SimCity 4 Lore

[watercitymadero 804]

Those are similar, but the ones from that post was planned to be "T21" and it will cover avenues overpass, road overpass, and elevated maxis highways. 

[CaptCity 4,695]

On 7/16/2025 at 7:15 PM, Haljackey said:

Trixies

Little bit of 'Trixie' lore... Anyone remember @Benedict's Priodic Table of 2011 Trixies? (I attached an image to replace the broken link there.)

Pretty impressive feat at the time. Many members used their little piece for avatars for a while. I know I did...

 

 

[Haljackey 17,267]

8 hours ago, watercitymadero said:

Those are similar, but the ones from that post was planned to be "T21" and it will cover avenues overpass, road overpass, and elevated maxis highways. 

Thanks for confirming- I'll add this as it's certainly lore

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.

7 hours ago, CaptCity said:

Little bit of 'Trixie' lore... Anyone remember @Benedict's Priodic Table of 2011 Trixies? (I attached an image to replace the broken link there.)

Pretty impressive feat at the time. Many members used their little piece for avatars for a while. I know I did...

 

 

Ah memories- ya @Benedict did more than CJ rankings. I think there was also a weekly or monthly reputation report as well and other stats for nerds.

I'll add this too!

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

[UpTheIrons98 14]

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.

[zahrul3 471]

Very happy that my reddit post made the community be active again!

[Vanasonic 49]

On 7/21/2025 at 9:56 AM, 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.

Found the image guides buried in an old non-English forum post. Some discretion advised, 10 year old+ 4chan humor. 

[Haljackey 17,267]

Thanks- added all the above!

---

Due to the length of this list, I decided to split members in the lore to their own section. So now there's 3- items/events, members and honourable mentions. 

[Vanasonic 49]

Good call on splitting members into their own section. 

I would attribute the image guides to Oldshoes rather than /cbg/ though. Something like this:

Quote

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

 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,045]

Periodic table is great! 

I would also suggest the following entry, unless it already exists...

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

City journalism can also be a separate entry if need be. Also, thank you for the mention - I'm doing my best.

[Haljackey 17,267]

53 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Periodic table is great! 

I would also suggest the following entry, unless it already exists...

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

City journalism can also be a separate entry if need be. Also, thank you for the mention - I'm doing my best.

I can add it but I do have a separate entry for CJ unions / alliances and all that jazz. 

It's empty for now so if anyone has insight about it or others- let me know  

[jonnboy1976 218]

Are @paeng and @Pegasus listed? Paeng was personally helpful to me years ago on this site. Also did you mention the beginners BATting school that took place here years ago?

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

7 minutes ago, jonnboy1976 said:

@paeng

That reminds me: Maybe his Scrabble-Box (or whatever it was) could be mentioned.

[Haljackey 17,267]

20 minutes ago, jonnboy1976 said:

Are @paeng and @Pegasus listed? Paeng was personally helpful to me years ago on this site. Also did you mention the beginners BATting school that took place here years ago?

 

12 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

That reminds me: Maybe his Scrabble-Box (or whatever it was) could be mentioned.

Yes I have @Pegasus and @Pegprod listed. I can add a member entry for @paeng

Can you guys give me more context for the BATting school and scrabble box among others? I can list those but they'll remain blank for now.

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

11 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

scrabble box

 

[Haljackey 17,267]

3 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

 

Thanks- added this blurb if it sounds ok?

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

[Terring 6,473]

On 17/7/2025 at 5:15 AM, Haljackey said:

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

I feel honored 

[Haljackey 17,267]

Thanks to whoever pinned this thread 

---

More bits filled in. Still lots to go. 

---

Another take on lore

Via https://steamcommunity.com/app/24780/images/?p=1&browsefilter=mostrecent

 

--

 

Also

https://bsky.app/profile/realdoctorvu.bsky.social/post/3lugak3pjqm2u

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

12 hours ago, Haljackey said:

Thanks to whoever pinned this thread 

Twas @nos.17. 

[nos.17 5,112]

Hal, amazing progress so far! I'm collecting a lot of stuff to add but it's not all ready yet so here's the first bit:

 

Acronymns - @simmering has put significant effort into their SC4 Dictionary, which I definitely believe deserves a mention here. Plus there might be some things in there that would be suitable for here too.

3d Camera mod - Add a sentence to the end: "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."

Best of STEX discs - I would correct the description to: "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." Then keep your final sentence about who made some of the bats

Christmas lights at Simtropolis - "Spawned an intense competition in 2024 for who could break the most bulbs, complete with it's own story line and lore."

City journals with Photobucket hosted images - The main reason, more than link rot, was photobucket ending their free hosting service, which most people here used.

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."

dll mayhem / renissance - Add "The advent of DLLs gives the ability to modify the game in ways that were previously thought impossible."

Empty highways yet clogged roads - Change to: "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."

Helpdesk / Simtropolis Help Squad - Add a sentence at the end: "Largely replaced on Simtropolis with the Got a Quick SC4 Question?... Ask Here thread."

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.

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

8 hours ago, nos.17 said:

LD files - <snip> They are completely useless today.

I recall there is still something they are good for, but I forget what. I believe it was @rsc204 who mentioned it in passing years ago. Maybe go with "Mostly useless today." ?

[Haljackey 17,267]

10 hours ago, nos.17 said:

Hal, amazing progress so far! I'm collecting a lot of stuff to add but it's not all ready yet so here's the first bit:

Thank you! 

I've added these to the list. Have a look at the entries to see if they all make sense.

I continue to add more and more- but if you've got more to throw my way have at it. The majority of items now have at least a brief explanation too.

---

...I've even made a lore entry for the lore list. This undertaking has snowballed into something far beyond what I envisioned and thought it would fun to mention.

Lore list in the lore list? We need to go deeper.

[nos.17 5,112]

Part 2 of ??

 

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Plugins sharing - Just add a single sentence to the end like: "The ability to share plugins has just recently been implemented in sc4pac via a configuration file."

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

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 .

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

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

 

14 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I recall there is still something they are good for, but I forget what

Hmm. This would be news to me, but I could be wrong ... 

  Edited July 30, 2025 by nos.17  

[Null 45 3,020]

Adding a few technical ones:

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.

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).

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.

Additional Notes:

I find it strange that Maxis bothered to obfuscate the INFO file, but that may have been a simple roadblock to prevent spoofing the population or other city statistics. I have no idea why the data includes the OS user name, I can't think of any reason for that to be included.

The Maxis developer that wrote the web browser plugin left a ton of debug logging in the binary, including log file paths that allowed me to find them in the game's credits. But it is still difficult to try and figure out everything it does due to the lack of actual debug symbols.

[Kel9509 1,357]

How about something for Ploppable Residential Lots?  

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).   

Yeah, yeah... too wordy and self-promoting.....  

[Alejandro24 575]

Add to the lore:
SimMars/Memories of the Colonists, the sci-fi mod that attempted to bring a Martian environment to the game.
Jupiter and Aurora Mod, which as far as I understand, they're the predecessors to the weather mod, correct me if wrong.
Linux compatibility, either via Wine or Proton.
SimCity China, that website where downloading was an absolute odyssey.
BRT for the NAM.
[redacted]

On 7/20/2025 at 11:25 PM, CaptCity said:

Little bit of 'Trixie' lore... Anyone remember @Benedict's Priodic Table of 2011 Trixies? (I attached an image to replace the broken link there.)

Pretty impressive feat at the time. Many members used their little piece for avatars for a while. I know I did...

 

 

What a time, it has passed a lot since then... and just realized that my square should say "MX" instead of "ST", never saw that detail before.
Maybe it's time to claim why I got that Trixie.

[simmering 2,607]

On 7/21/2025 at 7:25 AM, CaptCity said:

Little bit of 'Trixie' lore... Anyone remember @Benedict's Priodic Table of 2011 Trixies? (I attached an image to replace the broken link there.)

Pretty impressive feat at the time. Many members used their little piece for avatars for a while. I know I did...

 

 

The Periodic Table of 2011 Trixies shows a team "UNP". Never heard of that. Does anybody have more information? It must have been significant if it made it onto the table.

[CaptCity 4,695]

1 hour ago, simmering said:

The Periodic Table of 2011 Trixies shows a team "UNP". Never heard of that...

Something rang a bell for those four... I had to go back into my old Trixie files for that year... It may have been related to the BAT they were all nominated for - United Nations Project... maybe. @Jasoncw might be along to clarify...

[Tyberius06 12,184]

7 hours ago, nos.17 said:

Hmm. This would be news to me, but I could be wrong ... 

22 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I recall there is still something they are good for, but I forget what. I believe it was @rsc204 who mentioned it in passing years ago. Maybe go with "Mostly useless today." ?

LD properties were listing potential prop dependencies that were used for a given lot. This was sometimes accurate, sometimes completely missleading, but at least it gave a start where to look for, when one had run into missing props issues. 

 

[Haljackey 17,267]

Thanks all- I have edited the list (first post of this thread) to contain these new / expanded items.

Have a look and make sure it's worded/formatted as you would expect

8 hours ago, Alejandro24 said:

Add to the lore:

A darker, and dubious one, but there is an exe of the game that allows you to get night lights when the game is pirated (I still own that exe in my archives and I do not remember where I got it, possibly a Russian forum).

Can you elaborate more on this? What should the title be? Let me know and I can add it as well.

---

I'm also getting a ton of responses from people I have contacted/contacted me from other sites such as Reddit and Discord. More items added to the list.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

16 hours ago, CaptCity said:

Something rang a bell for those four... I had to go back into my old Trixie files for that year... It may have been related to the BAT they were all nominated for - United Nations Project... maybe. @Jasoncw might be along to clarify...

Yes!  

I did the facade stone texture, the day glass texture, and I forget but I might have modeled the small rectangular building in the lower right side of the complex. The glass texture was innovative because I included shapes at the correct angles to give the illusion of depth, which I also did for a later glass texture (Blackburn Tower) which I've been reusing to this day. And I think I did the window blinds in the texture such that the blinds would make a mask for the nitelites, so that the blinds would be correct at night too. But it was a long time ago so I don't remember 100%. And then the stone texture worked out well but it was more difficult to make than it needed to be and it's not how I do things nowadays. I drew the entire thing by hand in Photoshop, including the variation for each of the blocks. So after drawing the lines for the blocks (by tracing over a screenshot of one of the walls, so that everything lined up correctly), I'd use the paint bucket tool, pick a shade of grey, click on a bunch of blocks to fill them in, pick a different shade of grey, click on more blocks, and keep on doing that until every single block in the texture was uniquely shaded. Nowadays I model in the block/panel lines and give them a dark material, and then use a tool in 3ds Max to randomize the block faces automatically. Manually modeling in the panel lines can be tedious, but it's a simpler workflow (the lines occur at points which are helpful for modeling anyway) than drawing them for each facade in Photoshop, and it means the lines fit the model perfectly. 

That part isn't SC4 Lore, but yes, UNP is the United Nations Project.