Things SimCity 2000 Never Intended You to Do

This post is meant as a showcase of some of the proof-of-concept things I’ve done with SimCity 2000 that it had never intended you to do.

The way the game stores an in progress disaster is by setting the city to disaster mode and setting the disaster type in the MISC segment of the .sc2 file and then adding actual disaster tiles to the XTXT segment/layer. But what happens if we don’t go into disaster mode and place disaster tiles? Well, we get a city floating in clouds, and hell, a city that’s eternally on fire but never consumed.

Floating Cloud City, a city floating in the (toxic) clouds.

Hell, a city that is teternally on fire and never consumed.

And once you can change anything at will, there are other interesting things that can be done. Make mixed bridges? Easy. Edit the terrain after the city has been built? Yep, that’s a single value changed. Make tunnels cross? Well, sort of. The game doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. Avenues? Yep, just remove the intersections.

Terrain edit mode after a city has been built.

Mixed bridges.

Tunnels (almost) crossing.

Sometimes things go horribly, horribly wrong.

Three lane elevated highway to two lane at-grade highway. This is only cosmetic.

Avenues! These are only cosmetic, the game doesn’t treat them differently than two roads next to each other normally.

There’s a lot more possible, but I’ve been focused on getting more of the game reverse engineered over building better editing tools. I have considered building a standalone editor that would also function as a game frontend, but haven’t had time to do much with it.

I’ve also used the editing ability to make cities that have features some cities in real-life have. Rivers in many places flood, and often have levees along them, so I made a city that used the completely raised terrain tile as levees along a river instead of making a 3-tile wide strip of raised terrain.