Realistic terrain in SimCity 3000

Contributor/author(s): Blaze

I don't know about you but I hate cities with unrealistic terrain. You know, the cities that are totally flat, or the cities with no trees and a straight shoreline.

Well, here's some steps to make a nice, realistic terrain.

1. Don't make a straight shoreline, it ruins the feeling of a tropical paradise or a river, jut go nuts raising the terrain around the shoreline to make it uneven (but not too uneven). Play around with it for a bit so it looks nice.
2. When making peaks and mountains, be careful not to make them look like pyramids, just make them uneven and in different shapes. For example, make a moon-shaped mountain or a mountain that slowly gets bigger as it goes in a spiral.
3. A flat terrain will look ugly unless you spice it up a bit with little hills or water, or you could have a farm town but still a hill-less, treeless terrain will look ugly.
4. Sometimes, you may see a city that has no hills in the city area. Make some hills and cover the hill ridges by trees for a nice affect. It looks really nice in a suburb, but in the downtown area it won't look that nice.
5. And finally, don't make your terrain in one huge pattern, it looks ugly. Make a hill and a body of water here and there not just a hill every 5 blocks.

I hope this information will help you make a better terrain for your cities. It will be expensive to make a perfect terrain, but you can still do it!

See also
Making realistic cities
Living with hills
Downloadable terrain editors
Simple terrain editing for dummies
Get certain terrain types with SC3K terrain generator
Realistic space terrain with Unlimited
Notes on scale
Terrain editing (in German @ the SC3K Zone)
Raising elevation by 352 meters