draggable Revolution (ex drag GLR, no need to plop every time)

The drive-in theatre Plays a film showing flying saucers making crop circles from the SimCity 3000 intro

The game's camera using an axonometric, trimetric projection, and the artists annoying Paul Pedriana by calling it isometric.

The Greater Terran Region- A notable City Journal by @Haljackey

The eternal battle of grid (planned) vs organic growth

The hype & then disappointment that was SimCity Societies, then Cities XL, then SimCity (2013)

The OST and remixes

The Planning Pages (TPP)-  A site that was run by @zane900 and @sixers33, which faded in and out of existence multiple times in the mid-2000s. Eventually merged with SimVision

The Ring of Fire- A 'mega region' created by mashing up several regions together. It requires a powerful PC to render and a patched SC4 mapper / terraformer. It is the most popular large region (over 100km²) downloaded. 

The Sims maid robot, Servo, Is one of the disasters you can trigger in the game. It a giant sized version, and destroys your city by walking around and shooting dirty dishes it was tasked to clean.

Three Rivers Region / 3RR- a City Journal created by @dedgren that later evolved into a greater project.  It was a planned collaborative effort, but didn't really get far due to multiplayer limitations with the game. It also somewhat morphed into being a custom content creation effort, with the various BATs and Mods developed specifically for 3RR.

Top 10 weekly CJs By Benedict. One was also made for the specific CJ section @Benedict

Toutsimcities

Toxic waste dump

Traffic generators- A lot plopped next to a road network that would spawn automata, making roads look far busier than the game displays on their own. This was 'dumb' traffic, with no real destination programmed so they just drove around town, taking random turns until they disappeared. For multi-tile networks, such as wide RHWs and NWM networks, automata created from traffic generators would often weave dangerously between lanes- an unrealistic but humorous glitch. Traffic generators usually just spawned cars, but specific lots were created to spawn freight trucks, freight trains, etc.

Traffic simulator being garbage - need NAM to fix. 

Transfer money between cities

True Earth by Korver @korver

Trixies

Tunnel building being super annoying- Building tunnels will often never work the way you want. Sometimes one will form while dragging a road through bumpy terrain, but not really bumpy enough in one's mind for tunnels. At other points when you want a tunnel, the game will instead dig a massive trench through the hill- looking very unrealistic or give you the 'terrain too steep' message.

Type 21 / T21 Retaining walls for elevated NAM networks, highway pieces, etc that were showcased plenty of times, but sadly never released. Some plops were made that cover the area(s) such as this one, but they weren't based on the models themselves.

Tyle 21 Exemplar / model-  used to add props rendered in BAT (isometric) to networks, such as traffic lights and lamp posts.

U-Drive It' / UDI mode, Missions, special vehicle abilities (money from Mayor limo, police siren, etc)

UDI tank- Mayor destroying their own city

UDI videos / City / Region driving tours

Unreleased expansion packs- Maxis was apparently working on 2, possibly 3 expansion packs for SimCity 4, but only 1- Rush Hour, was ever released. Speculation is that one of these packs would expand more rural / natural features in the game, containing items like a dirt road (which was a unfinished network in the game's code)

Urban Walrus Award- Similar to the Trixie awards on Simtropolis, but handed out on the now defunct CSGdesign website

Value of Simoleons compared to US Dollar

Victivas (ancient lore)

Vinnie- Cheat in SimCity 3000 where you 'call cousin Vinnie' to get extra Simoleans for accepting a shady ordinance. There are some UDI missions in SimCity 4 that surround Vinnie as well.

Wall of fog- fun glitch in region view that usally happens when the game has been left running for an extended period of time

Wanting to become a urban planner / civil engineer / politician After playing

Water skiing mini game (via Flash)

Weaknesspays cheat- Cheat code you can spam copy and paste to give you 1,000 simoleans. It was one of the only ways to get sufficient cash in the game's early days until other financial aid downloads and extra cheats came onto the scene

Weather Mod

Wealthing- Refers to the appearance of road networks depending on what kind of development is on it. A vast majority of low wealth buildings will have basic sidewalks and cheap wooden lights for example, but a higher wealth texture could have flower pots, shiny lights and all that jazz. Industrial and airport areas also had their own wealthing appearances.

Wern Insurance / Wrenageddon- A building included in the base game with broken stats, making it grow far more commonly than other commercial buildings. This can make your city covered in repetitive Wern Insurance buildings. A fix exists to correct this so the building grows less commonly, called Go Away Wern.

Will Wright Liking SimMars Mod, but never publicly stated he liked any other mod for the game

Windows Update KB3086255

Winwar Asking you to buy their program after downloading each and every file off the exchanges

WolfZe Controversies-  His BAT work, while much revered,  is no longer available on Simtropolis due to events too spicy to list here.

Y U NO USE SLOPE MOD?- A common catchphrase supposedly started by @MandelSoft critiquing users for their extremely steep / horrendous / unrealistic slopes for their road and rail networks. These messages were often constructive, with the member usually recommending a slope mod or to manually reduce the slope a bit to help smooth things out.

Youdontdeserveit Cheat- unlocks all rewards buildings

Youtube Video series, time lapses, let's plays, showcases, guides/ tutorials, etc

Zone too large- when zoning there is a hard limit in the game's code as to how large a zone can be when dragging it out. Interestingly, the I-AG (agricultural) zone size is much larger than the others

Zots- Symbols that appear over buildings when there is a problem with them including no power, water, or road access. These can be annoying to players, and a cheat exists called 'tastyzots' to get rid of them

ZZZZZ_- Plugins that have to be loaded in last, with a ZZZZZ_ prefix if you don't want the game to break.

---

Lore-worthy Members:

6underground @6underground

A Nonny Moose-  A prolific member of Simtropolis who was always kind and eager to help others with their SimCity 4 questions. He passed away in 2016, and many remember him fondly and miss him dearly. @A Nonny Moose

Andreas Roth- Longtime BSC and NAM Team member @Andreas Roth

APTX- Japanese modder @APTX

Art128 @art128

B22rian- Founder and leader of the Simtropolis Help desk, a channel in the chat room to separate basic SC4 questions way from the social lobby's conversations, which can be very non-SC4 related at times. He also led several tutorial seminars showcasing how to build certain things, or fix common problems in the game. @b22rian

Barroco Hispano @Barroco Hispano

Bat @bat

Beebs- Early Simtropols member and moderator  @beebs

BarbulaM1- Veteran Simtropolis moderator, rocked the boat with Simtropolis and SC4D relations @BarbulaM1

Barbyw- Prominent BSC member, SC4D admin @BarbyW 

Bigslark @BigSlark

Bipin- Created many detailed reskins / cosmetic adaptions. NAM Team member @Bipin

Bixel  @bixel

Blade2k5 @blade2k5

BLANKBLANK / Ln X @BLANKBLANK

Blunder- Popular map maker @blunder

Bhmantan / Saus Tatar- Creates SC4 videos with a focus on shorts. @bhmantan

Boggy1- Helped many newbies out with questions @Boggy1

Buddybud- Prolific transit modder, and worked on, but never finished, a reskin of the elevated rail network. He also helped with the creation of HD props @buddybud

Buggi- Had a contact at Maxis who was able to get the extra cheats DLL and its source code released to the public. This mod provides features like the ability to plop any building in the game, and is essential to a lot of SC4 players. @Buggi

Callagrafx @callagrafx

CaptCity @CaptCity

CasperVg- NAM team member, created various lots, starterd early multiplayer attempts  @CasperVg

Catty-cb- Programer, provided technical support to more difficult questions and solutions @catty-cb

Cheese89 / Kevin & Cheese91 @Kevin @cheese91

Cobb32118 @Cobb32118

Cockatoo @Cockatoo

Cogeo- The 'father' of RTMT, pioneering transit modding researcher, created the first stations for GLR as well as multi switch hub stations so sims could transfer from one network to another  @cogeo

Compdude787 @Compdude787

Confused04- Chat room moderator and assisted many newbies in the chat with basic questions in the social lobby. @confused04

CorinaMarie - Simtropolis admin, created mods such as Parks Aura and No Kickout @CorinaMarie

Cougar2004 @Cougar2004

Craig-Abcvs @Craig-Abcvs

CSGdesign- Had a decently active website mostly centred around his Natural Growth play style. @CSGdesign

Cycledogg / cyclepuppy- Created terrain and tree controllers @CycleDogg

Cyclone Boom- Simtropolis admin, created mods for the CoriBoom team such as MySimtropolis @Cyclone Boom

Daeley-  Edited most of the LUA language code for the BSC Team @Daeley

Darkmatter @DarkMatter

Dcmetro34- Transit modder, station creator, helped create articles and seminars to help others learn modding techniques @DCMetro34

Deadwoods- BSC member, popular BATter @deadwoods

Deathtopumpkins- Popular member who dipped his toes into various aspects of the game, including making a CJ called Virgin Sores, making maps, and being on the NAM Team @deathtopumpkins

Dedgren- NAM team member, SC4D admin, had an entire section of SC4D created for him to expand the scope of Three Rivers Region @dedgren

Dexter @Dexter

Dirk / Dirktator- Simtropolis webmaster @Dirktator

DocRoelach- Creator and developer of the SC4Tools collection, Working Man Production (WMP) plugins and associated websites @DocRorlach

Droric- Developed DAMN2NAM @Droric

Drunkapple- Popular map maker  @drunkapple

Duke87- Extremely active poster on Simtropolis at one time. Called the 'mega fan' @Duke87

Durfsurn @Durfsurn

Dusktrooper- Legendary BAT creator @DuskTrooper

Ebina- Member of many teams, helped create the underground rail network and other transit-related projects @ebina

Eggman121 @Eggman121

Ennedi- Created slope mods @Ennedi

Flann @Flann

Frogface @frogface

Fukuda- Japanese member, helped bridge the gap with the Japanese community and provided a lot of useful feedback on various creations @fukuda

Glenni- BATter, wasn't afraid to rock the boat on various topics and go his own way to create new content @Glenni

Godzillaman @Godzillaman

Haljackey- Some crazy dude who made this list . Nah, I'm a NAM Team member; testing, breaking & manipulating content far beyond what anyone thought they'd be used for. I conduct public relations for the team and can be considered an evangelist or influencer (shivers). I also make videos; mostly tutorials & UDI tours, but also some series & things too. I'm probably best known for the creative, realistic & insane interchange designs I make with the RHW- showcasing it and other NAM content used in complicated, well utilized & often chaotic situations. @Haljackey

HamsterTK @hamsterTK

Heblem @Heblem

Hester @Hester

Krio- A somewhat controversial member but did make good quality BATs which are popular and his models are still used for projects to this day @Krio 

Kj3400 @kj3400

Hym @hym

Ilikehotdogsalot / Iamgoingtoeatyou @ilikehotdogsalot

Ill Tonkso- Creator of many popular transit stations, including GLR-in-avenue stations and other BATs @ILL Tonkso

Indiana Joe- Helped out many new members with questions, NAM Team member @Indiana Joe

Jacqulina @jacqulina

JakeMD / swat-medic @JakeMD

Jasoncw @Jasoncw

Jazzmaster / Yoshiisland @Jazzmaster

JBSimio @JBSimio

Jeronij- SC4D founder and destroyer @jeronij

Jmouse @Jmouse

Jondor @jondor

Jplumbley- Map maker and NAM team member. Created the SAM and was one of the co-founders of the NWM project and NHP- a mapping team called New Horiizons Productions, designed FLOG (a modular golf course set called Freakish Links of Gophers). He also developed Simulator A, and later ended up in the Traffic Simulator Wars.  @jplumbley

JP Schriefer @JP Schriefer

Livin in Sim @Livin in Sim

LivingInThePast- Longtime NAM (constructive) critic @LivingInThePast

Lucario Boricua / skuncarioboricua / Dragonxander- Best known for tropical landscapes, Pokémon-themed regions, precision terraforming & technical support for novice players aspiring to become experts. He's one of the very few transportation engineers in the NAM Team, contributing through the Traffic Simulator, Slope Mods and founding the Pedestrian Revolution Mod. @Lucario Boricua

Kel9509 @Kel9509

Kellydale2003- Popular BATter @kellydale2003

Mandelsoft / Mrtnrln- Modder and NAM member who specializes in cosmetic pieces, alternative textures, lighting and signs @MandelSoft

Masochrist @masochist

Matias93 @matias93

Mattb325- Very popular BATter, often did not include dependencies in his files, making for simple downloads. Also held the highest reputation count on Simtropolis @mattb325

McDuell- NAM team member known for his crazy interchange builds (one example) (another) (and another). Also made similar creations in Cityscape  @McDuell

Meg / Skigeek- Former Simtropolis admin and Dirk's right hand woman for many years @Meg

Memo- NAM Team member and programmer. Created many useful mods, such as the 3D camera @memo

Metarvo- Power line BATer and NAM team member @metarvo

Mightygoose- Help Desk co-founder, creator of 'SimLabs' @mightygoose

Mikeaut1- Leader of the MOTM (member of the month) team @Mikeaut1

Moonlight- Japanese modder @Moonlight

Moonraker0 / is0padre- Created SC4 videos @Moonraker0

Mayormott / Mott - NAM team member helping with traffic simulator development. Also started a popular thread on SC4D regarding transit enabled lots @mayormot

Mrbisonm @mrbisonm

MrCinatit @MrCinatit

Mushymushy-  BATter, network transition textures for NAM, admin on ST discord @MushyMushy

Nathanthemayor @nathanthemayor

Need4Camaro- Made early UDI videos @Need4Camaro

Nerdly_dood- Created many vehicles for the game's automata and UDI selection. Also a NAM (constructive) critic @nerdly_dood 

Newyorkrunnaway1 @newyorkrunaway1

NMUSpidey @NMUSpidey

Noahclem @noahclem

NOB Japanese modder @NOB from Japan

North country dude- Mostly known for railway yards / creations @north country dude

Nos.17 @nos.17

Null45- Modder who has created a number of new .dll files such as one that speeds up the game's loading times. Also created texture-related tools (Batch Png to Fsh Tool, the FSHLib Vista fix, BAT4MAX v4.5's fshwrite, etc.) and is on the NAM Team. @Null 45

Onlyplace4 / OP4- Leader of the BLAM team @onlyplace4

Owenluby @owenluby

Paeng @paeng

Palpatine001 @Palpatine001

Patriots_1228- Involved with several BAT teams@patriots_1228

Pegasus- Legendary modder, owner of Simpeg website @Pegasus

Pixelrage @Pixelrage

Qurlix- RHW founder @qurlix

RalphaelNinja- Legendary modder- created many early mods, stations, etc which are still very popular to this day @RalphaelNinja

Redfox85 / Kitsune- NAM Team member who 'Accidentally' solved one of the biggest requests in the early days: lowering bridge clearance for ferries. As of NAM 49 it now is 20m, and NAM 50's dll (and all subsequent versions), it will allow the slider to reflect this height too. Also worked on type-21 items @redfox85

Redlotus- Foundational NAM member @redlotus

Riiga- NAM Team member who made experimental puzzle pieces, laying the foundation for further development. Also created functional toll booths for the RHW mod  @riiga

Ripplejet @RippleJet

Rooker1 @rooker1

Rsc204 / MGB- NAM Team member, moderator, helps new and veteran members with questions and troubleshooting @rsc204

Ryan B- NAM Team member, created various sign packs and realistic road designs @Ryan B

Rickmastfan67- Pioneered various concepts for the NAM team @rickmastfan67

Ripplejet / Tage- SC4D Admin and BSC team member who helped create the first version of the CAM. Also worked on traffic simulators and RCI mods @RippleJet

Samerton @Samerton

Shadow Assassin @Shadow Assassin

SimCoug @SimCoug

SimGoober- Popular modder @SimGoober

SimHoTToDDy @SimHoTToDDy

SimMaster07- Leggendary member. Created various technical support topics, NAM features & fixed various aspects of the game. @simmaster07

Simmer2- Popular BATter @Simmer2

Smoncrie @smoncrie

SIM-ple Jack @SIM-ple Jack

Sithlrd98- Created many alternative reskins for networks and curves, very useful at a time when they were less polished / no wealth textures @sithlrd98

Suplado!- Middle East CJ'er @suplado!

Swamper77- BSC and NAM Team member, automata / traffic simulator developer. Created several puzzle pieces and pathing fixes @Swamper77

Swordmaster- Creator of the RRW, a realistic reskin of the railway network @Swordmaster

T Wrecks- Legendary modder @T Wrecks

Tarkus - NAM Team lead for many years. Founder of various NAM projects such as the Network Widening Mod (NWM) and vastly increased the scope of other projects like the RHW. Also created some notable City Journals including Argentum & Tarkusian Cities @Tarkus

Teirusu - Helped found some NAM projects such as the RHW and created the Rain tool @Teirusu

Terring- Futuristic / Sci-fi creator and player @Terring

Thatmonkeysim @thatmonkeysim

The7trumpets- Foundational NAM member @the7trumpets

TheMurderousCricket @TheMurderousCricket

Theteacat @theTeaCat

Threestooges @threestooges

Throvin- Euro texture creator @Thorvin

Thundercrack83 @thundercrack83

Toothless Snitch @Toothless Stitch

Toxicpiano @toxicpiano

Trar @trar

Tropod- NAM Founder @Tropod

TV-VCR @TV-VCR

Tyberius06- NAM Team member, STEX moderator, modified multiple files to fix them / make them more compatible, helped compile modpacks and restore files from SC4D's LEX. @Tyberius06

Ulisse Wolf / Ulisse- Created several City Journals, NAM member who helped develop draggable Pedmalls and CAM developer who is trying to complete the projects left by Maxis and expand the gameplay of SC4. @Ulisse Wolf

Un1- Created very early slope mods @un1

Vahr / Blue Lightning- Father of RHW Flexfly @Vahr

Vester_DK @vester_DK

Voar Tok @Voar Tok

Warrior- Created various tools, continued work on the HSRP, NAM Team member @warrior

Wouanagaine- Map maker, programmer of various SC4 tools such as the DatPacker. @wouanagaine

Xannepann @xannepan

Xxdita-  BSC member who was involved in a lot of initiatives involving the CAM and PIM-X, often involved in the modding side of the group's efforts. Well-known for his animated monkey avatars. @xxdita

Xyloxadoria- Well known station / RTMT creator and BATter @Xyloxadoria

Yarahi @Yarahi

your_adress_here @your_adress_here

Z1/ Z- Traffic simulator developer for the NAM @z1

Zeddic @Zeddic

Zelgadis-  The Fabulous, Rainbow-Adorned, Eyebrow-Plucking, Oh-So-Fashionable, Cutest Little Administrator of Simtropolis and Queen of Transylvania @Zelgadis

Zezug- Chat room moderator and assisted many newbies in the chat with basic questions in the social lobby. @Zezug

---

Honourable mentions:

/cbg/ - ' City Building General' term on 4chan. Example being this (non English) post about NAM 32

Arcologies (mostly from SimCity 2000)

Angry Video Game Nerd SNES review

Bowser attack in SimCity SNES instead of a Godzilla attack in SimCity (1989) due to the game being 'Nintendofied'

Braun Llama Dome-  Reward building from SimCity 2000,  named after Jeff Braun, co-founder of Maxis

Cities Skylines 2 Release- Similar to the Cities Skylines release but at a much lower scale. Many believe SimCity 4 still remains the best city building game to date.

City Status (Population)- in SimCity SNES, your city state changes with your population size. The music updates and you get some rewards and challenges. There is village (0-1,999), town (2,000-9,999), city (10,000-49,999), capitol (50,000 to 99,999), metropolis (100,000-499,999) and megaopolis (500k+). Megalopolis is extremely difficult to achieve. 

Dr Wright- NPC advisor in SimCity SNES named after Will Wright, who also appears in Super Smash Brothers

Magnasanti - SimCity 3000 max population hellscape

Mario Statue- A reward building given when your city reaches a population of 500,000 acheving Megaopolis status in SimCity SNES. It is modelled after the Statue of Liberty, and is considered to be extremely difficult to achieve. Most players do not get past Metropolis status (100k popluation) in the game as you need a city with very little water,  carefully laid out cities & a lot of luck to achieve this milestone.

Maxis was possibly working on a successor to SimCity (2013) before EA canned the studio

MaxisGuillaume @MaxisGuillaume doing his best to do public relations on Simtropolis pre and post SimCity (2013) release

Maxisman- glitch in SimCity 2000, superhero in SimCity (2013)

r/SimCity (top submissions)

SimCity (1989) Had a monster on the game box- and looked very much like Godzillia. Toho- the owners of the Godzillia trademark did not like this and the box art was changed to a tornado instead.  

SimCity (1989) was seen as obscure and did not sell well until The New York Times worte an article about the game regarding it's 'no win scenario'. Back then all games were very linear and SimCity (1989) was one of the first games that had no ending. This media attention caused the game's sales to skyrocket and the publicity inspired concepts like open world games, along with Maxis becoming a huge brand and spawning spinoffs such as SimCity SNES and sequels like SimCity 2000.

SimCity (2013) Honest Trailer

SimCity (2013) Q&A hosted by Simtropolis member @Zelgadis

SimCity (2013) release fiasco- The launch of SimCity (2013) is arguably the worst in gaming history, competing with others such as Diablo 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. On launch day players had to wait hours to access a server, as the game needed to be connected to one to play (always online DRM), with the game launcher frequently freezing or resetting as players patience waned. The issue did not improve much over the following few weeks, until EA decided to add more servers to handle the demand. However, by then most players had stopped playing, being heavily disappointed by the inferior product produced / small city sizes and a general lack of fun. EA later offered a free game to appease their customers, many who were demanding refunds, but the frustration stuck, tarnishing the reputation of the entire SimCity series.

SimCity (2013) was stated it needed to be always online to work, but a offline mode hack proved this to be false

SimCity Mayor Collegehumor skit

SimCity NES Never being released, reworked into SimCity SNES

SimCity vs Cities Skylines skit

SimShitty / ShittySkylines

Simtropolis Interview with Maxis- During SimCity (2013)'s development, @Dirktator & @hym were invited by EA to visit Maxis' studio and conduct an interview with Maxis. It was split into two parts- one with developers Kip Katserelis and Stone Librande & another with Maxis' creative director: Ocean Quigley

Starcraft has a term called SimCity Where your base is constructed in such a way that structures serve more functions than those of the individual buildings; usually for defensive purposes by creating a narrow path that enemy units will have trouble crossing or blocking a pathway entirely.

The utterly insane disasters in SimCity Creator for the Wii, including (but certainly not limited to) a giant spiked ball rolling around, hands and hammers smashing your city, and a variant of the monster attack with llamas.

YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING, YOU WILL REGRET THIS (Advisor message in SimCity 2000)

  Edited February 5 by Haljackey  
urls, additional items and context

[zahrul3 471]

What happened to the various Japanese BATs hosted on various Japanese imageboard sites and blogs? What happened to custom content from other non-english speaking SC4 communties that were never hosted on LEX or STEX? What happened to STEX/LEX disc exclusives? What happened to the bonus landmarks on the official SC4 website? How are the kids who played SC4 back in the day, doing right now, how many of them became actual urban planners? and how many BATters became actual architects or 3D visual artists?

[matias93 7,535]

17 hours ago, zahrul3 said:

What happened to the various Japanese BATs hosted on various Japanese imageboard sites and blogs? What happened to custom content from other non-english speaking SC4 communties that were never hosted on LEX or STEX? What happened to STEX/LEX disc exclusives? What happened to the bonus landmarks on the official SC4 website? How are the kids who played SC4 back in the day, doing right now, how many of them became actual urban planners? and how many BATters became actual architects or 3D visual artists?

Japanese BATs: some of them are backed up here on the STEX, but in most cases, you can find them on other Asian exchanges.

Other languages' exchanges: it depends on the case. CapitalSimCity is still there, and I think they host some Brazilian BATs as well. SimCityPolska is (I think) almost completely backed up here, most of SFBT is either here or in SC4E.

You can still get the STEX exclusives as a digital download by donating to Simtropolis. I don't remember if there was a LEX disc, but there were many LEX exclusives, which are being restored as part of the SC4E efforts.

You can download the Maxis' bonus landmarks here.

A handful of long-time SC4 players have gone into politics, including a South African MP and a city councillor in Halifax. I'm sure there are more, but the amount of disclosure people engage in on places like here varies a lot. About professionals in the area, there are way too many! Of the top of my mind, some examples are @MandelSoft and @Lucario Boricua, both transportation engineers and @Jasoncw, architect, but I'm really forgetting most of them.

[Null 45 3,041]

• The late Paul Pedriana (Lead Architect and Engineer on SimCity 4) leaking some source code to help the community create DLL mods, and encouraging reverse engineering to recreate the code he couldn't share.
• Buggi having a contact at Maxis who was able to get the extra cheats DLL and its source code released to the public.
• The extra cheats DLL source code hinting that SC4 may have been planned to release on Dec. 25th, 2003 at some point in its development.
• The game's camera using an axonometric, trimetric projection, and the artists annoying Paul Pedriana by calling it isometric.
• EA paying to fly early SC4 modders to San Francisco to learn more about the game code, and mentioning that DLL mods could be made.
• Several modders being under a Non disclosure agreement with EA specifically for the purpose of furthering file modifications (from the same post as above).

[Haljackey 17,303]

7 hours ago, Null 45 said:

• The late Paul Pedriana (Lead Architect and Engineer on SimCity 4) leaking some source code to help the community create DLL mods, and encouraging reverse engineering to recreate the code he couldn't share.
• Buggi having a contact at Maxis who was able to get the extra cheats DLL and its source code released to the public.
• The extra cheats DLL source code hinting that SC4 may have been planned to release on Dec. 25th, 2003 at some point in its development.
• The game's camera using an axonometric, trimetric projection, and the artists annoying Paul Pedriana by calling it isometric.
• EA paying to fly early SC4 modders to San Francisco to learn more about the game code, and mentioning that DLL mods could be made.
• Several modders being under a Non disclosure agreement with EA specifically for the purpose of furthering file modifications (from the same post as above).

Thanks! I've added these to the list, along with many others I found or came to mind.

If anyone has more lore to share- or can give more context to an existing item, post here. A staff member or myself can edit the list to include it.

[Zephyrus22 109]

I took a crack at answering some of them, mostly to test my own SC4 knowledge (been playing since 2006 but have only been sporadically active on Simtropolis since 2009). I only made it to the H's because the weather is beautiful today and I'll be very disappointed with myself if I don't get outside and take advantage of it while I can. I might try to answer the other ones later.

Please fact check my answers because some of them were educated guesses based on various sources I found online. I skipped over some of the more self-explanatory ones.

 

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/cbg/ - A board on 4chan dedicated to discussing City Building Games

$5 sales - The game can frequently be found on sale for $5 on Steam

10MB download limit - I think this is supposed to be 10MB Upload Limit. This game came out in the mid 2000s when internet data usage was different than today. Due to the era in which the game came out, sites like Simtropolis had a 10mb data cap on uploads to the site, both due to dialup internet constraints and because of the cost of data storage back then.

2008 Simtropolis Site Hack - A hacking of the Simtropolis website that occurred between May 23 and May 28, 2008. According to the SC4 Wiki, a hacking group originating from China inserted malicious code into the site, and caused data like City Journal entries to be lost or damaged.

3D Camera Mod - For years it has been a meme to request a 3D camera mod for the game. This was thought of as something that would enhance a 20-year-old game but that was impossible to implement. On April Fools 2024 someone released a 3D Camera Mod for the game which everyone thought was a joke at first, but when they installed it they realized that it was a real mod that actually added a 3D camera to the game.

4GB Patch - A third-party patch designed by NTCore to allow old programs to access 4GB of RAM on 32 bit executable files. A lot of programs from the 2000s were designed with 2GB of RAM and this limits how long one can play the game due to data constraints. The 4GB patch doublies the amount of RAM making it easier to avoid crashes and data limit issues. The patch is not limited to SC4 but can also be used on other programs with the 2GB cap.

A Nonny Moose - A prolific member of Simtropolis who was always kind and eager to help others with their SimCity 4 questions. He passed away in 2016, and many remember him fondly and miss him dearly.

Abandoned due to commute time - A common issue that seems to happen constantly in SC4 despite one’s best efforts to avoid the issue. The game is unable to find a path for Sims from residential lots where they live to commercial or industrial lots where they work, causing their residences to become abandoned. There are ways to minimize this issue (such as installing NAM for improved commute routing, and mods such as the Less Abandonment Mod and Industry Quadrupler mod, etc) but the issue is very hard to avoid completely and arguably one’s of the game’s most frustrating issues.

Acronyms / glossary for in game names, mods, forums - There are too many to list here. I guess the obvious one I can think of is BAT (Building Architect Tool) being the word for player-designed buildings and is named after the Maxis-made tool to create said buildings.

Adding water not at sea level / waterfalls - Typically in the game “sea level” is hard programmed into it. Water is supposed to only appear when you lower the land a certain amount. But using various water puzzle piece mods you can add things like small rivers, canals and waterfalls at different elevations.

Advisor popups - Just like in a real city, in SC4 you have seven mayoral advisors who give you advice on different areas to improve your city such as utilities, finance, city planning, etc. Whenever there is an issue in your city, there will be a popup window on the screen alerting you of the issue at hand. This can be very annoying, as this is a relic of the 2000s when things like popup ads were more commonplace and can interrupt gameplay. However there is a way to turn off popups in the game’s settings.

Advisor reactions when things go to shit - The SC4 advisor avatars are animated, and when something bad happens like a fire or power shortage, the avatars look enraged. It’s very dramatic and funny

AmbiguousAmphibian's crazy SC4 scenario videos - Ambiguous Amphibian is a youtuber who does silly challenges in video games, mostly ones from the late 90s and 2000s. He has several videos of challenges done in SimCity 4.

ANT- additional network tool- Also possibly called the Alternate Network Tool, this was a rural road/street network that Maxis/EA created but never completed. It was left in the game in a locked state, and the NAM team used it as a basis for the Rural Highway Network part of its mod.

April Fools releases - Over the years, there have been many mods that were released on April 1 as a joke, such as the SC4Undo plugin (which just prompted a popup that said “Happy April Fools” when you tried to use it) to a Disaster Addon Mod (DAM) to expand the types of disasters in the game, all of which were fake. The most famous April Fools Joke is the 3D Camera Mod, which subverted everyone’s expectation by being an actual real mod.

BATs using stolen models - Early on in SC4’s history, it was not uncommon for some modders to use models from other modders’ BATs without permission and upload them as a new file to download. Stealing other BATers’ models is frowned upon, and many of these lots have been removed from sites like Simtropolis to prevent stealing.

BATs with broken/overpowered stats - since BATers can make the stats of a lot whatever they want, it’s possible for them to release a lot with super overpowered stats that impact the game in unpredictable ways. I’m sure there are famous examples of this but I can’t think of any.

Best of STEX disc - As a reward for people who donate money to Simtropolis, they are given one of five “Best of STEX” discs. This used to be a physical CD that was mailed to you, but today it is a link to secret BATs that are not available on the normal STEX. These BATs are made by lots of well known/prolific creators like JBSimio, mattb325, jasoncw, etc.

Beta/cut content - There is a lot of content that was in the game in beta copies that never made it to the final release. One example is how the City Hall was supposed to have three stages of growth, but it was replaced with a singular building. Another example is the Additional/Alternative Network Tool that was cut from the game and used as the basis for NAM. There are also other models and features that were never made available in the final release.

Big Dig - This is a mod to make underground roads and highways utilizing the game’s subway feature. It is named after the “Big Dig”, a major civic project in Boston that turned a downtown freeway into an underground one. This mod allows players to have more space to build on since less of the surface land is being used by roads.

“Blow Your Socks Off” NAM teasers - I couldn’t find anything for this. Would be appreciative if anyone could give more information.

Bonus landmarks, hosted on the official SimCity 4 website - Maxis/EA created several bonus buildings that were not released in the main game, but were available for download on their website. This includes both real-life landmarks (like the Seoul City Hall and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago) and fictitious ones (like Shorty Burger and Lucky’s Hang Ten). Over the years the official SimCity website was updated and the official download links were lost. However, the files have been preserved and can be downloaded today from Simtropolis.

Braun Llama Dome - Refers to a reward building from SimCity 2000. I’m not sure what the connection to SimCity 4 is, so please let me know if you know!

Breaking the grid - SC4 has a fixed camera view and only allows zones to face in cardinal directions, even on diagonal streets. As a result the game is heavily based around grid city designs. Breaking the grid is a strategy to circumvent the game’s grid-based core to make more meandering street designs. This is desirable from a realism standpoint as there are lots of places that don’t have gridded streets (such as old European cities, post-WWII US Suburbs, etc.). Some BATers, like EffTheGrid, specialize in this sort of grid-breaking content.

Bridge Building being super annoying. Can't place two bridges together - Kind of self-explanatory. You can’t make diagonal bridges and you have to work at it to make bridges look good and function as intended.

Bridge too low for ferries (despite being really high) - This relates to the above point. When building bridges, there is an indicator that tells you if ferry boats can go underneath or not. However, you have to elevate your bridges very high to make them compatible with ferries, which makes bridge building frustrating. I really wish this game had drawbridges.

BSC becoming elitist / controlling - From my limited understanding, BSC was an early BATing collective that consisted of a lot of the game’s top creators back in the day. I wasn’t able to find any specific information about BSC being elitist or controlling, but if anyone has any information please let me know! I’m sure this is probably old drama from the game’s early days.

BSC Cleanitol - In 2013, BSC released Cleanitol, a tool for removing nonessential filies from your SC4 Plugins folder. A new version of the tool was released in December 2023 with expanded functionality. Cleanitol is a popular tool that improves game performance.

Buggi - A member and modder of Simtropolis. They are best known for the Extra Cheats Plugin, a mod that is actually a Maxis-internal tool used during the game’s development. Buggi reportedly contacted Maxis and received their permission to make the program available publicly. This mod provides features like the ability to plop any building in the game, and is essential to a lot of SC4 players.

Bugs caused by playing SimCity 4 at its minimum specified RAM (512MB) - I wasn’t able to find anything about specific bugs caused by this. Let me know if you have any examples!

Building a City From Scratch - A YouTube series by Haljackey, a prominent SC4 player.

Bullet Train Mod (BTM) / Shinkansen as a replacement for the monorail network no one uses

Cannot place over occupied tiles (but there's nothing there?)

Capitalsimcity - SC4 used to have various fan sites for players of various languages/countries. Capitalsimcity is a Spanish-language citybuilder fan site that is still active to this day. It has several BATs that are only available on this site.

CDs no longer working - Due to the advancement of technology, CDs from the game’s release do not work on modern hardware (plus many modern computers don’t even have CD drives). Most modern players use digital copies of the game to play.

Cities Skylines release - The Cities:Skylines franchise has largely taken over the SimCity franchise as the face of the citybuilder genre. The game has not outright replaced SC4 due to different goals of the respective games (SC4 being more of a city management simulator, while C:S is more of a urban planning game). I’m not sure what the release of Cities:Skylines refers to specifically.

City Journal pages vs forums - City Journals are a way for players to share photos and stories of the cities and regions they build in their games. Originally this was just a section of the Simtropolis forums. But over time City Journals became their own section of the Simtropolis website. In the City Journals section, entries are structured less like a forum thread and more like chapters of a book. People have different opinions on which presentation method is better.

City Journal unions / alliances / nations

City journals with Photobucket hosted images - One issue with a lot of old forums is the breaking of image hosting links. In the 2000s and early 2010s, Photobucket was one of the more popular image hosting websites. However, over time due to link rot, many of these old images have been lost to time, making these old city journals incomplete. Today, Imgur and Imgbb are the popular image hosting sites.

City Showcases - The SC4 Showcase forum is a place to share images of your city themed around various topics, such as industrial areas, parks, etc. By far the most popular thread in this forum is “Show Us What You’re Working On” which has significantly more activity and views than the other threads.

City Spread means trouble ahead - This is one of the popup messages that advisor Neal Fairbanks tells you. The popup essentially says that sprawl is bad. This popup annoys people because there isn’t really any issues in the game with building a sprawling city, and it’s actually advised to build out before building up. It’s adding increased density that makes trouble start popping up in cities, so this message is seen as pointless and a waste of time.

CMLs (custom member labels) - The Simtropolis admins can assign you a custom member label for accomplishments like winning a Trixie award. I honestly didn’t know this was a thing, it appears it was more popular in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

Compatibility glitches with a certain generation of nVidia GPUs

Constantly posting on City Journals on the forum to put them on top of others

CoriBoom' team saving Simtropolis - CorinaMarie and Cyclone Boom are two prominent Simtropolis members who have a joint modding team called CoriBoom, and are currently site admins. I wasn’t able to find out a lot of info about this, but apparently at one point they took over the site from another user named Dirk/Dirktator, who had owned the site for nearly 20 years and was ready to move on. Without them stepping in to take over, Simtropolis would have probably went offline like so many other SC4 fan sites have over the years.

Covid-19 pandemic popularity boom - During the Coronavirus pandemic, lots of people were stuck at home with nothing better to do but consume media. Presumably the game increased in popularity during this time. I didn’t know anything about this but I’m willing to believe it, as this happened to a lot of media during that time.

CPUcount: 1 - I am assuming this has to do with old games like SC4 being designed to run on single core computers, while modern computers are often quad core. Apparently this entry refers to commanding your game to only run with one core to prevent crashing. I don’t really understand this as I thought the game was already designed to run on one core, but maybe this makes more sense to someone with a better knowledge of computers/coding than myself.

Crazy traffic crashes / train derailments - If you are playing the game and sit still and watch traffic, sometimes you will see crazy automata car crashes at intersections with high traffic usage. This might occur with trains as well, but if you go into U-Drive-It mode, select a train and go as fast as possible, you can create your own crazy train derailment.

CSG Design website - From my understanding, CSGDesign was a modder/BATer who had their own website that is no longer offline. Not sure if they hosted content on the website that is now lost media or not.

CSGdesign Natural Growth blog - This is a thread on the SC4Devotion forums by user CSGDesign. It is a tutorial on how to naturally grow a city in a realistic way. Link: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=9440.0

CTD bugs with Monorails in NAM when High Speed Railway (HSR) mod is also installed

CTD hovering a puzzle piece over a TE Lot (fixed)

Custom content on STEX from banned users - Self-explanitory. Not sure if this means this content is lost media, or if it’s just unsupported due to the creator no longer having access to updating it.

Cutting funding results in visuals like potholes, striking workers, criminals, etc

DarkNite - a popular mod by SimFox that alters the look of night mode in the game. There are a lot of BATs that are designed to work with this mod specifically. I have never used it since I only play in day mode, but it is apparently very popular.

Datpacking - I might be wrong about this, but my understanding is that Datpacking is taking the files in your plugins folder and using a program to combine them into fewer individual files, which improves game performance and load times.

Demise of SC4D, rise of SC4E - SC4Devotion was one of the main English-language SC4 fansites, alongside Simpeg and Simtropolis. In June 2023, the website went offline. From my understanding, this was due to the web host requiring an update that the site’s team wasn’t able to implement. The site’s owner has instead opted to replace the site with a new website, SC4Evermore, and has been slowly uploading files that were hosted on SC4D and are currently lost media to the new website. Interestingly the new site’s name is very similar to SC4Ever, an old SimCity fan site that closed down over a decade ago.

Dependencies needing Dependencies needing Dependencies (inception) - Dependency files are files containing custom assets used in custom BATs. Sometimes the dependency trail runs deep and gets complicated.

Destruction De Saint Orano - A YouTube video from 2011 showing the destruction of a city called Saint Orano. Utilizing both SimCity 4 and The Sims 3, the animation is very impressive and looks great to this day.

Digging a 'hole to China' if a puzzle piece isn't placed on flat terrain - I’m assuming this is some sort of glitch with puzzle pieces that makes deep holes in your game. I haven’t encountered this personally but I can see how building on uneven terrain could do this

Dirk / Dirktator - The previous admin of Simtropolis who founded the site. They aren’t around much anymore and the CoriBoom team are largely in charge now.

Disasters - In the game you can inflict a number of different disasters upon your city. Some are realistic, like earthquakes and tornadoes, whereas others are more fantastical, such as UFO invasions and robot dinosaur rampages.

DLL mayhem / renaissance - a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) is a type of file containing code that can be used by multiple programs at once. I’m not sure what the mayhem/renaissance bit refers to, but DLLs have been used in SC4 modding for years.

DollyLlama - Cheat code that turns the in-game advisors’ avatars into llamas.

Dr Vu - a supervillain in SimCity. In SC4 he is the subject of various “evil” missions that you can do in your city. He is referenced in various builds but surprisingly has not had a huge impact on the Sims franchise as a whole.

Draw paths - “drawpaths” is a cheat code that shows automata paths on streets. This is apparently used for NAM debugging.

Drive-ins being built right next to skyscrapers - Since there are only three levels of zoning, you don’t have a lot of control over what exact buildings get built in your city, leading your city to have weird buildings next to each other. I call this the Houston phenomenon, after Houston Texas which famously does not have zoning laws and has weird land uses like this in real life.

Dropbox multiplayer - Apparently some people play multiplayer SC4 by uploading a city to dropbox and sharing it with their group, who works on the city cooperatively. Not sure how this would practically work since presumably only one person could update the file at a time.

Early NAM puzzle pieces - I’m assuming that this either refers to old pieces that were removed in subsequent releases, or pieces that were somehow broken and needed to be replaced. This one might be better answered by a NAM historian.

Empty highways yet clogged roads - I assume this refers to the base game routing system, which only considers the absolute shortest path despite more practical routes being available. This would lead to instances of everyone using a small street to travel when an adjacent highway is empty due to it being slightly less direct. NAM largely fixes this issue by incentivizing Sims to use higher density roads over absolute shortest distance.

Eternal Commuter Loop - A glitch in which sims near the city border will go to an adjacent town to look for work, then go from that town to the next town over, etc. until they are traveling in an eternal loop instead of going to work. This is because the game only looks at the current tile being played and not the region as a whole. The glitch can lead to commute time abandonment. One solution is to build more job centers near city borders.

Executable installers for most mods - In the early days of SC4 modding it was very common for BATs to have executable installers. While it may have made sense at the time, today it is a major nuisance as these take significantly more time to install compared to simply extracting a file to your plugins folder, especially for simple BATs with small file sizes. Most modern BATs don’t have this issue, but downloading old content still presents this frustration.

Exporting a SimCity 4 small tile to make a Sims 2 map - You can apparently use SimCity 4 to create a neighborhood map for The Sims 2. While there are restrictions as to what exactly can be carried over, it is a clever piece of cross-collaboration between games.

Extra Cheats - A mod created by Maxis that expands the in-game cheats options. See the “Buggi” entry for more information

Fireworks on New Years / city founding - You will see fireworks every New Years in your game.

Forum Drama - A very broad category. Someone with more knowledge than me should provide some juicy examples.

Freeway Experts dividing the NAM team and other bickering within various mod teams

Fun sound effects when querying specific buildings - Usually things like hearing a doorbell when clicking a residential lot. It can be annoying with some BATs that have custom sounds (looking at you, SimGoober movie theater with the loud THX Deep Note that can’t be muted)

Garbage chute pushing your trash off the city tile edge - A fun classic mod by Pegasus that creatively utilizes the game’s tile system to create a visual gag.

Giant farm structures that look nothing like real life - Farms in SC4 are weird. The buildings on these farms are definitely not common in real life.

Giant wild life - The scale of the animals in this game is very disproportionate.

Go Away Advisors - A somewhat controversial mod that turns off advisor popup notifications. Not really necessary since you can just turn this off in the game settings.

Graphical bugs with certain Intel and ATI integrated graphics (Windows XP era)

Haljackey's SimCity 4 Archives - Haljackey has been creating their famous freeway interchanges for a long time!

Helpdesk / Simtropolis Help Squad - Appears to have been an account that would help users with game issues. Was active between 2005 and 2011

Herman Cain 9-9-9 tax plan - Herman Cain was a candidate for US President on the Republican side in 2012. During his campaign, he proposed 9% taxes for three categories: Personal income, federal sales, and corporate taxes. In SC4, the default tax rate is 9% residential, 9% commercial and 9% industrial. Some accused Cain of copying SC4 for his tax plan.

[Tyberius06 12,189]

2 hours ago, Zephyrus22 said:

Big Dig - This is a mod created by Tyberius06 to make underground roads and highways utilizing the game’s subway feature. It is named after the “Big Dig”, a major civic project in Boston that turned a downtown freeway into an underground one. This mod allows players to have more space to build on since less of the surface land is being used by roads

I only gave a few extra functionalities and modding fixes when we restored on SC4Evermore. 

It's not my creation. I wasn't even around, was not aware of the existence of the community, when it was initially released on SC4 Devotion.

It was a project of the Freeway Experts as far as I know...

[Zephyrus22 109]

39 minutes ago, Tyberius06 said:

I only gave a few extra functionalities and modding fixes when we restored on SC4Evermore. 

It's not my creation. I wasn't even around, was not aware of the existence of the community, when it was initially released on SC4 Devotion.

It was a project of the Freeway Experts as far as I know...

Thanks, I will edit my post to remove that it was created by you

[Haljackey 17,303]

Thanks for your insights @Zephyrus22! I have added a lot of what you mentioned to my list. Great additional context for some of this rather obscure lore.

For the Big Dig, it was actually pre-Freeway Experts and created by @blahdy. That splinter / failed team formed after the initial work for that mod completed, which turned road traffic into subway traffic with lots that looked terrific in modding programs, but rather standard in the game. This was pre-HD textures. I added that @Tyberius06 did some work on the file to enhance it / make it more compatible. 

---

Big Dig-  This is a mod created by @blahdy (Later enhanced by @Tyberius06) to make underground roads and highways utilizing the game’s subway network. It is named after the “Big Dig”, a major civic project in Boston that turned a downtown freeway into an underground one. This mod allows players to have more space to build on since less of the surface land is being used by roads.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

5 hours ago, Zephyrus22 said:

CoriBoom' team saving Simtropolis - CorinaMarie and Cyclone Boom are two prominent Simtropolis members who have a joint modding team called CoriBoom, and are currently site admins. I wasn’t able to find out a lot of info about this, but apparently at one point they took over the site from another user named Dirk/Dirktator, who had owned the site for nearly 20 years and was ready to move on. Without them stepping in to take over, Simtropolis would have probably went offline like so many other SC4 fan sites have over the years.

5 hours ago, Zephyrus22 said:

Dirk / Dirktator - The previous admin of Simtropolis who founded the site. They aren’t around much anymore and the CoriBoom team are largely in charge now.

Oh, my! Wait a minute...  

Yes, CB and I do run the site now as the sole administrators and we do have Webmaster titles as secondary privileges (which means we can access all the tools), but we don't show that as our official titles. Additionally, we do have the greatest level of access (Root SSH, cPanel and such) ever given by Dirk, but he still very much owns the site. All donations to Simtropolis go to him directly for him to pay for the fees associated with maintaining the site. (CB and I don't handle any of the money, but we do see the receipts as Dirk emails them to the admin email account here and then CB updates the donation tracker.)

Because Dirk has full confidence in how we shifted the site away from the old guard police style mentality, he rarely pops in himself. Ofc, he is still immediately on call like when the host borked the site a few days ago. He then contacted them to get it straightened out.

So, if we saved Simtropolis, I'd like to think it's because of our leadership style, how we interact with peeps, and maybe how we promoted things like NKO or created mods like the Parks Aura and/or laid the groundwork for the Building Styles. (Along with how CB handles all the technical glitches, ofc!)

[Null 45 3,041]

Speaking of Building Styles, the fact that the community can't agree on additional building styles would be another bit of lore. Although most ST users would probably have heard of it.

I am not sure how to word that bullet point, possibly something like:

Additional Building Style Mayhem - Building on the experiments of the CoriBoom team, a DLL mod was created to allow for additional building styles beyond the 4 Maxis created. But the community was unable to find a consensus on how to organize a set of community building styles.

[Kel9509 1,363]

5 minutes ago, Null 45 said:

Speaking of Building Styles, the fact that the community can't agree on additional building styles would be another bit of lore. Although most ST users would probably have heard of it.

HA!  Since I'm back with my new PC, I'm going through my downloads that I've gotten over the past several months and am now installing them.  I've got a lot of new buildings that are more suburban than I normally download and so I hopped on over to that thread an hour ago or so to see if there was any new posts - hoping for a resolution.  Nope!  

I decided against posting again there for tonight but I am probably going to kick that cat again soon.  I'd really, really like to categorize my downloads with the new styles.  Of course, I suspect many are working on other mods right now like CAM 3.0 and NAM50...

[simmering 2,638]

4 hours ago, Haljackey said:

Big Dig-  This is a mod created by @blahdy (Later enhanced by @Tyberius06) to make underground roads and highways utilizing the game’s subway network. It is named after the “Big Dig”, a major civic project in Boston that turned a downtown freeway into an underground one. This mod allows players to have more space to build on since less of the surface land is being used by roads.

... and currently has some unresolved issues.

[simmering 2,638]

On 7/17/2025 at 4:15 AM, Haljackey said:

WolfZe controversies 

I share here the entry from the SC4 Dictionary, somewhat modified. Edit it as you see fit, @Haljackey:

WolfZe (also WZ, WolfZW, Wolf Z, Wolf Zerkowski) is a German custom content creator, author and musician. WolfZe's BAT work, while much revered,  is no longer available on Simtropolis (with the exception of the scoty-WolfZE peckham farmyard, which includes a WZ model). His account was deactivated. His older posts on ST show the name "Guest 760649". His subsequently created Patreon account remains inactive.

In 2021, ST member @City_Slider announced a possible return of WolfZe to STEX. However, City_Slider was last seen on Simtropolis in 2022.

Content creator @debussyman has recreated some WZ BATs:

• https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/36334-wz-recreation-palais/
• https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/36426-wz-recreation-gare-avenue-foch/
• https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/33175-stift-haug-church/

[Jasoncw 11,840]

WolfZe's BATs were all just free 3d models he downloaded from online and then exported in gmax. If you search online for "name of building free 3d model" or search the popular 3d model websites, you can find most of the models he used. 

[pclark06 11,831]

If we’re talking SC3, definitely the SC3K BAT Exchange there (not the old one on the Wayback Archive but the BAP-SC3KU one that never got archived so most of the stuff got lost, including what I made back then as a kid). There was no security so people would constantly reupload others’ works lol. It was very Wild West at the time.

Also Freeland/ @fredfreewho ran it (and who is an artist who can still be found on Instagram at fred_free). A bunch of people got their start from there doing SC3K mods before going into SC4, including Pegasus who later started SimPeg. Freeland was named after the scenario in the OG SNES game.

Also, SC4-wise, “The Ones that Never Made It To STEX” thread as well as the BAT Request thread, OG and current lol.

@Heblem probably deserves his own entry due to his prolific work. He leads the Reforma mod for American Truck Simulator now (that can be found on TruckyMods.io). @mattb325 as well for his apartments and pretty much everything else.

 

[Haljackey 17,303]

On 7/19/2025 at 12:36 AM, Null 45 said:

Speaking of Building Styles, the fact that the community can't agree on additional building styles would be another bit of lore. Although most ST users would probably have heard of it.

I am not sure how to word that bullet point, possibly something like:

Additional Building Style Mayhem - Building on the experiments of the CoriBoom team, a DLL mod was created to allow for additional building styles beyond the 4 Maxis created. But the community was unable to find a consensus on how to organize a set of community building styles.

Added, but I am not touching that thread with a 50ft pole.

 

22 hours ago, simmering said:

... and currently has some unresolved issues.

Added!

 

6 hours ago, simmering said:

I share here the entry from the SC4 Dictionary, somewhat modified. Edit it as you see fit, @Haljackey:

WolfZe (also WZ, WolfZW, Wolf Z, Wolf Zerkowski) is a German custom content creator, author and musician. WolfZe's BAT work, while much revered,  is no longer available on Simtropolis (with the exception of the scoty-WolfZE peckham farmyard, which includes a WZ model). His account was deactivated. His older posts on ST show the name "Guest 760649". His subsequently created Patreon account remains inactive.

In 2021, ST member @City_Slider announced a possible return of WolfZe to STEX. However, City_Slider was last seen on Simtropolis in 2022.

Content creator @debussyman has recreated some WZ BATs:

• https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/36334-wz-recreation-palais/
• https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/36426-wz-recreation-gare-avenue-foch/
• https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/33175-stift-haug-church/

&

1 hour ago, Jasoncw said:

WolfZe's BATs were all just free 3d models he downloaded from online and then exported in gmax. If you search online for "name of building free 3d model" or search the popular 3d model websites, you can find most of the models he used. 

There is far more surrounding this lore than you know. I'll expand it a bit but I don't want to make it too spicy 

 

1 hour ago, pclark06 said:

If we’re talking SC3, definitely the SC3K BAT Exchange there (not the old one on the Wayback Archive but the BAP-SC3KU one that never got archived so most of the stuff got lost, including what I made back then as a kid). There was no security so people would constantly reupload others’ works lol. It was very Wild West at the time.

Also Freeland/ @fredfreewho ran it (and who is an artist who can still be found on Instagram at fred_free). A bunch of people got their start from there doing SC3K mods before going into SC4, including Pegasus who later started SimPeg. Freeland was named after the scenario in the OG SNES game.

Also, SC4-wise, “The Ones that Never Made It To STEX” thread as well as the BAT Request thread, OG and current lol.

@Heblem probably deserves his own entry due to his prolific work. He leads the Reforma mod for American Truck Simulator now (that can be found on TruckyMods.io). @mattb325 as well for his apartments and pretty much everything else.

 

We're not, but I'm giving some honourable mentions to other games. I am not sure if the SC3K items discussed qualify? Prove me wrong and perhaps you could change my mind 

I was thinking about @Heblem- but I guess you vouching for him is enough to convince me to added. I mentioned @mattb325 in some pieces of lore, but I'll add one for him as well now.

[pclark06 11,831]

18 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

Added, but I am not touching that thread with a 50ft pole.

 

Added!

 

&

There is far more surrounding this lore than you know. I'll expand it a bit but I don't want to make it too spicy 

 

We're not, but I'm giving some honourable mentions to other games. I am not sure if the SC3K items discussed qualify? Prove me wrong and perhaps you could change my mind 

I was thinking about @Heblem- but I guess you vouching for him is enough to convince me to added. I mentioned @mattb325 in some pieces of lore, but I'll add one for him as well now.

Yeah, I was thinking Freeland was important more because a bunch of people who did SC3 ended up doing SC4 and it’d be a honorable mention if you were doing other games. Fred actually keeps up the site (minus the downloads which got lost) as an archival for his portfolio:

http://www.fredfree.com/FVC.html http://www.fredfree.com/one.html

I know @mikeseith, @Vanderaap, @oppie, @Pegasus and a few others came from there. There’s also definitely some people who made amazing stuff there who didn’t make the transition to SC4. It’s proto-Simtropolis in terms of early creators who migrated to here.

 

[Haljackey 17,303]

8 minutes ago, pclark06 said:

Yeah, I was thinking Freeland was important more because a bunch of people who did SC3 ended up doing SC4 and it’d be a honorable mention if you were doing other games. Fred actually keeps up the site (minus the downloads which got lost) as an archival for his portfolio: http://www.fredfree.com/one.html

I know @mikeseith, @Vanderaap, @oppie, @Pegasus and a few others came from there. There’s also definitely some people who made amazing stuff there who didn’t make the transition to SC4.

 

Ok you win

This is definitely SC4 lore for sure, even if it had it's start in SC3K. 

Added this blurb:
Freeland / @fredfree - A polerific SimCity 3000 modder who convinced other modders to make their way over to SimCity 4 when the game was released. This list includes prominent members such as @mikeseith, @Vanderaap, @oppie, @Pegasus & others.

[pclark06 11,831]

25 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

Ok you win

This is definitely SC4 lore for sure, even if it had it's start in SC3K. 

Added this blurb:
Freeland / @fredfree - A polerific SimCity 3000 modder who convinced other modders to make their way over to SimCity 4 when the game was released. This list includes prominent members such as @mikeseith, @Vanderaap, @oppie, @Pegasus & others.

This list of names has a lot of blasts from the past. Cyclepuppy became @CycleDogg. I see @JaWood. Also @Odd from Sweden and @couchpotato. S.A.C. did SimGothia, which was an early influential city journal, and also was one of the few women in the modding community at the time. Because I was an edgy teenager who didn’t know any better I was seveneleven117 (I use my real name now). Also so many people I forgot about, who made some amazing stuff for SC3.

[kaimai 1,042]

1 hour ago, Haljackey said:

There is far more surrounding this lore than you know. I'll expand it a bit but I don't want to make it too spicy 

I can't help being a little curious, just because this was before my time and I am a messy b*tch who loves drama. (I know there are some creators who still texture/edit and export 3d models from other sources, with credit usually, and/or paying for them. I do sometimes use models from the 3dwarehouse as references, although they're not usable in game & I basically always have to model everything from scratch.)

2 hours ago, pclark06 said:

If we’re talking SC3, definitely the SC3K BAT Exchange there (not the old one on the Wayback Archive but the BAP-SC3KU one that never got archived so most of the stuff got lost, including what I made back then as a kid). There was no security so people would constantly reupload others’ works lol. It was very Wild West at the time.

 

I loved SC3K as an 11 (?) year old and was so disappointed when SC4 came out and it only had four tilesets and no climate types etc. There's a SimCity CN batter (SXCZ) who remade about thirty buildings from the SC3K Asian tileset for SC4, but I'm not sure where those are to be found at the moment.

[Terring 6,473]

3 hours ago, pclark06 said:

Yeah, I was thinking Freeland was important more because a bunch of people who did SC3 ended up doing SC4 and it’d be a honorable mention if you were doing other games. Fred actually keeps up the site (minus the downloads which got lost) as an archival for his portfolio:

http://www.fredfree.com/FVC.html http://www.fredfree.com/one.html

I know @mikeseith, @Vanderaap, @oppie, @Pegasus and a few others came from there. There’s also definitely some people who made amazing stuff there who didn’t make the transition to SC4. It’s proto-Simtropolis in terms of early creators who migrated to here.

 

My goodness, Freeland! Such beautiful times  

[Barroco Hispano 26,703]

The gamma fix unnecessarily adds gamma correction to the alpha channel, causing all BAT's exported with Max 2014/2017 to have a ugly halo around the edges. (The script can be easily fixed in Notepad++ but it has never been updated.)

 

[Haljackey 17,303]

8 hours ago, kaimai said:

I can't help being a little curious, just because this was before my time and I am a messy b*tch who loves drama. (I know there are some creators who still texture/edit and export 3d models from other sources, with credit usually, and/or paying for them. I do sometimes use models from the 3dwarehouse as references, although they're not usable in game & I basically always have to model everything from scratch.)

Sorry, but I'm not going to get into it there. You can use the links provided to learn more, and/or do a little googling. It's some sensitive stuff so I won't add any more fuel/drama to this specific piece of lore.

1 hour ago, Barroco Hispano said:

The gamma fix unnecessarily adds gamma correction to the alpha channel, causing all BAT's exported with Max 2014/2017 to have a ugly halo around the edges. (The script can be easily fixed in Notepad++ but it has never been updated.)

 

Added, but can you restate what's happening here / what it does in a more digestible way? I added this but I don't think it fits properly:

BAT4MAX- gamma corrections in the alpha channel

Also- I do remember @Droric! Added him too.

[Vanasonic 49]

Good lore dump. I'll have to make proper time to have a thorough read through.

Minor correction /cbg/ isn't a 4chan board, it's a general (thread). It stands for City Building Games general (or City Building General). Because of the way 4chan works, threads will eventually expire and disappear off the board. A general is a type of thread that gets made on a recurring basis when the previous thread dies.

/cbg/ originally began on the /v/ (video games) board to primarily discuss SimCity 4 and similar titles, before migrating to the /vg/ (video game generals) board. The general ran for several years but was eventually merged into the /civ4xg/ generals, as discussion slowed and couldn’t keep up with the increasingly faster pace of /vg/.

Oldshoes was a frequent contributor and his image guides helped many a 4channer start their first realistic looking cities. /cbg/ also had representation in the 4chan Cup, a series of simulated soccer tournaments run using games from the Pro Evolution Soccer series. Pro tip: hover over the player names on the team page to uncover some extra funny thread lore.

[Haljackey 17,303]

2 hours ago, Vanasonic said:

Good lore dump. I'll have to make proper time to have a thorough read through.

Minor correction /cbg/ isn't a 4chan board, it's a general (thread). It stands for City Building Games general (or City Building General). Because of the way 4chan works, threads will eventually expire and disappear off the board. A general is a type of thread that gets made on a recurring basis when the previous thread dies.

/cbg/ originally began on the /v/ (video games) board to primarily discuss SimCity 4 and similar titles, before migrating to the /vg/ (video game generals) board. The general ran for several years but was eventually merged into the /civ4xg/ generals, as discussion slowed and couldn’t keep up with the increasingly faster pace of /vg/.

Oldshoes was a frequent contributor and his image guides helped many a 4channer start their first realistic looking cities. /cbg/ also had representation in the 4chan Cup, a series of simulated soccer tournaments run using games from the Pro Evolution Soccer series. Pro tip: hover over the player names on the team page to uncover some extra funny thread lore.

Ya it's starting to get really long. Nearly 350 items now as of the time of this post, along with 20 honourable mentions

A lot are placeholders that need more context however. While I know a lot, I don't know everything . Everyone is welcome to help add to the list and expand on what's there. Thanks for for your feedback, I changed that to:

/cgb/ - ' City Building General' term on 4chan

Oldshoes- His image guides helped many 4chan members start their first realistic looking cities. 

That sound about right?

[Vanasonic 49]

Should be /cbg/ rather than /cgb/. That being said, I'm happy with the cliff notes description as you can always just link my Simtropolis post for those wanting extra context.

Fantastic work btw, can recognize that providing context for these is a lot of work (seeing as I did just 2 so far). I'll see if I can find links to Oldshoes' image guides somewhere in the archives (or find them on my hard drive), they're succinct and helpful to new players.

[Haljackey 17,303]

3 hours ago, Vanasonic said:

Should be /cbg/ rather than /cgb/. That being said, I'm happy with the cliff notes description as you can always just link my Simtropolis post for those wanting extra context.

Fantastic work btw, can recognize that providing context for these is a lot of work (seeing as I did just 2 so far). I'll see if I can find links to Oldshoes' image guides somewhere in the archives (or find them on my hard drive), they're succinct and helpful to new players.

Thanks! It may just be 2 drops in the bucket, but every drop counts. 

 

I finally added a blurb for myself, but writing about yourself is much harder vs others. Hope it sounds half-decent.

I also had discussions with @b22rian and others on the ST / SC4E discords and added / filled in a lot of lore bits. The list still seems very incomplete, but we're getting there. Thanks to all for your input! 

[watercitymadero 804]

Retaining walls for NAM puzzle pieces never seen the light of day Retaining walls for NAM correct me if this was released, I never saw anything about this anywhere else.

[Haljackey 17,303]

11 minutes ago, watercitymadero said:

Retaining walls for NAM puzzle pieces never seen the light of day Retaining walls for NAM correct me if this was released, I never saw anything about this anywhere else.

 

@Bipin Created some retaining walls for the RHW network that is somewhat similar to this?

 

...I think the main difference is what you are referring to change the models themselves, whereas this is a cosmetic plop that just covers the area. We can write up a blurb about it if you think it's noteworthy enough.