Nuclear Rabbit

I was just looking through BUILDFAM.IXF myself. Can't make sense of the hex code, but I saw that some buildings belong to more than one building family. In particular, some buildings are part of the "Row House" family and also the "Residential Medium Density Medium Land Value" family. We knew about the Row House rule, but there is also something called the "Res MD scatter" rule. In fact, there's a lot of "scatter rules," but I don't know what that means.

Recently, I got excited by modern urban planning with YouTube channels like NotJustBikes and City Beautiful. Since I'm not a citizen in my country of residence, I have to express my urban planning desires in games. I cracked open my old favorite SC3KU, and got to experimenting. Then I got to data collecting. I gleaned as much as I could from the Prima guide and collated it into a spreadsheet. I also went back to the old legend, Magnasanti, to learn what I could from that. Total population in SC3K is limited to approximately 10,289,000. This would be the densest residential structure tiled infinitely. Magnasanti carefully placed each individual building to ensure the maximum number of them and came up with a final population of 6,005,000. Land values had to be kept low because low-value structures support more sims than high-value structures at the same density. Looking at the endless expanse of identical brick towers makes one imagine that living there must be horrible. It would be horrible, but not because of the density. I found two real-world cities that have very close densities to Magnasanti (91%): Paris and Macau. Paris is far from any dystopia, and very little of the land is covered with high-rises. Macau is pretty dystopic, but not for reasons related to its density; moreso the crime, totalitarianism, and income inequality. Macau's population is less than one million; just a mile away (as the bird flies) is Zhuxian Park, an area larger than the city that is basically wild forest. There are a many IRL cities denser than Magnasanti, such as Manila or Manhattan. They didn't have to sacrifice schools, healthcare, fire protection, or public spaces to achieve their densities. Density in SC3K is unrealistically sparse. The densest buildings in-game compare to real-world mid-rise structures. My own recent attempt at the densest possible humane city has so far clocked in at sparser than Queens, New York, even though it displays countless Kong Towers and endless other skyscrapers. That being said, there are some things I have questions on our pursuit of either realism or mania. Perhaps the whole community doesn't know the answers, perhaps it's only me. 1. Do we have knowledge of the number of sims and jobs provided by every RCI building in the game? I know one place on the internet this data used to be accessible, but not anymore. 2. Has there been any interest in the modding community toward making SC3K more realistic in terms of density? (Either to accurately represent the number of sims, or to change the buildings graphically so they make sense?) 3. Does anyone know the trigger for "Sims want more fun in their lives"? I've got five Central Parks' worth of parkland in my city, but they always want more. I know there's been some recent attempts and talk of getting into the game files (see here and here and here). Any news beyond what's in those threads? I tried my hand at getting inside OccupantAttribs.ixf and BuildFam.ixf, but wasn't able to glean very much using only Excel. I did make some discoveries I thought were interesting, though.