I crammed lots of easter eggs on the map, but they are more apparent on the transportation view: both AoT and non-AoT easter eggs, some are pretty obvious, and a few that are not as obvious. Among the most notable, starting from north to south:

“Hexagonopolis” inspired by the article Hexagonal Planning in Theory and Practice, which is a fun longread btw – there’s also this video by City Beautiful on YouTube dissecting the linked article. The elevated highway snaking through the adjacent hexagonal neighborhoods on the satellite view resembles the hallucigenia “source of all living matter”.

Nearby we have the sinusoidal waveform, Celtic knot, universal ‘S’, feng shui bagua inside the massive crop circle, hypercube/tesseract, DNA double-helix, and spiral farms. That northern grid city where the highways intersect is one of my more ambitious attempts to shepherd the dumbo vanilla commuters – we’ll go into it in more detail in a later entry with better zoomed-in screencaps.

For the inverted 5-pointed star, I would like to pre-emptively apologize for any unintended unfortunate meaning. I had originally wanted it to resemble Captain America’s shield and put it that way just so it would look better on the isometric regional view, not for summoning lemons or anything like that.

Moving on with the rest of the northern landmarks, there is a 3x3 Rubik’s cube and a smaller version of Hexagonopolis with diagonal neighborhoods on its outskirts.

One of the most striking landmarks is the huge circle inspired by the concentric zone model of city planning as well as of course the three walls of Maria, Rose, and Sina from the series. I was planning to develop it more to build a cluster of skyscrapers in the innermost circle around the John Hancock Center, but never got around to doing it so it ended up looking like Isengard and Orthanc from Lord of the Rings.

Lastly, we have the giant Star of Eldia composed of farm lots subdivided by streets, and an industrial area that resembles the wings of freedom (or Eren’s founding titan) along the east bank of the southern river as it flows south through Shiganshina. Which is quite fitting now that I think about it, I had the most freedom with laying out industrial zones, since the individual lots within the zones don’t require direct road access and only care about distance from the nearest road. I could just construct diagonal road grids then do the click-and-hold zoning shortcut to fill in the diagonal blocks, while also holding the shift key to suppress street creation within the block.

Likewise with farm lots, which can be sculpted into any shape as long as they have at least one tile touching the street. By “sculpting”, I mean laying out a huge rectangular farm lot all at once while again holding the shift key to remove streets, then using the dezone tool to remove 1-tile wide segments of agriculutral zones, and the click-and-hold dezone trick to remove large non-rectangular areas after sculpting, to whittle down the edges and to carve the partitions between farm lots, then optionally filling in the dezoned tiles with mayor mode and/or god mode trees to conceal the janky corner tiles.

That is also how I got the “center-pivot irrigation” circle farms: zone a large area, place any building with a radius, adjust the funding to the desired size, then toggle on the radius while de-zoning tiles along the circumference. That trick works for small-medium sized circles, but for large circles of arbitrary size - as in extending across multiple city tiles like Isengard described above - we’ll go back to it later.

If dezoning agricultural zones is not your thing, I believe there is a mod that removes the minimum size of agricultural zones enabling you to zone farms as small as one tile for this same purpose, but they still won’t develop until they reach the minimum size of at least 4x6 I think. Similarly, there is a “Pedriana killer” mod that prevents the ugly-looking Pedriana’s Plants building from appearing, but this can be worked around without the mod by strategically de-zoning every fourth 1x1 tile along the side of the agricultural zone where it touches the road, such that there is no 4x4 area for the building to spawn since all farm buildings require a road connection, but this also blocks the larger farm buildings from appearing.