Entry 47 -- Pololomia- Mowden (East Pololomia)

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Entry posted by The British Sausage · May 29, 2019

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mattb325: That's all I do- use what's given from the content creators. I don't use the Lot Editor you see and that's my motto. Anyway, thanks for your comment and I'm looking forward to more of those FA buildings, they're a <real> gamechanger!

Tyberius06: Thanks! Just wait until I've added a sprinkling of small rocks and wildflowers in those forests!

raynev1: Thanks for that. FYI I use Ennedi's slope mod; it comes with three different maximum gradients and I use the middle one. Link here- https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1512

kschmidt: Thank you! The rock and dirt textures in the Sudden Valley mod are gorgeous and mattb325's houses are gorgeous too; I carefully designed the areas so that there wasn't any retaining walls to be seen. You are right about the industrial retaining walls; I will explore some more natural looking cobblestone ones, unfortunately these retaining walls don't have fences which adapt to the slope and so it makes it look weird.

Garbanzo: Thank you! The core city of Cindersville is almost done; the last half is sprucing up the forests with a sprinkling of small rocks, wildflowers and forest scenes.

Bayyne23: Thanks for that! Also- welcome to Simtropolis!

VicRusty: Cheers! But it will be even more beautiful once the city is complete and I've finished putting into the forests all those little details: rocks, flowers, etc.

Vigilante1987: Most of that fencing comes from the retaining walls next to the road; I use them to hide the cliff face. I like to think they're there for safety and to prevent rock falls onto the road.

BlueCloud: It's my most ambitious city because I usually build on flat tiles, it's also ambitious because of: fractionally angled city blocks, buildings and roads; massive sloped suburbs; every single building plopped in and/or carefully selected to give each area that right look. Thanks for your comment!

911Diva: Thanks! And... That's Mr. The British Sausage!

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Entry 47: Pololomia- Mowden (East Pololomia)

In this entry we go back to Pololomia and to one last suburb which hasn't been shown yet. This suburb is on the outskirts of East Pololomia and on the fringes there emerge farm fields and pasture land; so this entry is chock full of greenery!

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And this is the Mowden suburb.

I named it Mowden because there is an area in my home town of Darlington called Mowden.

Most of the zones are 3 by 3 squares wide or 3 by 4 squares wide.

Where there are gaps in the zoning I use tree fillers.

With each suburb I lay out a large city block and it is defined by the main roads (in black).

And most of the main roads link up to the cities transport "arteries": avenues, motorways or two-laned roads (like the one in the bottom of this picture).

Railway lines are one of the main ways I divide up cities- just like in real life.

These 5x5 apartment blocks are lots created by T Wrecks: they are very useful and very slope-tolerant!

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The trick with creating varied suburbs is creating an interesting street layout within the suburban city block.

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It's not enough to lay down a grid of residential zones...

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One way is to go diagonal, but there are other more subtle ways too...

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A realistic feature to add is cul-de-sacs; streets which lead to dead ends.

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Diagonals and Simcoug's Diagonal Houses can help break the grid-like monotony too if one is feeling adventurous.

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But the best suburbs should have a real labyrinth of streets and dead-ends...

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The next tricky thing about suburbs is when they bump into the countryside.

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But there are ways of creating realistic transitions from suburbs to countryside.

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The most obvious way is to create farms and large fields.

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Now the zoneable farm fields are decent, however I am often put off by how uniform they look.

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Thus I use MMPs: I plop in various plants/flowers to create farm fields. I'll explain more about the advantages of this method in the next entry where you can see this method in full action!

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This Saturday we're having a look at the M7 motorway which runs into south-eastern Pololomia. Along the way there are plenty of fields and MMPs!

Enjoy, and thanks again for all the comments and interest in the last entry.

From here on outwards the next several entries are going to be very interesting and very different from each other: I've got a city centre entry to show, a rather unique countryside village, the 50th entry milestone of this CJ, the 51st entry being a best-of where I select the best three pictures from each entry and talk a bit about them, then four more entries from a newer city tile called Madison Plains.

Once I'm done with all that then Cindersville should be ready.

And after Cindersville what then? Two projects: one is Thirlmere and a Lake District inspired area, the other is what I call "The Big Mango"- a loose recreation of New York where I go 100% urban; this ain't Korver-style uber-realistic, but, you'll see in a few months time...

That's the schedule!