vortical

I'm not quite clear on what you are trying to accomplish here. Are you simply trying to add pedestrian routes (the paths the game uses to determine where people walk, not the visible asset). If so, there is an existing mod that lets you do that (and a whole lot more). Take a look at the Advanced Building Mod.

That is rather surprising. If that variable is not used to determine whether or not an asset is available in the editor then I wonder what it is for? There has to be a variable SOMEWHERE that the code uses to determine what shows up in the editor. I mean, they wouldn't have been so dense as to hard code something like that right?

I think I might have cracked the puzzle. I was looking at some of the transport buildings in an actual game using ModTools. I noticed that all the buildings that are available in the Asset Editor have a value of 'GameAndAsset' for the variable 'Item+Availability'. The buildings that don't show up (including the cargo buildings). have a value of 'All'. I wonder if mabey this is a bug and the 'All' category is not working as intended. The bad news is, that variable is not editable anywhere in ModTools, at least as far as I can tell. What I need now is a brave soul who is willing to go mucking around in the hex files. I simply don't know enough to risk changing things at that level.

Another thing I've been considering is trying to figure out what is responsible for determining whether or not an asset is available in the asset editor. If it is possible to toggle a hex value in the vanilla cargo station that makes it available in the AE, it would make this whole discussion moot.

I'm fairly sure you are correct ethan. I think I have all the tools needed now to pull this off, it is just a matter of actually getting everything working together. Advanced Building Mod allows paths and spawners to be placed in the asset editor. Building AI Changer allows the building ai to be set to a cargo station. If I get time, I may take another crack at actually getting this fully functional.

Yeah, I had wondered about that. It looked like the building was working but I didn't see any trucks spawning. Is there a way to edit that stuff in the asset editor or is there a third party tool?

You are a genius! I finally decided to try your suggestion and it worked like a charm. If you are interested, here is my 'swapped' station: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=455900706

I may look into that if I can't figure out something better. What I don't understand is why cago buildings are not available for editing like any other asset in the game.

I decided to dive into the asset editor today and I thought I would start with a custom cargo terminal. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it anywhere. Both the freight station and freight port seem to be missing. Is there any way to edit these buildings or would it require a full blown mod? Any help would be appreciated.

Take a look at your population panel (right next to the budget where it shows you the number of sims). Look at the number of available jobs vs the available workers for each wealth category. Each building, whether ploppable or zoned, requires a certain number of workers from each wealth category. My guess is, it's not the education level of the sims that is your problem. By building those nice services like healthcare and schools, you raised the surrounding land value and your residential upgraded to medium or high wealth. So now you do not have enough low wealth sims in your city to work those factory jobs and run your services.

Have you tried slowing the game speed down to watch how your trains are actually behaving? I've seen similar behavior and I suspect it has to do with having multiple stations in series on a single line. From what I've seen, trains tend to pickup/drop off from the first station they reach regardless of how many people are waiting at each station. Trains also seem to switch from inbound to outbound as soon as they pick up passengers, even if they have additional unfilled capacity. So you could have 5 people at station 1 and 200 people at station 2 and the first train to arrive will pick up those 5 people and head back to the region without ever reaching station 2. The only way those people at the second station ever get picked up is if another train comes in while station 1 is empty. Every additional station you put on the line exacerbates the problem. If you have the cash (and the space) try splitting that single rail line into 3 parallel lines and put a single station on each one. Alternately, you could also create a little siding for each station just long enough to plop the building on. The important thing is that you don't have any stations attached directly to the main line and 'blocking' access to the other station.

I ran into some unusual behavior in my rail system recently and I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this. I had a single line of rail running from my city border to the coast where my port was located (no loops anywhere just a straight shot). The layout went City Border -> Passenger Station-> freight terminal. I noticed that my trade port wasn't receiving any shipments by rail, even after everything was open and working. I opened up the rail map to see what was going on. Every train, regardless of whether it was freight or passenger, would get to my passenger station and stop, do that strange little teleport onto the rails going the other direction, and proceed back OUT of my city. So the trains carrying resources to my port were getting turned around before they ever reached the freight terminal. Just for giggles, I decided to create a little siding and rebuild my passenger station on that. Suddenly everything started working. The passengers got off at their station and the freight trains stayed on the main line to my port. As I said, has anyone else run into this? Is this a bug or working as intended?

Turns out we were both right. I managed to solve the issue last night by playing around with the layout of my industry and residential. At some point I demolished just enough dirty industry for some of the dense R (which I had accidently put down in place of M R) to take off. Once it did, it started a chain reaction of bigger and bigger residential buildings. I went from 80k to 130k in about 15 minutes I suspect part of the trouble was the industry doubler mod I had installed. It makes for a more realistic city, but it also concentrates the pollution, making that mildy dirty area around the inustry much smaller. I'm still interested in seeing what strategies other people use to tackle this problem. Are there any tactics you use to keep enough low wealth sims in your city?

Are the rules for getting bigger buildings to grow different for residential? I seem to recall that to get larger commercial building to grow you need a sufficient density of smaller buildings in your region. Since this is the only established city in the region, wouldn't I need to get more apartments and lowrises before the larger buildings are able to grow? The other reason I haven't done that yet is I'm trying to avoid 'overgrowing' my city. Ive killed cities in the past by allowing high density to develop too soon. It tends to start a viscous cycle where big builings pop-up, over populate, and go abandoned due to lack of jobs.

I'm currently running an experiment to see what the maximum population I can achieve with a single large tile. The only other established tile I'm allowing myself is my 'utility' city to supply power, water, and garbage disposal. I've reached a point where most of the available land has been covered with low density zones, so I need to start building up. The trouble I'm running into is that I can never seem to provide enough low wealth housing to supply my Commercial and Industrial sectors with the workers they need. It's causing my city to stagnate right around 80k population. The only soultion I can see is to get higher density buildings in less desirable areas of my city, but that is proving to be extremely difficult. There is only a tiny sliver of land where I can actually get low weath apartments to grow, near my industry. Too far to one side and the pollution prevents anything but single family houses. Too far to the other side and the land value gets high enough that medium wealth sims move in and chase the low income folks out I've been playing quite awhile, so I know in general what buildings and ordinances increase land value, but even avoiding those, my land values always go too high. Is there anything specific I can do to create a low income area in my city without also chasing out my med and high wealth sims? I know the info here is a little thin; I'll try to post some screenshots and census data later. Any suggestions in the mean time are apprciated.