The British Sausage

I believe this is JENX Poseidon mod- though I have only used the ploppable ground textures. Found here on the LEX: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3077

Very nice! That lake/park picture was the best but the use of MMPs next to the JENX Seine river bank walls is inspired.

There's got to be a tutorial somewhere on this site but the idea is to use the NAM and elevated railway pieces to create a street/road/avenue tile which doesn't end in a stub or cul-de-sac. I have used this A LOT to connect the roads to car parks or street driveways in the building's lot (tile area it comes in).

The cars took a while and a very steady hand!

Entry 76: Hefnall Forest East Welcome back to some more scenes from Cindersville! Thanks alot for all of your comments- much appreciated! This time the eastern parts of Hefnall Forest will be explored. Also, to reflect the festive scene, I've included at the very end of this entry a special "present" for your SC4 viewing pleasure. Let's get started! {---} 1. 2. During the Spring, Summer and Autumn this dirt car park can become quite full as many drive from Cindersville, park up and walk around either Hefnall Forest or Mount Hefnall. 3. From the eastern slopes of Mount Hefnall we move eastwards (downwards). 4. 5. From north to south. 6. From west to east- follow the paths! 7. Where the ground is drier or even semi-arid I ensured it be devoid of trees. 8. The Sudden Valley terrain mod has some amazing dry textures! 9. 10. 11. Can't have a forest scene without the clouds! 12. 13. 14. A crossing of trails and paths. 15. The southern borders of Hefnall Forest meet up with the area of Hefnall itself (a town within the Cindersville urban city area). 16. 17. 18. 19. A herd of deer in the mist... 20. 21. A super close-up of those horses. 22. East Hefnall Forest folks! {---} Coming this Saturday- THE tour of Mount Hefnall, one of three major mountains dominating the Cindersville skyline. {---} And here's that present! The square mosaic! Link below if you can't on this page expand the image- https://imageshack.com/i/pnNum5Lfj

Thank you Terring! And have a great new year yourself as well!

This will be the last square mosaic in many, many weeks as these things take too long to create! Here's the last overview of Mount Hefnall with the top being north and the bottom being south.

I use Heblem's original gravel, FrankU's scaled-down version of Heblem's gravel (https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/29426-franku-heblem-sand-addon/) and SFBT's draggable paths (LEX download)- which include great street cobble textures and a tarmac texture. For the bushes I use girafe's bushes found on the LEX. For the grass and clover texture I use Chrisadams3997 RRP pasture flora- https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1886. I also use the false intersection trick to create the two street stubs leading off the main road.

Unfortunately SFBT fillers, at least the diagonal ones, have to be reselected from the menu. It adds a bit of time but not too much as diagonal areas are either very small or not as common. Also, the diagonal fillers will remain hidden in the park menu, I get around the 1x1 SFBT lot by using the cheat "you don't deserve it". You can access the games cheats by pressing "Ctrl" + "x". And yes- I admit I cheat. I cheat the game so that buildings don't need power or water, I also give myself HUNDREDS of millions of simoleans and unlock every reward. If there was a way of altering that menu feature of SFBT's diagonal fillers that would be cool!

I don't use a rock mod, the rock textures come from the Sudden Valley terrain mod. It is the longest mosiac I've created so far strictly because of the hilly terrain and how visually, in the isometric view, it takes up more of the screen. Took me a while to find these but these are CSX buildings as lotted by barbyw. A great outer-suburban house/housing to have! https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=866

A new year and a new mosaic!

Yes, I am using the SFBT Maxis tree override mod combined with the SFBT street mod as they utilise Cycledogg's trees and a lot of custom buildings (and lots) use Cycledogg's trees. This ensures more continuity of trees and flora.

Very cool! Fun fact (rumour?): The Richat Structure, in Mauritania, is rumoured to be a possible location for the lost city of Atlantis!

Transport Tycoon nostalgia intensifies! Seriously you're Transport Tycoon style of building cities is really cool!

My advice with the installation is to select all of Cycledogg's trees and also select the PEG pines. If you select all the tree options it doesn't come out as good because Maxis trees are not very pleasing to the eye. I find that Cycledogg's and PEG's trees combined provide the best flora visuals. As for Scoty's field paths and hedges, I would highly recommend this for those getting to grips with agriculture. It provides a useful means of dividing up fields and the diagonal pieces with natural looking trails and has some useful fillers to connect fields to tracks and tracks to roads.

Ooh there's interchangeable railway types? So RRW can join with this Hybrid Railway and Hybrid Railway can join with RRW?

Very nice! I like this minimalist style with MMPs and wide spaces contrasted with lotted buildings- NOICE! The normal option would to be to place this in the landmarks menu, the technical option would be to place it in the power menu because technically windmills are a form of power, while the gutsy option would to make it an MMP! There is another way which is to set the automata generator, in the NAM installer, to 24 hours constant which guarantees busy automata (traffic) on ALL streets, roads and highways which are being used by Sims. The downside of this is that suburbs appear to be busy streets and another downside is that in can have an adverse effect on game performance and can cause more crashes. I opt for the periodic 24 hour automata where there's a lot of visual traffic which coincides with rush hour times: 0500 to 0900 to 1600 to 2000.

This is the coolest boulder I have ever seen! So natural and so earthy! I could almost touch it.

Looks like you downloaded T Wrecks Industrial Revolution Mod! Check out his expansion packs where he has car park fillers for dirty, manfacturing and hi-tech industry!

It's simple, you make a bigger cliff!

Sadly there is no first person or ground view mode on SC4. The misty pictures are created by using a fog affect on GIMP, the version of photoshop I use. The actual forest itself took about several hours to complete as all I had to do was fill in the coniferous areas with desert flora which has a very wide footprint. But the rocky areas took considerably longer. All nature scenes are inspired by the English countryside! The path texture comes from FrankU's Heblem paths. https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/29426-franku-heblem-sand-addon/ While the ground textures come from Gobias' Sudden Valley terrain mod. Thanks! The paths and dirt roads are very quick to create, it just requires a steady hand!

Replies: Vigilante1987: Thank you! infamousjbe: Thanks- I always make sure to add car parks, or multi-story (or even underground car parks) for high density areas. mattb325: It's getting easier since each year there's new fillers and they often complement each other. tariely: In future, perhaps a year from now, I'm going to create a town with lower density but one strictly American: so concrete roads, grids everywhere and plenty of space/wasteland! Toby66: You may have a point with the last part of your comment, but I take lots of pictures because I spend so many hours creating these cities: which then translates in many CJ journal entries. For a medium sized city tile I can squeeze out six entries, for a large one easily fifteen. Thanks for your comment! tagehring: Thanks for commenting! metarvo: I'll tell you one thing about textures: they are increasingly complementing each other thanks to new filler sets and rsc204's NAM Terrain Grass mod, this all helps towards creating that cohesive look. As for the concrete road texture, yeah I'm not sure why other people don't use it either for the textures are fantastic, plus there is no pavement per say (just a white line demarcating where pedestrians can walk) which means driveway textures link up to the road textures- hence adding to the realism. Ke|is: It kind of happened on an ad-hoc basis because I wanted an excuse to use Simmer2's highway walls! Takingyouthere: It's good, but parts of the city were experimental or stood out a bit too much with building themes that somewhat clashed. I feel Cindersville is more cohesive and The Big Mango vastly more cohesive. Madison Plains was a chance to experiment and to quickly develop a cohesively city thanks to it being a medium-sized city tile. {---} Entry 59 -- FDR Drive + Completing Midtown Manhattan Yes I know it's been a while but my interest has been largely consumed with story-writing and I'm getting close to finishing my sci-fi novel. Nevertheless, projects like Cindersville and The Big Mango will be complete and showcased for 2020. This may be a smaller entry but I am giving you a taste of my down-sized recreation of Midtown Manhattan. {---} 1. 2. The elevated highway is FDR Drive, I extended out the land to add space for this highway! 3. Mattb325's new diagonal buildings have proved to be super useful! 4. Giving how I don't use the Lot Editor, then I have to squeeze every last drop out of those fillers and keep on trying to discover better filler combinations! 5. A little sliver of Hell's Kitchen- I made parts of this area deliberately rustic. 6. Where possible I made a conscious choice to keep the buildings in Hell's Kitchen either art-deco, or pre 1940s or even 19th century. 7. One part of me wishes I had made Manhattan Island to scale, but then it ran the risk of it becoming to large to fill without becoming repetitive- so the GTA option of recreating cities was my only recourse! 8. Madison Square Gardens- probably the most faithfully recreated area of New York I could manage. 9. Another mosaic of a VERY famous landmark! 10. Here I cram in as much art-deco as possible! 11. Times Square, and the surrounding areas, didn't turn out exactly how I wanted them to. But without the Lot Editor or the right lots or even road networks which were suitably texture friendly... One must compromise to complete the project. 12. But the rest of the areas I am pleased with, most importantly I captured a lot of the art deco feel which Manhattan still largely retains. 13. 14. {---} And there you have it. For the next entry it is back to Madison Plains and a special little surprise...

Spent the last thirty minutes going through your thread and I can see you're quickly developing a style of your own. It's nice to the NAM 39 being pushed as I see wide curve SAM streets? I'm still using NAM 38 so as to not mess up the city tiles I'm working on. Good to see the PEG / SPAM agriculture being used, it's way better than the vanilla stuff and there's even diagonal crop filler tiles to create diagonal scenes! I also see that you are dipping your toes into the deep pool that is MMPing. I also see you've found girafe's useful flora MMPs but there are other ones far more suitable for rural and agricultural areas. Did you know you can create agricultural areas purely with MMPs? I would not recommend this approach because there's so much more you can squeeze out by zoning and/or plopping in fields, crops, farms and agricultural scenes. The picture is flipped but the road is orthogonal and the railway is diagonal. You may find SFBT's diagonal fillers userful as well as chrisadams3997's RRP fences useful too, these can be found on the LEX. Diagonal fillers- https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1197 RRP fences- https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1888 And some of chrisdams3997's football fields too because why not- https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1721 I choose to create fields with MMPs because the repetition of crop zoning tiles can get... How should I say this? Repetitive only in the sense of seeing the same 1x1 tile repeated dozens of times! There's the classic Maxis ploughed field tile which NEVER gets old and never gets repetitive, some of SPAM's crop tiles and FrankU's Dutch Fields can have some pleasing patterns. Take my words with a pinch of salt- I must say my style is the complete and utter opposite of natural growth philosophy, I go through each and every tile plopping, adding MMPs or checking it over- something I adopted from an SC4 master called Paeng. My cities do work but nearly everything is plopped but the appearance gives an impression of natural growth and the various transitions: from urban to suburban, to suburban to agricultural, to agricultural to wilderness, etc. But if you ever want some useful woodland fillers, diagonal fillers, fences, stones, flora or crops just ask! Good luck! Keeping building and have a great Christmas!

It's an approximation of New York. I made note of some key landmarks and roughly sketched it out on a piece of paper to get the basic layout right. The Big Mango project is simply about capturing the feel and the spirit of New York and this project is not completed yet- but it will be some time in 2021.

Replies: SIMCITYPLIS: Thanks for your comment. That house you are referring belongs to Simcoug's R$$ Diagonal Houses. Thanks a lot folks for the likes and views! {---} Entry 62: Brooklyn, The Beginning These pictures are a collection of two to three months work on my The Big Mango project, a downscaled recreation of New York. This is my best approximation of Brooklyn giving the resources available. If this had been Cities: Skylines I would have nailed it, sadly my computer can't run Cities: Skylines anymore, let alone a version of the game with all those mods and plugins. So here's the next best thing! This is also a small treat for all those New York members of Simtropolis- you're in my thoughts and prayers given that you are in the epicentre of the Covid-19 outbreak in the USA. Stay safe folks and good luck. {---} Everything in the bottom right corner, bound by the East River and my approximation of Newtown Creek, is Brooklyn. 2. I tentatively added some avenues and highways to denote some of the key routes of Brooklyn. 3. The next step was working out the kind of buildings to use. 4. One day this view will be complete... Some day- perhaps coming sooner given the extra spare time I have due to the WuFlu lockdown in the UK. 5. The next challenge was finding a series of brownstones which were both grimy enough and suitably Brooklyn-enough! 6. From here, once I found the right building styles and themes, the area suddenly exploded with development as I infilled city block after city block. 7. 8. 9. One part of my Brooklyn Bridge Boulevard creation- pushing the community plugins, mods and user-content to the maximum here! 10. Since this recreation is downsized I couldn't create all the fisheries and small docks dotted along Brooklyn's west shoreline. So this had to suffice as a substitute for Wallabout Bay. 11. 12. There is no SC4 bridge to match the Williamsburg Bridge. So I picked the closest approximation and that steel girders style felt the best to use! 13. Good fortune allowed me to end the bridge inland, thus given me the ability to place some overhang buildings under the bridge! NO lotting was involved! 14. This area is loosely based around New York City Housing Authority's Ingersoll Houses (by Brooklyn Bridge). 15. These aren't random creations either- I looked extensively at Google Maps and sketched out a hand-drawn map of key roads, areas and landmarks. Thus proportionately landmarks and features are in the right place, but the scale is smaller. 16. I did something similar for Manhattan Island- Lower and Midtown Manhattan. 17. So it was a mini labour of love! 18. The rest is my interpretation- an artist gotta be an artist! 19. 20. One thing I noticed about the Brooklyn brownstone city blocks were the trees both on the streets and in the middle (of the city blocks). This made my job easier! 21. My dream is for one day where someone creates a diagonal Brownstone set to help me create diagonal city blocks of brownstones! But, one can only dream... All it would take is ten buildings, three or so different colour variations, and three or so different roof junk and window variations (closed curtains, etc.) and that would be enough. Give me that and I shall give you a few dozen blocks of diagonal, W2W Brownstone goodiness to make jaws drop! 22. 23. The northern part of Brooklyn is complete, but the southern part is not as I'm waiting for diagonal brownstones- it hast to be diagonal to really break up the area. But, as you can see in the bottom left corner of the picture, Long Island City can be worked on! 24. The money shot! To the bottom left is Greenpoint. 25. This miniature version of Greenpoint gave me a chance to splurge out on all those industrial BATs! 26. And a bit of MMPing too! 27. The elevated highway is supposed to represent the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. 28. Any ideas you have, or recommended buildings, then I'm all ears. 29. The small river is Newtown Creek. Since this is surrounded by a lot of warehouses, factories and industry, then this will be really fun to build! 30. 31. The Big Mango -- my downsized New York recreation -- as it stands now. My next goal is to complete the Long Island City portion in the bottom left of the picture. Afterwards I'll be working west of Manhattan on Union City and Jersey City. There's still plenty to do before I eventually tackle the south of Brooklyn. Again, if diagonal brownstones turn up that would be nice! And that's it for this entry! Have a good weekend and stay safe! Oh and a few bonus pictures, albeit posted previously- but keeping good spirits and all of that...