Hazelfield (under construction)
@TogaMasterJohn, @tomz16, @korver, @Schulmanator, @mitsos, @Kloudkicker and @ByeByeBayou, thank you very much for your likes and follows. I'm deeply sorry for the lack of new entries since January, but real life can be so annoying even (or, especially) during lockdowns. I also wanted to take my time and use it as an opportunity to improve my mayor skills and raise the bar, by making the next town even better and more detailed than ever. Hopefully I've achieved it.
The next town is named Hazelfield and is south to Everret Green. It's on a mostly flat area, so building a big town here will be very easy.
The regional magnetic railroad is already crossing the area, so let's build a main road next to it. And yes, there is a good reason why I made a specific, flat building block right in the middle of the town.
Building a big town is very easy, just fill the entire area with roads and buildings. But this was not my goal when I started the construction of Hazelfield. My goal was to do something better, to build a big and unique town, one that would be an evolutionary step of the green futuristic towns already existed in Fairview, while still following the aims and philosophy of the region. In this case, an ecological octagonal town of the future!
Octagonal cities sounds awesome on paper, until you give it a try and attempt to build them. Then it's pain in the butt, because you'll need a mathematical formula to make the necessary calculations to build the octagonal city, and even then is almost guarantee you're gonna mess things up. 7 years ago I discovered that the best formula to will help you making almost perfect octagons is s/1.4, where s is the length of the octagon you want to build. Example below. If you want to make your own octagonal cities, give this formula a try to calculate the diagonals and don't forget to make the rounding. Oh, and keep an eye for any miscalculation results.
Making the octagon is only the one half of the challenge. Filling the octagon is the second half. I tried to come up with a beautiful and futuristic layout without disrupting the landscape too much, and I think I've got it. The overall design and the general idea behind the octagonal shape of Hazelfield is based on an actual concept, more information of it coming in the next entry, when the city will be ready. Don't worry about the roads, most of them will be replaced by streets. These are just placeholders that function as guidance map and as a way to make our road network smooth enough.
Now it's time to prepare our landscape for our urban infrastructures, by "terraforming" our area to make small flat terraces. We don't want to flat the entire area, but we don't want to just blindly build stuff to make a chaotic ugly mess either. We want a middle ground, there the town is developing nicely while respecting the environment.
Every city needs power, food, water and trash management, and Hazelnuts is not an exception, with all the necessary facilities being outside of the town.
We have already build solar plants and wind generators, so let's try something different for once and pick a different type of energy source, geothermal. Hazelfield will be running with geothermal energy, and in our next entry we'll learn more about this type of energy and its fully potentials.
Sims need food, but why wasting too much land and resources while polluting the environment with pesticides, when we can grow our food inside tall skyfarms?
A new generation of waste disposal is in our hand, this time based on advances in genetics to manage garbage. How? Next entry.
At first in this area is where I was thinking about building my skyfarms, until I discovered a small dent in this area. So I expanded this dent a bit and turn it into a small lake for Hazelfield's water needs. More of it soon.
Now that we have all the above needs covered, it's time to prepare the town by planting trees, replacing a large portion of the roads with humble streets...
...and building a tower in the middle of Hazelfield! Remember when we had to built individual police stations, fire stations, schools and hospitals? Not in this town, and maybe not anymore. Instead, we'll be using the Small City Facilities Central made by @happyapple to pack everything under the same roof. Now, I'm sure that some of you will find a tall tower in the middle of a small town unrealistic, but A) it's based on an old Japanese concept, more info about in soon, and B) are you still obsessed with realism in a futuristic landscape? I'm sorry that my towns doesn't have castles and coal power plants
And of course let's not forget the abundance of bus stops, underground pod hubs and magnetic train stations, so our Sims could go anywhere they want without the limitations of cars.
Everything is set, so it's time to remove the rail tiles and fill those gaps with zones, parks and other stuff. The problem is that in many cases I just couldn't came up with something good, and I don't know how the town and its needs will evolve during the development. Will my Sims need more houses that I've zoned? What about the rewards? If I cover all the gaps, I will probably face a situation where important improvements are required, but no empty space to do them. So I think it's better to fill some gaps, let the town go, and fill the rest of them as needed. Some work has been done though, such as lakes, paths, and tons of diagonal parks made by @mattb325
In Everret Green I tried to make a landscape as realistic and detailed as possible. But since my terrain mod changes per month, I'm going to paint the landscape based on those changes this time, hopefully to get an ever better result with even more details.
The construction of Hazelfield was a heck of a challenge, and it's not finished yet. I hope the next entry will be ready faster than this one, where the town will be fully finished and we'll take a tour in it. See you there
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