SimCity 4 Lore

[Turnstyled 486]

2 hours ago, Haljackey said:

Or should I change/expand it somehow?

Looks great to me! 

[beebs 129]

Fun! 

A few things I can add.

• Kevin/cheese89 was the fearless leader of the Simtropolis Help Squad through the 2000s.
• rybolton was a site admin in the early early days, and was almost certainly the first (probably only?) person to make a successful marriage proposal to another user with the help of dirk.
• Mikeaut1 was (I think) the leader of the Member of the Month committee in the 2000s.
• I'm going to have a midlife crisis now, knowing that I've been a member for 22 years.

@Haljackey @Cyclone Boom I also happened to notice that a lot of the earlier Trixie awards have no descriptions or information... I think I came across those on an old hard drive a while back and can send them over if you have any interest in restoring the descriptions/awards or gleaning any details from them.

 

Edit - Ah! And the Simtropolis store! As archived by the Wayback Machine...

https://web.archive.org/web/20040402030700/http://www.cafeshops.com/simtropolis

  Edited November 12, 2025 by beebs  

[Haljackey 17,302]

9 hours ago, beebs said:

Fun! 

A few things I can add.

• Kevin/cheese89 was the fearless leader of the Simtropolis Help Squad through the 2000s.
• rybolton was a site admin in the early early days, and was almost certainly the first (probably only?) person to make a successful marriage proposal to another user with the help of dirk.
• Mikeaut1 was (I think) the leader of the Member of the Month committee in the 2000s.
• I'm going to have a midlife crisis now, knowing that I've been a member for 22 years.

@Haljackey @Cyclone Boom I also happened to notice that a lot of the earlier Trixie awards have no descriptions or information... I think I came across those on an old hard drive a while back and can send them over if you have any interest in restoring the descriptions/awards or gleaning any details from them.

 

Edit - Ah! And the Simtropolis store! As archived by the Wayback Machine...

https://web.archive.org/web/20040402030700/http://www.cafeshops.com/simtropolis

Long time no chat! Nice to see you pop in!

Added / enhanced the following- look ok?

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.

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.

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

----

And yes, if you have earlier trixie texts, send them either here as an attachment or some other form. They can eventually be added perhaps. I noticed I'm missing one of my awards I swear I got in 2014, and text on a few, for example

 

[Haljackey 17,302]

I guess I'll make posts here every now and then when a notable and/or significant amount of content has been added to the list. 

-

Ex I just added this one:

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.

 

[Haljackey 17,302]

Added a blurb for the infinite commuter bug.

My attempt with little knowledge:

Infinite 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 4 city tiles. This bug has never been fixed since launch

 

That seem right?

 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

10 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

where commuters will generate heavy traffic congestion going in a loop juggling as many as 4 city tiles.

Maybe tweak to "4 or more city tiles". Somewhere I documented a 22 city tile loop.  

(And while not posted, I also tested and proved it cannot be done with only 3.)

[Kel9509 1,363]

17 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

That seem right? 

This bug goes by several names: Eternal Commuter Loop, Infinite Commuter Bug, Eternal Commuter Bug, etc.  I'd call it: "Infinite Commuter Bug / Eternal Commuter Loop".

[Haljackey 17,302]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Maybe tweak to "4 or more city tiles". Somewhere I documented a 22 city tile loop.  

(And while not posted, I also tested and proved it cannot be done with only 3.)

 

54 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

This bug goes by several names: Eternal Commuter Loop, Infinite Commuter Bug, Eternal Commuter Bug, etc.  I'd call it: "Infinite Commuter Bug / Eternal Commuter Loop".

 

Thanks- tweaked it to this:

 

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

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, Haljackey said:

... going in a loop juggling as many as 22 or more city tiles.

While I did prove that as an extreme case, in reality the accidental version is really only the 4 city tiles where their corners meet so maybe: "... going in a loop of 4 city tiles (but with planning can be many more)." ?

And I'm not sure how to add it, or if we'd want to, but there was something several months ago where Kel proved that the eternal commuters was 99% made up by Ripple Jet not full understanding what was going on with some of the data.

[Kel9509 1,363]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

And I'm not sure how to add it, or if we'd want to, but there was something several months ago where Kel proved that the eternal commuters was 99% made up by Ripple Jet not full understanding what was going on with some of the data.

No, that was merely his data in the Census Repository where he substituted extrapolation for the commuters.  Unfortunately, the Eternal Commuter Loop is made up of real data and real commuters.  I keep hearing of efforts to fix it with DLL magic, but given the way the game is made I have no idea how that could possibly happen.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

7 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

Unfortunately, the Eternal Commuter Loop is made up of real data and real commuters. 

Yes, indeed. It really is real, but the only valid info is checking the traffic on the networks.  

My point is dozens, if not hundreds, of cities were destroyed as peeps watched the numbers in RJ's Repository and no matter how much they bulldozed, the numbers would not reduce. Then all the peeps trying to help just had to guess that the save file was slightly corrupted or such and best to just obliterate and start over.

And yet the totals in the repository that were reported as commuters were never actual commuters at all. 

[Kel9509 1,363]

Just now, CorinaMarie said:

Yes, indeed. It really is real, but the only valid info is checking the traffic on the networks.  

My point is dozens, if not hundreds, of cities were destroyed as peeps watched the numbers in RJ's Repository and no matter how much they bulldozed, the numbers would not reduce. Then all the peeps trying to help just had to guess that the save file was slightly corrupted or such and best to just obliterate and start over.

And yet the totals in the repository that were reported as commuters were never actual commuters at all. 

I see what you mean.  Yes, that's unfortunate, and yes it meant that the CR reported fake "commuters" that never decreased.  

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

On 13.12.2025 at 10:31 PM, Kel9509 said:

I see what you mean.  Yes, that's unfortunate, and yes it meant that the CR reported fake "commuters" that never decreased.  

Now I'm lost... So is this a real problem, or a side-effect of a census mod? 

On 13.12.2025 at 5:08 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Maybe tweak to "4 or more city tiles". Somewhere I documented a 22 city tile loop.  

How did you arrange the city tiles? Max I can think of is 17 city tiles (one large neighbored by 16 tiny).

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

12 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

So is this a real problem, or a side-effect of a census mod? 

Turns out it never was an actual real problem, but way too many cities were demolished because of a grave mis-representation of data. Not only was it not real commuters into the city tile, but the number shown was an accumulation of the data for each prior month it appeared in.  

It was due to Kel's improvements to the Census Repository Data Display UI that the reported "Commuters" turned out to make no sense at all. I forget the exact details, but I was able to create a graph for each of the 3 and I believe we decided they equated to extrapolated potential growth. I also forget if we've linked to the posts or not (RL is being unkind atm), but I'm sure Kel can point them out if needed.

 

12 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

How did you arrange the city tiles? Max I can think of is 17 city tiles (one large neighbored by 16 tiny).

You might want to refresh yourself on how real eternal commuters are created. I posted that here. Now these really do represent real traffic and commuters that go in a loop thru 4 city tiles continuously. They are also not the ones RJ's repository reported.

Then scroll down in the same thread to post #27 where I show my 22 tile loop.  

[Haljackey 17,302]

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

 

I'll add that bit to the list

 

---

 

EDIT: Shared this with reddit as I thought it was interesting. Mildly blew up on r/gaming

 

  Edited February 5 by Haljackey  

[Lab Rat 13]

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[Haljackey 17,302]

We certainly need a lore entry for the great 2026 Simtropolis site outage. Gimmie your best takes and I can add it.

Also reaching out to the admins for their takes / perspectives on the matter. @CorinaMarie @Cyclone Boom @Dirktator

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

8 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

Gimmie your best takes and I can add it.

Here's what we came up with.  

On 5/26/2026 at 11:42 PM, CorinaMarie said:

As many of y'all know, ST went down on 16 April, 2026 due to a billing error 2 days prior to that. The pathetic host decided to not only suspend the server, but to immediately delete it entirely, including the live site and both daily backups. There was no forewarning or communication about this sent to Dirk.

From initial correspondence with the old host, they claimed the server was merely suspended and data was kept for 6 months. It seemed like the billing issue only needed correcting. However, once Dirk heard back from a higher level support, to our complete shock and dismay it was confirmed the server had been wiped. They offered to restore it if we had backups. But what use were those when they were on the server?! Everything was gone.

A full offline backup was about 187 GB last time CB downloaded it and he had to do it in pieces (due to a very slow internet connection in his teeny, tiny town) and it took several days. This contains all the objects (which are all the files and pictures anywhere on the site including attachments and within the STEX) as well as the board software and the forums. There was also a separate full account backup from 2020, but we didn't need that in the end.

Now, separately, the database is all of the posts in the forums, STEX, omnibus, and so forth. That comes in around 6 GB and is backed up and downloaded more often. However, the offline download was just a fallback which should never be needed since we always had full backups run online every single day. (We never anticipated the host would fucking delete everything on the server!)

Ofc, in hindsight we'd've kept separate online daily synced backups too, even if those come at a cost. Without any local backup, Simtropolis as we know it would be lost forever to the infinite voids of cyberspace. Thankfully this isn't the case, so it could've been much, much worse.

Anyhow, what this means for us now is we have the forums and text of the STEX restored as it was on 28 February, 2026, but all files and pictures (both as forum attachments and in the STEX) are missing from 17 June, 2024 and after.

We can recover!  (But, we'll need a lot of help.)

And many, many peeps are already helping with more volunteering to pitch in as well.