Zephyrus22

Thanks for sharing this. I do use the Industry Quadrupler for more jobs, not sure if that counts as a demand enhancer or not. Other than that, I don't have any specific demand enhancers unless they are a side effect of another mod (NAM, CAM, Less Abandonment, etc), yet I am still experiencing an insatiable demand for jobs that feels impossible to meet without completely ruining the aesthetics of my cities. I might try to dabble with creating something like I previously described once I have the time to do so.

Today, after experiencing more frustration with "Abandoned due to commute time", I had an idea for a simple mod. But before I started trying to make it myself, I thought I'd ask if this already exists so I'm not wasting my time doing something that's already been done. I was thinking that I could use a program like PIM-X or Reader to take a 1x1 tile (Park, grass, pavement, etc) and give it the properties of a CO$$$ or I-HT lot with like 1,000 jobs, and just place one on every block to make jobs abundant in my city. I know this is super cheaty but I'd rather have this than a bunch of abandoned buildings. I imagine that this should be relatively simple to create (unless someone more skilled than me thinks otherwise), but I am curious if this kind of thing already exists. Years ago I found a similar mod that made utilities like power and garbage into a 1x1 tile for cosmetic purposes, so the concept has been done before. I'm just not sure if this specific concept has been made.

You know, I thought I did have the Less Abandonment Mod installed, but now looking at my plugins I can't seem to find it. Maybe I removed it while troubleshooting something and forgot to put it back in. Hopefully reinstalling it will fix my problem. I think the Abandonment Dilapidation Mod was the one I was thinking of, but I'll go with the other one for now and try it out. Anyway, I wanted to prevent buildings from turning grey for cosmetic purposes. I just don't like how it looks during gameplay. I don't mind the For Sale sign out front, but the greyed out appearance of abandoned buildings in the game just looks unrealistic to me. Maybe it makes sense for a haunted mansion in the woods, but not for every vacant building in a given city. I guess I prefer to think of those buildings as being temporarily vacant rather than abandoned.

Is there a mod that prevents abandoned buildings from turning grey? I seem to remember one existing, but now that I am trying to look for it I am unable to find it. I have all the typical anti-abandonment fixes applied but I still get the occasional abandoned building, and would prefer it to look normal rather than being greyed out.

@CorinaMarie That's an interesting strategy. I've never considered that because I worried it would cause issues in the city tile to only have some of it watered. I might have to try it in my game and see how it works.

In the past, I used to add water to my cities as soon as I received the popup prompting me to, usually around 15k residents. Because the game told me I should, I figured that doing so immediately was in my best interest. However, lately I've been playing differently. Instead of adding water early on in my city's development, I purposefully delay adding it until I build out my entire city at low density development, then I add water when I'm ready to add higher density. I've noticed that my cities seem to grow better when played this way. Once I add water and higher density, I have a harder time with growing my city outward to fill the entire city tile, as the game seems to hit a wall at a certain point. But with this purposeful delay, I feel that I can control their development better, making the city feel more realistic. So I'm curious, do you have a particular strategy to adding water to your city? Do you wait until you hit a particular milestone, or do you add it from the beginning? Have you noticed any particular benefits or drawbacks to your strategy?

Thank you for your assistance. I will try again, this time DATpacking only one folder at a time before testing in-game to diagnose which exact files might be causing the issue. I think some of my folders may have been too big despite still being under the technical limit.

Apologies if this is in the wrong section; I wasn't sure if this was better suited for this forum or the custom content forum, but decided on this one since the game crashing is my ultimate problem. I should also note that prior to posting this, I searched several threads throughout Simtropolis, Reddit and the Steam forums and was not able to resolve my issue. I recently decided to try datpacking some of my files to make the game run faster. I followed this tutorial to datpack my lots only. A few notes on how I went through this process: After taking these steps, I tried loading my game. The game loaded quickly, but when I try to open a city tile the game crashes during loading. Some initial googling suggested the issue was the 4GB patch not being applied to SimCity4.exe. I thought this was something I had already done since I thought it was a requirement for NAM, but I figured I'd try reapplying it anyway. So I downloaded the 4GB patch from the NTcore site and navigated to where I expected my game's .exe to be on my computer (I have a 64-bit Windows 11 PC and am using the Steam version of the game, so the location should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps.) I am only showing the SimCity 4 Application file (which I understand to be the same thing as .exe). But whenever I try to apply the patch I get the error message "Couldn't open executable", leading me to believe I'm not doing something right. Edit: I was able to apply the 4GB patch, but the game is still crashing whenever I open it and try to load a city tile. So my questions are as follows: 1. Besides updating the 4GB patch, what other issues could be causing the game to crash after datpacking? 2. Regarding datpacking, is there a problem with me packaging BATs only without their respective dependencies? I'm not sure if this would be a cause for the game crashes but figure it's still worth asking. Thanks for your help!

Thanks, I will edit my post to remove that it was created by you

I took a crack at answering some of them, mostly to test my own SC4 knowledge (been playing since 2006 but have only been sporadically active on Simtropolis since 2009). I only made it to the H's because the weather is beautiful today and I'll be very disappointed with myself if I don't get outside and take advantage of it while I can. I might try to answer the other ones later. Please fact check my answers because some of them were educated guesses based on various sources I found online. I skipped over some of the more self-explanatory ones. --- /cbg/ - A board on 4chan dedicated to discussing City Building Games $5 sales - The game can frequently be found on sale for $5 on Steam 10MB download limit - I think this is supposed to be 10MB Upload Limit. This game came out in the mid 2000s when internet data usage was different than today. Due to the era in which the game came out, sites like Simtropolis had a 10mb data cap on uploads to the site, both due to dialup internet constraints and because of the cost of data storage back then. 2008 Simtropolis Site Hack - A hacking of the Simtropolis website that occurred between May 23 and May 28, 2008. According to the SC4 Wiki, a hacking group originating from China inserted malicious code into the site, and caused data like City Journal entries to be lost or damaged. 3D Camera Mod - For years it has been a meme to request a 3D camera mod for the game. This was thought of as something that would enhance a 20-year-old game but that was impossible to implement. On April Fools 2024 someone released a 3D Camera Mod for the game which everyone thought was a joke at first, but when they installed it they realized that it was a real mod that actually added a 3D camera to the game. 4GB Patch - A third-party patch designed by NTCore to allow old programs to access 4GB of RAM on 32 bit executable files. A lot of programs from the 2000s were designed with 2GB of RAM and this limits how long one can play the game due to data constraints. The 4GB patch doublies the amount of RAM making it easier to avoid crashes and data limit issues. The patch is not limited to SC4 but can also be used on other programs with the 2GB cap. A Nonny Moose - A prolific member of Simtropolis who was always kind and eager to help others with their SimCity 4 questions. He passed away in 2016, and many remember him fondly and miss him dearly. Abandoned due to commute time - A common issue that seems to happen constantly in SC4 despite one’s best efforts to avoid the issue. The game is unable to find a path for Sims from residential lots where they live to commercial or industrial lots where they work, causing their residences to become abandoned. There are ways to minimize this issue (such as installing NAM for improved commute routing, and mods such as the Less Abandonment Mod and Industry Quadrupler mod, etc) but the issue is very hard to avoid completely and arguably one’s of the game’s most frustrating issues. Acronyms / glossary for in game names, mods, forums - There are too many to list here. I guess the obvious one I can think of is BAT (Building Architect Tool) being the word for player-designed buildings and is named after the Maxis-made tool to create said buildings. Adding water not at sea level / waterfalls - Typically in the game “sea level” is hard programmed into it. Water is supposed to only appear when you lower the land a certain amount. But using various water puzzle piece mods you can add things like small rivers, canals and waterfalls at different elevations. Advisor popups - Just like in a real city, in SC4 you have seven mayoral advisors who give you advice on different areas to improve your city such as utilities, finance, city planning, etc. Whenever there is an issue in your city, there will be a popup window on the screen alerting you of the issue at hand. This can be very annoying, as this is a relic of the 2000s when things like popup ads were more commonplace and can interrupt gameplay. However there is a way to turn off popups in the game’s settings. Advisor reactions when things go to shit - The SC4 advisor avatars are animated, and when something bad happens like a fire or power shortage, the avatars look enraged. It’s very dramatic and funny AmbiguousAmphibian's crazy SC4 scenario videos - Ambiguous Amphibian is a youtuber who does silly challenges in video games, mostly ones from the late 90s and 2000s. He has several videos of challenges done in SimCity 4. ANT- additional network tool- Also possibly called the Alternate Network Tool, this was a rural road/street network that Maxis/EA created but never completed. It was left in the game in a locked state, and the NAM team used it as a basis for the Rural Highway Network part of its mod. April Fools releases - Over the years, there have been many mods that were released on April 1 as a joke, such as the SC4Undo plugin (which just prompted a popup that said “Happy April Fools” when you tried to use it) to a Disaster Addon Mod (DAM) to expand the types of disasters in the game, all of which were fake. The most famous April Fools Joke is the 3D Camera Mod, which subverted everyone’s expectation by being an actual real mod. BATs using stolen models - Early on in SC4’s history, it was not uncommon for some modders to use models from other modders’ BATs without permission and upload them as a new file to download. Stealing other BATers’ models is frowned upon, and many of these lots have been removed from sites like Simtropolis to prevent stealing. BATs with broken/overpowered stats - since BATers can make the stats of a lot whatever they want, it’s possible for them to release a lot with super overpowered stats that impact the game in unpredictable ways. I’m sure there are famous examples of this but I can’t think of any. Best of STEX disc - As a reward for people who donate money to Simtropolis, they are given one of five “Best of STEX” discs. This used to be a physical CD that was mailed to you, but today it is a link to secret BATs that are not available on the normal STEX. These BATs are made by lots of well known/prolific creators like JBSimio, mattb325, jasoncw, etc. Beta/cut content - There is a lot of content that was in the game in beta copies that never made it to the final release. One example is how the City Hall was supposed to have three stages of growth, but it was replaced with a singular building. Another example is the Additional/Alternative Network Tool that was cut from the game and used as the basis for NAM. There are also other models and features that were never made available in the final release. Big Dig - This is a mod to make underground roads and highways utilizing the game’s subway feature. It is named after the “Big Dig”, a major civic project in Boston that turned a downtown freeway into an underground one. This mod allows players to have more space to build on since less of the surface land is being used by roads. “Blow Your Socks Off” NAM teasers - I couldn’t find anything for this. Would be appreciative if anyone could give more information. Bonus landmarks, hosted on the official SimCity 4 website - Maxis/EA created several bonus buildings that were not released in the main game, but were available for download on their website. This includes both real-life landmarks (like the Seoul City Hall and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago) and fictitious ones (like Shorty Burger and Lucky’s Hang Ten). Over the years the official SimCity website was updated and the official download links were lost. However, the files have been preserved and can be downloaded today from Simtropolis. Braun Llama Dome - Refers to a reward building from SimCity 2000. I’m not sure what the connection to SimCity 4 is, so please let me know if you know! Breaking the grid - SC4 has a fixed camera view and only allows zones to face in cardinal directions, even on diagonal streets. As a result the game is heavily based around grid city designs. Breaking the grid is a strategy to circumvent the game’s grid-based core to make more meandering street designs. This is desirable from a realism standpoint as there are lots of places that don’t have gridded streets (such as old European cities, post-WWII US Suburbs, etc.). Some BATers, like EffTheGrid, specialize in this sort of grid-breaking content. Bridge Building being super annoying. Can't place two bridges together - Kind of self-explanatory. You can’t make diagonal bridges and you have to work at it to make bridges look good and function as intended. Bridge too low for ferries (despite being really high) - This relates to the above point. When building bridges, there is an indicator that tells you if ferry boats can go underneath or not. However, you have to elevate your bridges very high to make them compatible with ferries, which makes bridge building frustrating. I really wish this game had drawbridges. BSC becoming elitist / controlling - From my limited understanding, BSC was an early BATing collective that consisted of a lot of the game’s top creators back in the day. I wasn’t able to find any specific information about BSC being elitist or controlling, but if anyone has any information please let me know! I’m sure this is probably old drama from the game’s early days. BSC Cleanitol - In 2013, BSC released Cleanitol, a tool for removing nonessential filies from your SC4 Plugins folder. A new version of the tool was released in December 2023 with expanded functionality. Cleanitol is a popular tool that improves game performance. Buggi - A member and modder of Simtropolis. They are best known for the Extra Cheats Plugin, a mod that is actually a Maxis-internal tool used during the game’s development. Buggi reportedly contacted Maxis and received their permission to make the program available publicly. This mod provides features like the ability to plop any building in the game, and is essential to a lot of SC4 players. Bugs caused by playing SimCity 4 at its minimum specified RAM (512MB) - I wasn’t able to find anything about specific bugs caused by this. Let me know if you have any examples! Building a City From Scratch - A YouTube series by Haljackey, a prominent SC4 player. Bullet Train Mod (BTM) / Shinkansen as a replacement for the monorail network no one uses Cannot place over occupied tiles (but there's nothing there?) Capitalsimcity - SC4 used to have various fan sites for players of various languages/countries. Capitalsimcity is a Spanish-language citybuilder fan site that is still active to this day. It has several BATs that are only available on this site. CDs no longer working - Due to the advancement of technology, CDs from the game’s release do not work on modern hardware (plus many modern computers don’t even have CD drives). Most modern players use digital copies of the game to play. Cities Skylines release - The Cities:Skylines franchise has largely taken over the SimCity franchise as the face of the citybuilder genre. The game has not outright replaced SC4 due to different goals of the respective games (SC4 being more of a city management simulator, while C:S is more of a urban planning game). I’m not sure what the release of Cities:Skylines refers to specifically. City Journal pages vs forums - City Journals are a way for players to share photos and stories of the cities and regions they build in their games. Originally this was just a section of the Simtropolis forums. But over time City Journals became their own section of the Simtropolis website. In the City Journals section, entries are structured less like a forum thread and more like chapters of a book. People have different opinions on which presentation method is better. City Journal unions / alliances / nations City journals with Photobucket hosted images - One issue with a lot of old forums is the breaking of image hosting links. In the 2000s and early 2010s, Photobucket was one of the more popular image hosting websites. However, over time due to link rot, many of these old images have been lost to time, making these old city journals incomplete. Today, Imgur and Imgbb are the popular image hosting sites. City Showcases - The SC4 Showcase forum is a place to share images of your city themed around various topics, such as industrial areas, parks, etc. By far the most popular thread in this forum is “Show Us What You’re Working On” which has significantly more activity and views than the other threads. City Spread means trouble ahead - This is one of the popup messages that advisor Neal Fairbanks tells you. The popup essentially says that sprawl is bad. This popup annoys people because there isn’t really any issues in the game with building a sprawling city, and it’s actually advised to build out before building up. It’s adding increased density that makes trouble start popping up in cities, so this message is seen as pointless and a waste of time. CMLs (custom member labels) - The Simtropolis admins can assign you a custom member label for accomplishments like winning a Trixie award. I honestly didn’t know this was a thing, it appears it was more popular in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Compatibility glitches with a certain generation of nVidia GPUs Constantly posting on City Journals on the forum to put them on top of others CoriBoom' team saving Simtropolis - CorinaMarie and Cyclone Boom are two prominent Simtropolis members who have a joint modding team called CoriBoom, and are currently site admins. I wasn’t able to find out a lot of info about this, but apparently at one point they took over the site from another user named Dirk/Dirktator, who had owned the site for nearly 20 years and was ready to move on. Without them stepping in to take over, Simtropolis would have probably went offline like so many other SC4 fan sites have over the years. Covid-19 pandemic popularity boom - During the Coronavirus pandemic, lots of people were stuck at home with nothing better to do but consume media. Presumably the game increased in popularity during this time. I didn’t know anything about this but I’m willing to believe it, as this happened to a lot of media during that time. CPUcount: 1 - I am assuming this has to do with old games like SC4 being designed to run on single core computers, while modern computers are often quad core. Apparently this entry refers to commanding your game to only run with one core to prevent crashing. I don’t really understand this as I thought the game was already designed to run on one core, but maybe this makes more sense to someone with a better knowledge of computers/coding than myself. Crazy traffic crashes / train derailments - If you are playing the game and sit still and watch traffic, sometimes you will see crazy automata car crashes at intersections with high traffic usage. This might occur with trains as well, but if you go into U-Drive-It mode, select a train and go as fast as possible, you can create your own crazy train derailment. CSG Design website - From my understanding, CSGDesign was a modder/BATer who had their own website that is no longer offline. Not sure if they hosted content on the website that is now lost media or not. CSGdesign Natural Growth blog - This is a thread on the SC4Devotion forums by user CSGDesign. It is a tutorial on how to naturally grow a city in a realistic way. Link: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=9440.0 CTD bugs with Monorails in NAM when High Speed Railway (HSR) mod is also installed CTD hovering a puzzle piece over a TE Lot (fixed) Custom content on STEX from banned users - Self-explanitory. Not sure if this means this content is lost media, or if it’s just unsupported due to the creator no longer having access to updating it. Cutting funding results in visuals like potholes, striking workers, criminals, etc DarkNite - a popular mod by SimFox that alters the look of night mode in the game. There are a lot of BATs that are designed to work with this mod specifically. I have never used it since I only play in day mode, but it is apparently very popular. Datpacking - I might be wrong about this, but my understanding is that Datpacking is taking the files in your plugins folder and using a program to combine them into fewer individual files, which improves game performance and load times. Demise of SC4D, rise of SC4E - SC4Devotion was one of the main English-language SC4 fansites, alongside Simpeg and Simtropolis. In June 2023, the website went offline. From my understanding, this was due to the web host requiring an update that the site’s team wasn’t able to implement. The site’s owner has instead opted to replace the site with a new website, SC4Evermore, and has been slowly uploading files that were hosted on SC4D and are currently lost media to the new website. Interestingly the new site’s name is very similar to SC4Ever, an old SimCity fan site that closed down over a decade ago. Dependencies needing Dependencies needing Dependencies (inception) - Dependency files are files containing custom assets used in custom BATs. Sometimes the dependency trail runs deep and gets complicated. Destruction De Saint Orano - A YouTube video from 2011 showing the destruction of a city called Saint Orano. Utilizing both SimCity 4 and The Sims 3, the animation is very impressive and looks great to this day. Digging a 'hole to China' if a puzzle piece isn't placed on flat terrain - I’m assuming this is some sort of glitch with puzzle pieces that makes deep holes in your game. I haven’t encountered this personally but I can see how building on uneven terrain could do this Dirk / Dirktator - The previous admin of Simtropolis who founded the site. They aren’t around much anymore and the CoriBoom team are largely in charge now. Disasters - In the game you can inflict a number of different disasters upon your city. Some are realistic, like earthquakes and tornadoes, whereas others are more fantastical, such as UFO invasions and robot dinosaur rampages. DLL mayhem / renaissance - a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) is a type of file containing code that can be used by multiple programs at once. I’m not sure what the mayhem/renaissance bit refers to, but DLLs have been used in SC4 modding for years. DollyLlama - Cheat code that turns the in-game advisors’ avatars into llamas. Dr Vu - a supervillain in SimCity. In SC4 he is the subject of various “evil” missions that you can do in your city. He is referenced in various builds but surprisingly has not had a huge impact on the Sims franchise as a whole. Draw paths - “drawpaths” is a cheat code that shows automata paths on streets. This is apparently used for NAM debugging. Drive-ins being built right next to skyscrapers - Since there are only three levels of zoning, you don’t have a lot of control over what exact buildings get built in your city, leading your city to have weird buildings next to each other. I call this the Houston phenomenon, after Houston Texas which famously does not have zoning laws and has weird land uses like this in real life. Dropbox multiplayer - Apparently some people play multiplayer SC4 by uploading a city to dropbox and sharing it with their group, who works on the city cooperatively. Not sure how this would practically work since presumably only one person could update the file at a time. Early NAM puzzle pieces - I’m assuming that this either refers to old pieces that were removed in subsequent releases, or pieces that were somehow broken and needed to be replaced. This one might be better answered by a NAM historian. Empty highways yet clogged roads - I assume this refers to the base game routing system, which only considers the absolute shortest path despite more practical routes being available. This would lead to instances of everyone using a small street to travel when an adjacent highway is empty due to it being slightly less direct. NAM largely fixes this issue by incentivizing Sims to use higher density roads over absolute shortest distance. Eternal Commuter Loop - A glitch in which sims near the city border will go to an adjacent town to look for work, then go from that town to the next town over, etc. until they are traveling in an eternal loop instead of going to work. This is because the game only looks at the current tile being played and not the region as a whole. The glitch can lead to commute time abandonment. One solution is to build more job centers near city borders. Executable installers for most mods - In the early days of SC4 modding it was very common for BATs to have executable installers. While it may have made sense at the time, today it is a major nuisance as these take significantly more time to install compared to simply extracting a file to your plugins folder, especially for simple BATs with small file sizes. Most modern BATs don’t have this issue, but downloading old content still presents this frustration. Exporting a SimCity 4 small tile to make a Sims 2 map - You can apparently use SimCity 4 to create a neighborhood map for The Sims 2. While there are restrictions as to what exactly can be carried over, it is a clever piece of cross-collaboration between games. Extra Cheats - A mod created by Maxis that expands the in-game cheats options. See the “Buggi” entry for more information Fireworks on New Years / city founding - You will see fireworks every New Years in your game. Forum Drama - A very broad category. Someone with more knowledge than me should provide some juicy examples. Freeway Experts dividing the NAM team and other bickering within various mod teams Fun sound effects when querying specific buildings - Usually things like hearing a doorbell when clicking a residential lot. It can be annoying with some BATs that have custom sounds (looking at you, SimGoober movie theater with the loud THX Deep Note that can’t be muted) Garbage chute pushing your trash off the city tile edge - A fun classic mod by Pegasus that creatively utilizes the game’s tile system to create a visual gag. Giant farm structures that look nothing like real life - Farms in SC4 are weird. The buildings on these farms are definitely not common in real life. Giant wild life - The scale of the animals in this game is very disproportionate. Go Away Advisors - A somewhat controversial mod that turns off advisor popup notifications. Not really necessary since you can just turn this off in the game settings. Graphical bugs with certain Intel and ATI integrated graphics (Windows XP era) Haljackey's SimCity 4 Archives - Haljackey has been creating their famous freeway interchanges for a long time! Helpdesk / Simtropolis Help Squad - Appears to have been an account that would help users with game issues. Was active between 2005 and 2011 Herman Cain 9-9-9 tax plan - Herman Cain was a candidate for US President on the Republican side in 2012. During his campaign, he proposed 9% taxes for three categories: Personal income, federal sales, and corporate taxes. In SC4, the default tax rate is 9% residential, 9% commercial and 9% industrial. Some accused Cain of copying SC4 for his tax plan.

Recently I've been wanting create a custom airport for my region. I was interested in trying out Mattb325's Nice International Airport Modular Pack, but it contains a dependency that I am unable to find: Osturland Chancellory. The original link no longer works because it was originally hosted on the LEX. The file is listed on the SC4 Devotion LEX Files Cross Reference list, but it seems that it hasn't been mirrored on SC4Evermore yet. Is there another place where I can find this file?

Thanks for sharing your file! These stores will look nice in some of my immigrant neighborhoods. But yes, ideally I am looking for supermarkets that are at least a few stories tall and don't have a huge parking lot in front, maybe with a few other storefronts mixed into the building like an urban shopping center. I feel like there's a lack of this kind of mid-rise commercial development on the STEX, so it would be cool to have more options in this regard.

Request: Urban W2W Grocery Stores Why it would be beneficial to have in SC4: There are tons of grocery stores on Simtropolis, but almost all of them are designed to go in a suburban style environment. But urban sims need to eat, too! I've looked around for urban grocery stores and the only one I am aware of is a Sainsbury's by SimGoober, but it would be nice to have some more variety in the game. I'm looking for a W2W-style lot that has parking incorporated into the building as a parking deck rather than being a separate sea of parking in front. Here are a few pictures of what I am thinking of, for inspiration: Google Street View Google Street View Google Street View Google Street View Google Street View