Downloadable terrain editors in SimCity 3000

Contributor/author(s): Andy Stuart

Andy Stuart discusses some popular 3rd-party terrain editors below. For more links to terrain editors, see also Files & Media.

One of the most disappointing things about SC3K is the lack of a terrain editor. It seems that there are few options when you want to make your own terrain. You can make a bitmap in a paint file and then load it, but it is incredibly hard to see those subtle shades of gray-black. Some people even make SC3K terrains with the SC2K editor. However, this limits you to a measly 128x128 block.

But mope not SC3K players. You can get two fine terrain builders on line. One is made by Tenermerx, the other by CyberWire. Both are found at www.tenermerx.com/sc3maped.

Neither is perfect, and neither is as useful to SC3K as the SC2K's terrain editor was to SC2K; but they are better than the other alternatives.

They work best when used in conjunction. The CyberWire editor has many useful specialty tools, such as the canyon tool, but is not great for simple terrain leveling and raising. It suffers badly from a small terrain display with colors that don't contrast.

The Tenermerx editor can be tedious, but it will do anything you want. It has a great mountain tool and a magic wand tool that allows you to make mountains, lakes, rivers and mesas in any shape.

I use the CyberWire tools to create basic land forms such as canyons [which don't have to be a mile deep; they can be 13 meters deep]. Then I fine tune the land and build mountains in Tenermerx. To load the terrain, press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C. The cheat window will appear. Type in "Load terrain <path to your bitmap>". Example: "Load terrain A:\terrain.bmp" Both programs automatically save your terrains as a bitmap.

My first terrain editor city is available in the City Center. It is called Colorado and is based on Colorado Springs.

Note: you need WinZip (or a similar zip extraction tool) to download the CyberWire editor, but not the Tenermerx.

See also
Generating custom terrain from bitmaps
Terrain generation with Photoshop 4.0
Simple terrain editing for dummies
Realistic terrain
Terrain importing utilities and resources