If you’re like me, SimCity 4 just isn’t the same without a good tree controller. When combined with a quality terrain mod, seasonal flora transforms the look of the game—even if you’re playing with plain old vanilla Maxis buildings.
There is, however, a downside to most tree controllers: they have a steep learning curve. Trying to cover a full city tile in seasonal trees can be a painstaking process. That’s especially true if you like realistic shorelines, or if want to include meadows and pastures.
Additionally, all of the seasonal flora in your city will change at exactly the same time. That can be a little jarring when your city goes from summer green to autumn orange in the snap of a finger.
This tutorial offers a handful of shortcuts to help address these problems. These shortcuts are designed to work relatively quickly. That way, you can build a beautiful landscape in a matter of minutes, instead of spending who-knows-how-many hours manicuring each square-foot of your city.
In this tutorial, we’ll be covering:
- How to cover your city with seasonal trees quickly
- How to make flora change seasons more gradually
- How to give your shorelines a more natural appearance
- How to develop natural-looking meadows and plains
And here are the mods we’ll be using:
- Blunder’s Cascadia Tree Controller (plus its dependencies)
- Cori’s Moisture DataView Mod
- Whatevermind’s Standalone Flora Brush Mod
- Girafe’s Daisies & Girafe’s Narcissus
- Lowkee33’s Appalachian Terrain Mod*
- Raymond7cn’s Cutaway Texture Mod*
*Optional, but strongly recommended! If you don’t like the Appalachian Terrain Mod, you can check out other HD terrain mods here.
In this tutorial, we'll be using CorinaMarie's Moisture DataView a couple of times.
One thing that's important to understand about this mod is that it replaces the Radiation DataView in the game. Additionally, CorinaMarie has a separate mod for an Abandoned Buildings DataView that also overrides the Radiation DataView.
Because these three DataViews use the same slot, you can only use one at a time. To use the Radiation DataView, you will need to remove the Moisture DataView from your plugins folder. You will also need to remove the Abandoned Buildings DataView, if you have this mod installed.
If you install the Moisture DataView but you cannot see the Moisture DataView in the game, this is probably because you have installed a separate DataView mod that is using the same slot. You will need to remove this mod from your plugins folder for the Moisture DataView to appear.
Step 1: Planting the Trees
Let’s start out by opening a new city tile.
The first thing we'll need to do is fast forward to autumn to start planting trees.
In the instructions for most seasonal tree controllers, the creator will tell you to plant all of your trees on September 1. This is to make sure that all of the trees change seasons at the same time.
We’re going to do things a little bit differently.
Instead of planting all of our trees at once, we’re going to plant the trees in two passes. We’re also going to plant trees in two different months. Half of our trees will be planted in October, the other half will be planted in September. This way, our trees will change seasons more gradually. Half of the trees will change seasons in one month. The other half will change seasons the next month.
For our first pass, we will fast forward to October 1 and pause the game. (Note: Any date between September 5 and October 4 will work.)
We will then use our flora brush to cover the city tile with trees. To speed things up, we’ll use Whatevermind’s Standalone Flora Brush mod, which makes the flora brush much bigger. This allows us to cover the city in trees in just a few seconds in Zoom 1.
Right now, it’s okay if you can still see gaps of grass between the trees. We’re going to fill those areas in when we get to the next step.
Next, we will fast forward to September 1 of the next year and pause the game. (Note: Any date between August 5 and September 4 will work.)
Now, we’re going to use the flora brush again to add more trees. At this point, all of the trees we planted the previous October should be green. The new trees should be autumn colored, so they will stand out against the existing greenery.
Our goal is to get a roughly 50/50 split of summer trees and autumn trees.
And we’re done planting our September trees. Now, instead of all our trees changing season at once, they will change seasons at a more gradual and natural rate.
So far so good! And it took less than five minutes to get to this point.
But now we have a bit of a problem. We’ve added trees to the city, but they're covering all of the available land. That might work in a rainforest region. But the tree-choked shorelines and lack of grassland look a little out of place in our tile.
To fix this, we're going to start by reclaiming some of the space along the shores of our city.
Step 2: Clearing the Shores
When I first started using the Cascadia Tree Controller, I didn’t like how some trees seemed to be growing right out of the water. That’s not a problem with the controller itself. Instead, it’s an issue with the game, which tells flora to grow wherever it’s wet.
This creates a bit of unrealistic look, since most seas, lakes, and rivers have beaches or banks where trees don’t grow. Banks and beaches tend to be low-lying areas where water from tides and flooding prevent large trees from growing. In SC4, it's almost impossible to plant a bunch of trees quickly without having trees grow on these areas.
At first, I tried to create beaches and river banks manually using the Bulldozer tool. However, this took a lot of time to get right, and I was never happy with the results. My shores always looked kind of blocky and unnatural, no matter what I tried.
That's when I decided to try using CorinaMarie's Moisture DataView Mod! This mod maps out SimCity 4’s moisture levels, which makes it a perfect guide to low-lying shorelines and flood-prone riverbanks.
To access the Moisture DataView, we’ll need to establish our city so that we can use the Mayor Mode tools.
Now, let's zoom in a bit.
In the screenshot below, we can see how the trees have grown right up against the edge of the river bank.
Next, we’ll open up the Moisture DataView, which indicates wetter areas in blue. All of the blue and blue-green areas along the shorelines represent the river banks where we want to get rid of the trees. At this point, we’ll select the Bulldozer tool. Using the Moisture DataView as a guide, we’ll start to clear the trees from the river bank.
If you want narrow river banks, you can bulldoze trees from only the dark blue areas. I prefer wider banks, so I’m going to bulldoze some of the mid-tone blue-green areas as well.
Using the Moisture DataView as a guide, it takes only a minute or two to clear up one side of the river.
And here’s what the entire city tile looks like once we’ve cleaned up all of the shorelines.
If you like, you can use seasonal flora (like cattails) or ploppable props (like rocks and driftwood) to decorate the river banks at this point.
However, that takes time, and I promised this would be quick. So let's move on to the meadows.
Step 3: Creating the Meadows
As Smokey Bear is fond of reminding us, only you can prevent forest fires. The good news—at least for our purposes—is that you also have the power to start them.
Instead of relying on the Bulldozer tool to make our meadows, we’re going to create them by dropping lit matches and burning cigarettes in some very irresponsible places. The neat thing about this technique is that it’s actually true to life. A lot of meadows and grasslands are created when a disaster (such as a wildfire) clears an area of trees.
Before creating any meadows, I’d recommend saving your city. This way, if you don’t like the results, you can easily start over.
To begin, we’ll open up the Disasters panel and select the Fire tool. Then, we’ll pick the starting spot for our meadow and light a few fires.
Unlike real forest fires, ours won’t spread to many other trees. So once the first set of trees have burned off, we’ll start spreading fires to surrounding trees.
We’ll keep repeating this process until we’ve created a clearing that we’re happy with.
By this point, there should be a number of trees left over from the fires. We’ll keep a few clusters for our meadow, but we’ll use the bulldozer tool to clear out any trees we don’t want. (If we want to, we can also get rid of some of the burned stumps from the fire.)
And here’s the result once we've tidied things up:
If you don’t like using the Fire tool, there are three other ways to achieve similar results.
1. The first option is to simply use the Bulldozer tool. For meadows, I recommend against dragging the Bulldozer across large areas, since this will lead to unnatural-looking rectangles. Instead, I suggest simply click around a bunch to clear out patches more organically.
This is basically the same technique as the Fire tool, but with the Bulldozer instead.
Personally, I prefer using the Fire tool because it's less visually obtrusive, so it's easier for me to get a sense of how I'm developing my meadows. I also find that the Fire tool creates more natural edges to meadows when I use it.
2. The second option is to use another, little-used Disaster tool: the Autosaurus Rex.
The Autosaurus will clear out large areas of trees quickly, and you can guide it to make sure it creates meadows in the shape you want. If you use it correctly, this mechanical monster can deliver some surprisingly attractive results. If you want, you can even set a few fires along the edge of the Autosaurus meadows to create some more natural looking edges.
3. CorinaMarie has created a mod called Cori's Flora Eraser Brush which can be used to remove flora. This brush gives you the ability to change its size, making it great for precision flora removal or clearing out large areas all at once. You can download the Flora Eraser Brush here.
Now, if you like the look of open grassland, you can stop right here and start building your city.
Personally, I prefer to have some flowers in my meadows—I just don't like to spend a bunch of time planting each flower one-by-one. Luckily, this is another area where the Moisture DataView can speed things up.
To add flowers to our meadows, we’ll use Girafe’s seasonal daisies and narcissus, which are available from the Mayor Mode flora menu.
Unlike most seasonal flora, Girafe’s flowers need to be planted in the spring. So we’ll starting by fast forwarding to March 1 of the next year.
Next, we’ll re-open the Moisture DataView and examine the meadow. (You may notice that the moisture patterns are different than they were in the fall. The changing patterns are a feature of the game’s moisture simulation.)
Right now, we’re looking for any blue or darker green areas in our meadow. These are the wettest parts of our meadow, which makes them prime targets for flower fields.
To add the flowers, we'll start with Girafe’s seasonal daisies. At this point, you can click and drag to paint the daisies across the wet areas by moving your mouse slowly back and forth. We don’t need to be precise at this stage. We just want to make sure that the wet areas have a thick carpet of daisies. Using slow, click-and-drag movements will create a dense area of flora.
After we’ve filled in the wettest areas, we’ll fill in other parts of the field with more flowers. We want the flowers to get sparser as we move away from the wettest areas. To do this, we'll use the same click-and-drag technique to paint the flowers across the grass—just move your mouse back and forth more quickly over these areas.
First we'll do a pass with the seasonal daisies. Then we'll do another pass with the seasonal narcissus, filling in gaps between the daisies. The result should look something like this:
It can be hard to tell the difference between the daisies and the narcissus in the above screenshot. To see the difference more clearly, let’s fast forward to the month of June, when Girafe’s flowers are in full bloom.
I’ve covered a large part of the meadow with flowers, but I’ve intentionally left some areas grassy. Here you can see how the flowers get sparser toward these areas.
And if we Zoom out, you can see how the entire meadow looks while in bloom.
That just about wraps things up. We’ve applied a bunch of seasonal trees quickly. We’ve made it so that they change seasons more gradually. We’ve created some natural shores and riverbanks using the Moisture DataView. And we’ve added a pleasant meadow with some flower fields.
All in all, the whole process took about 20 minutes.
It’s a small city tile, so that makes things a little easier. Larger cities will take more time, especially if you're adding large sections meadows. But these techniques should give you a much faster way to get the job done.
Wondering what the final results look like?
Here’s a gif showing how our city appears throughout the year...
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