Tom Thumb's SC4 Questions

[Tom Thumb 4]

Yes, I'm new here so please bear with me.  I've read a lot, but never signed up to comment before.  A few questions.  One is when CorinaMarie said she'd experienced the game crashing to desktop and thought it to be when vehicles were spawned at the military base as one of the causes IIRC.  How would one ascertain somethjng like this unless just happened to be looking at the moment?  

I see debate about whether or not traffic noise significantly affects willingness to live in a building or not, some say if everything else is favorable (low crime, high school grades, low commute time, high hospital grades) that it's minimal.  Others say not.  Has this debate ever been settled?  

Along those lines:  Are freeways lower noise than the monorail?  It seems the monorail makes a lot of noise.  

Does it pay to build freeways?  So far I have not, just used monorails and it seems to work out pretty well.  

I have a building that is  § § §  but that has decayed to  § § presumably because my school grade was low.  The school grade is now high so will the third  § ever return?  

Someone said that Sims will travel to a neighboring tile for jobs but not to that neighboring tile to a third, yet I swear (unless I am somehow missing something basic which is possible) I have City A with passenger trains traveling south through City B to City C.  I say this because I have two train tracks entering City B from A that I merged together into a single track heading south to City C, and the sum of the traffic in the single track heading to City C strongly suggest that there are Sims heading from City A through City B all the way through to City C.  

One thread here said that one could make a region with as many tiles as one wants, but I've found that if I make one large enough that it crashes to desktop when loading.  Is it just that they have a computer with more capabilities?  This is more academic question because I have made ones that load reliably that could keep one occupied for a lifetime, but a curiosity nonetheless.   

I've bunches of questions, but I'll just leave it at this for now.  

 

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

2 hours ago, Tom Thumb said:

Yes, I'm new here so please bear with me.

Hiya! Welcome to posting.  

I've split your post out into its own topic. You've got so many questions I feel they need a home of their own rather than lost and buried in the Quick Questions thread.

Also, I don't have time for full replies now, but I'll just touch on a couple or three things.

 

2 hours ago, Tom Thumb said:

CorinaMarie said she'd experienced the game crashing to desktop and thought it to be when vehicles were spawned at the military base as one of the causes IIRC.

I do recall this and I'd like to re-find it. I believe there's some context there which explains it better. I believe that the trouble was when I was coding and tweaking the Lua generator and attractors and I myself had something wrong. It made it difficult to troubleshoot because all was well until the spawning of military vehicles cause the CTD.

If you can post a linky to what I said, there might be more details. I do seem to recall it was a self-created Snafu rather than a game problem.  

 

2 hours ago, Tom Thumb said:

I have City A with passenger trains traveling south through City B to City C.

They most certainly can do that. They can go even farther. I've had them go thru 22 city tiles and create an eternal loop. (There's a DLL now that will prevent that.) But yes, they can certainly travel as you've seen. 

 

2 hours ago, Tom Thumb said:

Is it just that they have a computer with more capabilities?

Someone else prolly remembers the specifics, but there are limits indeed. The good thing is what is still possible can be more than enough to last years and years trying to fill it up.

 

I'm following along and might get a chance to post more if needed another day.

[Tom Thumb 4]

51 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'm following along and might get a chance to post more if needed another day.

Well, thanks for the reply.  I look forward to, when you get a chance, if you'd touch on the freeway vs. monorail question I had, but you basically covered everything else.  If I dig up that part about the military base I'll send a link, but I'm sure you are correct that it was an experiment gone awry rather than inherent to the game.  I just couldn't recall the details.  I've read a lot on here, and haven't been able to put it all in the permanent memory banks.    

[Tom Thumb 4]

6 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

They most certainly can do that. They can go even farther. I've had them go thru 22 city tiles and create an eternal loop. (There's a DLL now that will prevent that.) But yes, they can certainly travel as you've seen. 

 

Do you recall specifically what DLL accomplishes this?  I've read some about this, and it seems the infinite traffic loop can be quite a hassle.  

[rsc204 21,805]

It's the NAM.DLL which is part of the NAM 50 Beta release, which is only available through SC4Pac currently.

[Tom Thumb 4]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

It's the NAM.DLL which is part of the NAM 50 Beta release, which is only available through SC4Pac currently.

I went over to your YT channel, and there you have a video from a couple months ago about building roundabouts.  It reminded me about someone mentioning there is a compact roundabout for monorails that one just drops in instead of having to build them, although it seems if I do one curved connection at each intersection it seems the trains can go any of the other three directions.  

Off on a tangent here, but speaking of the NAM, do you know why the decision was made to take the Traffic Simulator Settings out of NAM?  It seems many liked to tinker with that and do miss it.  

Anyway, thanks for your reply, it was a help.  

[nos.17 5,112]

6 hours ago, Tom Thumb said:

Off on a tangent here, but speaking of the NAM, do you know why the decision was made to take the Traffic Simulator Settings out of NAM?  It seems many liked to tinker with that and do miss it.  

The short answer is that it was discovered that many of the settings didn't do what they said they would do, and some of the adjustments could actually have negative effects on a city. The simulator was also improved and made a bit smarter, rendering a lot of these changes unnecessary today. There's a bit more info in the NAM docs: https://www.sc4nam.com/docs/feature-guides/the-NAM-traffic-simulator/#TSCT

[rsc204 21,805]

On 18/01/2026 at 1:15 PM, Tom Thumb said:

It reminded me about someone mentioning there is a compact roundabout for monorails that one just drops in instead of having to build them, although it seems if I do one curved connection at each intersection it seems the trains can go any of the other three directions.  

Generally speaking most monorail content is built by simply dragging the monorail tool, the only ploppable or puzzle pieces are limited to the L4 or High Elevated monorail and some special pieces for crosslinks.

The vanilla game (without NAM), does create a roundabout when you cross NS and EW lines and make connections between them as tight as possible:

In fact, you can also do the same with both regular rail and elevated rail networks also. However, NAM removes this setup because it's totally unrealistic for rails, but orders of magnitude more so for a high speed monorail line. In short its very unrealistic and was felt the inner roundabout should be altered just to make diagonal connections instead.

[Tom Thumb 4]

I'm having a new problem now.  I got a large city (256 by 256 tiles) up to about 1 million people.  Despite having more than adequate water volume, it started getting a patch that didn't have water.  I looked up some stuff and some thought it was if one routed near something polluting it would, so to speak, seep into the pipes and cause outages in areas.  I routed it around the red dots of undesireability at the medical research and advanced research centers.  This didn't seem to help.  I have the pumping stations in the upper left (northwest, I suppose) corner and another in the upper right and two more near the bottom of the map.  I have plenty of of water treatment plants so I don't think pollution is the problem.  I did replace all of the water pumps at once, and this did solve the problem but 7 years later the problem re-occurred.  I ran extra pipes in the area where the outage occurs and it goes away there but then pops up a short distance away making it feel like whack-a-mole. 

I'm being specific as I know how on this.  Does any of this ring a bell?  If you have a specific question to help narrow it down ask away.   

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

• Do you have any neighbor water deals?
• Can you set the water usage graph to 50 years and post a screenshot?
• If you plunk down a new large capacity water pump, does it take longer before the trouble arises?

 

[Tom Thumb 4]

6 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

• Do you have any neighbor water deals?
• Can you set the water usage graph to 50 years and post a screenshot?
• If you plunk down a new large capacity water pump, does it take longer before the trouble arises?

No water deals.  A large water pump as contrasted with several small ones or contrasted with an old large water pump?  In any case, I did replace every single large water pump and the problem went away but came up again in seven years although that could be coincidence.  

I've included a screen shot of the graph, and another two that show the water outage, note the red band, it was more extensive but I exited without saving.  It also happened on a neighboring new city I started when the population reached 400k.  I just exited that without saving out of frustration, but if it happens again (and it might help) I could take a screen shot then.  Anyway, I hope what I do have helps.  

 

 

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

As you'll already know, the graph shows your total water supply has been more than adequate all along.  

The water view with that narrow band of unwatered land often happens when a particular water pump gets overwhelmed, but it certainly looks like all of you pipes connect to all others so they should take up the slack if there is any. 

The whole whack-a-mole part (when placing more pipes) is just how the game reacts when the requests are like 105% of capacity. While you have the brown strip and the water shortage, are there any pumps or towers which show 90% or more usage? Based on the water graph, I'd expect them all to be around 67% so I'm wondering if there is just one that's way over that.

And, perhaps, the unwatered strip is about equal distance from all of the pumps? Maybe it's like the power glitch where a route traveled over more than 127 cells is flaky? I'd try plopping a Maxis Water Tower right near those and running time and watch its usage percent and see if the moles still need whacked. (You don't need to save it like that, but just run it as an experiment.)

[Tom Thumb 4]

Thanks.  I'll give that a try.  

[Tom Thumb 4]

Plopping another pumping station down did work in the first city I had the problem in, but not in the second one.  It's odd given that I had already had several cities going without this problem.  

[Tom Thumb 4]

Another weird thing is that a city became eligible for the hydrogen plant, I plopped a couple of those down and then deleted some natural gas plants and tried to plop down a third and it wasn't available.  The demand for electricity was high enough, but the high tech population was under 4,000.  The weird part is that the hydrogen plant didn't become available again after the high tech pop went back above 4k.  

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

3 minutes ago, Tom Thumb said:

The weird part is that the hydrogen plant didn't become available again after the high tech pop went back above 4k.  

Grrr.

I presume saving, exiting to Region, then reentering doesn't re-trigger it either? 

[Tom Thumb 4]

On 01/02/2026 at 7:20 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Grrr.

I presume saving, exiting to Region, then reentering doesn't re-trigger it either? 

I'll have to try that if I encounter the hydrogen plant problem.  

As far as the water problem, I thought I might've solved it when it popped up, I exited without saving, added a bunch of water treatment plants so that water pollution was zero even away from pumps.   Then the problem popped up again when I added a high volume pumping station.  

Could it be some weird glitch of having a lot of capacity over and above the required water volume?  I'm kind of grabbing at straws here, I realize.  

[Tom Thumb 4]

On 01/02/2026 at 10:51 AM, CorinaMarie said:

As you'll already know, the graph shows your total water supply has been more than adequate all along.  

The water view with that narrow band of unwatered land often happens when a particular water pump gets overwhelmed, but it certainly looks like all of you pipes connect to all others so they should take up the slack if there is any. 

The whole whack-a-mole part (when placing more pipes) is just how the game reacts when the requests are like 105% of capacity. While you have the brown strip and the water shortage, are there any pumps or towers which show 90% or more usage? Based on the water graph, I'd expect them all to be around 67% so I'm wondering if there is just one that's way over that.

And, perhaps, the unwatered strip is about equal distance from all of the pumps? Maybe it's like the power glitch where a route traveled over more than 127 cells is flaky? I'd try plopping a Maxis Water Tower right near those and running time and watch its usage percent and see if the moles still need whacked. (You don't need to save it like that, but just run it as an experiment.)

Some problems are fun, or at least not a nuisance, to deal with, but this water problem really is tending to take the fun out of the game.  I'm perplexed.  

[Tom Thumb 4]

I tinker some more with the water problem, and it a less grabbing at straws sort of way, I think the problem might be happening due to some weird loop of pipes forming when putting the new water pumps in a grid of rows and columns.  I tried putting them in just a single file line and it seems to reliably solve it, fingers crossed.  

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

43 minutes ago, Tom Thumb said:

I tried putting them in just a single file line and it seems to reliably solve it, fingers crossed.

Here's hoping! It seems like an odd glitch of some sort.

In the past 10 years I only vaguely recall a couple or three water problems and one of those was for a dual purpose lot. It was set to produce water and clean it too so there were two connections underground and the one for the sewer looked way more like it should be the water pump connection and so peeps were hooking up there and leaving the other one unconnected and so the water that one produced only spread out 7 cells around it, but because of massive pipes everywhere it looked connected in the water data view.

^ That rambling story just in case you might have something like that going on.  

And, ofc, if so you'd see its usage at a very low percent like 1% or 5% or such.

[Lab Rat 12]

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