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128x128 = 16,384 bytes of zoning madness That's right. Each zone belongs in a byte in SC2K and with a full map (along with 360 Sims per tile), this means 5,898,240 Sims without any arcology. Only the external population makes uses of city services like libraries, hospitals, etc. and provides educational quotient (EQ) and life expectancy (LE), so it pays to have it as high as possible... as long as you can provide the services, that is! Note that arcologies indirectly benefit from services to increase their own grading level, but even a D- arcology will easily fill up within about 100 years just like an A+ one. If the 2-byte overflow trick is used (each arcology microsim stores the population in 2 out of 8 microsim bytes and does not check for overflow), an empty arcology losing population at the end of the year will immediately overflow back to 65,535. Let's think of all of the constraints and possibilities. The importance of corners All buildings have corners, even 1x1 ones. 3x3 ones don't use the middle portions and 1x1 ones use all four corners. They are stored in the XZON chunk. When a flood or fire ravages your city (and produces the magic eraser "effect"), you may have noticed a building loses all of its population after a certain portion of the building has been destroyed. In Micropolis, they would remain functional with only one tile; however, in SC2K, while functional, 2x2s and 3x3 will lose all population if less than one layer is filled (you need at least 2x1 or 3x1). We'll get into detail about corners and zoning flags later. Any building can be stacked Anything that qualifies as a building tile can be stacked this way - more coverage, less space. Don't expect the SimPark system to show 147,456 acres, though, as stacking a big park only really helps with land value from the building (the tile count for big and small parks remains the same). But then, why don't we use 16,384 launch ("lanch archology" when the microsim count breaks) arcologies? Well, there are two catches. First off, arcos launch in non-Mac 1.0 versions - contrary to popular belief, the exodus begins after the last one of the 301 arcos has been built regardless of the current year (on the "first" of January 1901, 1951, 2001, 2051 or, if you've been messing with internal counters, on the "first" of January 1 AD). Then there's the microsim issue - see below. On top of queries being hidden, the game has trouble with the extra arco RCI pop (the game only stores about 20k pop and will eventually cap on 2 bytes, that is, around 17 million Sims in arcos, much less than a normal maximum of around 100 million Sims on Mac or about 25 million Sims on Windows/DOS; this is a lot less than the coveted theoretical maximum of 1,073,725,440 Sims from 16,384 Launch Arcos). For the curious, the game stores city size unsigned and on 4 bytes, making it theoretically possible to welcome 4,294,967,295 Sims from both natural and arco pop, after which it will overflow back to zero. 150 Microsimulators to keep the mayor informed You may have noticed that in SC2K, your queries would treat a city service as a generic terrain tile. As stated in the manual, the game uses 10 global microsimulators (SimNation, SimBus, SimRail, SimSub, Wind, Hydro, Parks, Museum, Libraries, Marinas) as well as one for user signs, which leaves 139 microsimulators for individual services and mayor rewards. When you go over 139 of them, the game simply stops storing the new information (as text), and you will need to bulldoze all excess microsims to be able to fill up the XMIC chunk again (more on technicalities later). If you mess up when building your services, don't worry, the memory is freed as soon as you bulldoze it, so just do it right after that (or save and load). So, then, what is the highest user-facing pop while keeping all services functional? Assuming a perfect transportation system (to keep a 3x3 alive forever, you need to prevent it from both regressing and relocating, with the latter being an annoying random occurence), you would think we are going to need a lot more than 139 services to give them maximum coverage. Fret not. Why not overfund them to keep it realistic? Crime With traffic out of the way, there's still crime to take care of. If going over 139 microsims isn't really an issue for you, remember you can stack them the same way (assigning a zone will only affect the RCI indicator, though). If you'd rather use their nominal coverage, you can overfund them. While annual budget will show up weird (it is meant to fit in one byte; you were not supposed to give each police station more than 255 Simoleons a year to do their job, but again, keep in mind the query part is just text), this will allow perfect use of the police radius. Depending on your version, you should still be at least able to give 255% funding. Pollution Oh yeah, the big one. Well, if you know how pollution works, you probably noticed that a completely empty, flat map would produce insane global crime and pollution with just one building. The more developed non-polluting tiles, the lower pollution gets, as global pollution is divided by the number of developed tiles. Then again, that is just for the graph; your Sims take local issues into account too. Traffic Assuming you have roads for some reason (actually, if you aren't completely insane, you should have some as 3x3s normally require a road intersection on the corner to build in addition to their desirability requirements) then you also want to keep in mind it works globally. And if you don't mind making it much less realistic, you can have completely disconnected roads; as long as the trip simulator finds a R-C-I relationship somewhere, Sims will build. Rail will also work without a depot if there's a neighbor connection close by. What's this about chunks? Well, you see, savefiles are divided into (not so efficiently, but hey, 40 years ago, this was decent; it's still actually pretty decent for really redundant repeats of ASCII characters and digits) RLE-compressed memory chunks. I highly recommend reading David Moews's insane guide and Dale Floer's ongoing project on the file format and simulation specifics, which are mentioned above. Did someone say another 16,384 bytes of zoning madness? Ah, yes, the XUND chunk for underground tiles. Unfortunately, you can't zone there, but this is where pipes and subway lines go. Bear in mind you really don't need to keep everything interconnected - and sadly, realistic commutes will be treated as an attempt to connect similar zone types, so the Sims simply won't use the stations that have them until they also have lines to another (even if it's a massive residential area leading to a lone light density industry tile they shouldn't care about, because all they see is the global industrial pool). Long story short, make educated use of this too. Maybe you want your Sims to travel underground and also have water. (Water and power actually is determined somewhere else, but it does check periodically). If you could fool the savefile into using that chunk for zoning, then we now have potential for almost 2 billion Sims... And with XTER and XBIT chunks, this would effectively allow us to hit 4,294,901,760 Sims, which is insanely close to the overflow alarm range. Is there an ELI5 on all of this technical stuff? XBLD and XZON are what you want to pay attention to. XZON is really, really important for zoning. Note that since it's a completely different chunk, you can have a "residential park" or an "industrial zoo" (though all it will really do is zone below the occupied tile). It also manages a tile's corners and more importantly, what zoning type it belongs to. Any building has a set population and a boolean (true/false) attribute that makes zoning possible, but it is perfectly possible to have residential theaters, commercial thingamajigs and industrial condos. Crime, pollution and land value, however, is defined by density and zone type, so all of those wonderful buildings will (unfortunately) cause the same issues. That said, this gives you a lot of things to play with; the zoning is defined by bit flags, just like corners, except it's the other 4 bits. XBLD stores what occupies a tile (the building ID, specifically; there can only be 256 different building types, and some of them are unused). Ideal if you cannot use SCURK or don't want to. XBIT stores what a tile has access and can give access to: water, power, pipes and also salt/fresh for water type. It can also rotate tiles, which you may want to use to further compress your cities natively (or if they just don't look good). XALT is not really useful for max pop, though it will help with land value (and can also help produce floating islands and phantom boats - nothing like a Flying Hollander happily sailing above your magic ground zone hydro plants or a plane never crashing above any building because it's always above them, even if it's about to land or actually crash). Feel free to comment if you see missing information. My thanks go to all contributors in the header for the motivation to make this little guide. Better late than never! Technicalities that are not already covered by existing guides will be discussed in a separate article to prevent headaches, old age, baby deliveries by taxi drivers and creatures from outer space or other dimensions showing up in your backyard.

Hello everyone! Oldschool player into Micropolis (SimCity Classic), SimCity for SNES and SimCity 2000 here. I am glad to see such a thriving community covering all of those (now old but still as awesome as ever) games. As a number crunching maniac, I must say I have spent a great deal of time reading and bookmarking the extensive guides here; there is always something new and interesting to learn about the simulation mechanics even over three decades later. I will make sure to contribute whenever possible to the community. Old games are often put aside but never forgotten!