New population record attempt!

[THijSCiTy 141]

Hey peoples, sims and devotees!

After breaking the population record of Magnasanti in SimCity 3000 I decided to do another attempt in SimCity 4!
As far I know, the current record stands by a city named "Breath of the dying" by XCity sitting on about 34 million residents on a big city tile.
However, it's impossible these days to find any information back about this city made somewhere in 2021, but I still got the city files from back then on my harddrive.
Does anybody know if there has been a (re)new(ed) attempt by now?
I am  aiming my city to have about 39 million population, but I will try to achieve the maximum possible, hopefully there are more people who like to do such challenge.

After about 3-4 months of preparation, I think im finally able to say construction has commenced, I will reveal no details yet as I want to surprise 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Are there any rules for your attempt? Is it an isolated single large city tile for the whole region? Or does it have neighbors which can provide tons of outside jobs? What about modded buildings? NAM? Etc? 

[THijSCiTy 141]

5 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Are there any rules for your attempt? Is it an isolated single large city tile for the whole region? Or does it have neighbors which can provide tons of outside jobs? What about modded buildings? NAM? Etc? 

Oh, wow good you did mention this.
Initially my city would have no neighbor tiles, but at least I wanted to break the absolute population numbers record in general.
Neighboring cities will provide tons of jobs to support this megapolis, but I will use no mods that are NAM, colossus etc, all buildings will have the vanilla game stats when the city is finished, but I use graph enhancements, the repository vault etc to closely monitor the progress of my work and all changes, but those things will have no effect on the released city files when it is done, I wonder how I can export an entire region though as people would need to manually reassemble it, and I want to make it easy for others to see to result, but making a solo city tile with max population without external factors is a very interesting and challenging aspect, I would for ease of life be needed to extend the lifespan of utilities to infinite to not be bothered by continuous renewals and restore the utilities to original stats when I release the map.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, THijSCiTy said:

I use graph enhancements, the repository vault etc to closely monitor the progress

Perfectly reasonable. Nothing wrong with that at all. You could include FUN too if you haven't already.

 

1 hour ago, THijSCiTy said:

I wonder how I can export an entire region

Just go to that folder and zip up all the city tile files, the config.bmp, and the region.ini. Elsewhere on the STEX we do allow complete regions that way so yours can fit the same criteria. I think we've (CB and me) set a soft limit of 50 or 100 mb, but we can often be convinced to make an exception for special cases.

 

1 hour ago, THijSCiTy said:

I would for ease of life be needed to extend the lifespan of utilities to infinite to not be bothered by continuous renewals and restore the utilities to original stats when I release the map.

Very early on I found Paeng's Age Degradation Mod and selected the Degrade Radical set. That means they last about 5,000 years. Once I learned to mod for myself I would tweak any other CC I downloaded to simply never degrade at all. I always intended to do the same for the ones in Paeng's mod, but never did since 5,000 years is actually a very long time.

As far as resetting them before releasing your map: I'd say no need. Just slap in linkys to the mods you've used and call it a day. Anyone else who might decide to challenge you for the most population can simply play by the rules you establish.

Now what about mods that fix borked items? IHT-Fix? Seems legit and you should allow it. Solar Plant Jobs? Clinic Jobs? Seems like there is one other jobs one? Opera House Fix? And so on and so forth. I believe it's perfectly fine to cherry pick all the mods that have a reasonable reason to be used and just say that is your baseline for the project.

[IDS2 3,346]

This is an interesting experiment. I haven't ever tried to assemble the theoretical best case scenario, but I did take a partial stab at it once. For this attempt, I created a set of 1x1 cheat lots to provide jobs to avoid the congestion headache of everyone having to commute to neighboring tiles. I was running the NAM, and I believe the radical ordinance mod, but no CAM.

Since I didn't fully terraform everything flat to achieve the perfect grid, I would suppose that I could get closer to ~20 million if I filled in all of the water. The best I've ever gotten on a small tile is 1,318,119; extrapolating that to a large city tile gives 21,089,904, so the ~20 million figure more or less checks out.

I would suppose that, in theory, you could achieve greater density by replacing all of the buildings here with Ong Condos that had fully dilapidated to RS$ from RS$$$. Looks like the building capacity in that case is 20,778 on a 4x4 lot, which would give you the greatest density on a sims per tile basis out of all of the vanilla buildings.

 

[Kel9509 1,363]

2 hours ago, IDS2 said:

I would suppose that, in theory, you could achieve greater density by replacing all of the buildings here with Ong Condos that had fully dilapidated to RS$ from RS$$$. Looks like the building capacity in that case is 20,778 on a 4x4 lot, which would give you the greatest density on a sims per tile basis out of all of the vanilla buildings.

I had no idea that one building in vanilla SimCity could hold 20,000 residents (when dilapidated).  Crazy.  According to the SimCity Building Index, it's a stage 7 building and normally supports about 5,000 R$$$ residents on a 4x4 lot.  How could that not be a Stage 8 building?  Does that building actually grow?

I assume this challenge is for growth, right?  

[THijSCiTy 141]

@CorinaMarie you mean with fun, Fun supply aka popcap?
@IDS2 wow cool thats much pop on that small tile!

@Kel9509 woa yes, you probably mention ONG condos, well despite having such insane amount of pop when demoted, its very problematic with traffic because without mods, traffic goes into congestion immediately nomatter what you do, so I try my focus on population density overall with smaller buildings.


 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

6 hours ago, THijSCiTy said:

@CorinaMarie you mean with fun, Fun supply aka popcap?

FUN  

[THijSCiTy 141]

8 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

FUN  

Oh I just put the moolah money cheat to get simoleans and put budget to optimal, I have no time for that, hehe =)

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

On 19.10.2025 at 4:16 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Are there any rules for your attempt?

That was my first thought too. The key consideration is the size of the map itself and the fact that there are no two exact regions in this game!

There is really no such thing as a population record in SC4, because every region, will have different potential for "highest" population. You can have a region with 50 million people that is built on a comparatively small but completely flat field. You can also have a region with the same amount of population that is built on a vast region but one which consists entirely of islands.

It's like saying I beat record at running because I finished the run in 20 seconds (without saying whether it was 200, 110 or 400 meters that I ran).

I'm not discouraging you @THijSCiTy or berating your idea. Just challenging it from a strictly academic perspective. 

Perhaps it could be a nice idea to create a forum thread especially for the purpose of record beating with a selection of 5 - 8 maps and clearly stated conditions regarding which mods can be used. This could be a record book of sorts.

[AneriphtoKubos 13]

I mean, I'm sure that there is a 'Largest Filled SimCity 4 Region Record'