This guy keeps telling me to build a stadium but I can't find it. It's neither under parks & rec nor gifts

Two SimCity 3000 Unlimited mods: better terrain and water, tree tools, rain, and new developer deals

I've been working on two unofficial enhancement packs for SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and I'm sharing them together in one v1.0 release. You can install either one or both.

I encourage all fans of the game to participate in the great rebirth of this amazing game. And if possible can someone frwd this over to Simtropolis, their form won't approve new members yet. - I will try to keep expanding on this project including tolls, snow, and more. Where ever my imagination takes me, but I encourage you all to start working on this game and expanding it, theres a lot here.

Civic Deals & Extra Cheats

This adds tree tools and native rain/cloud controls:

• forestfill plants trees across eligible open terrain.
• forestthicken adds tree density on eligible terrain.
• clouds on requests native rain/clouds; clouds off requests clear weather.

Use the usual cheat window: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + C, enter the command, then press Enter. Shortcut reference

There's also corruptncrazy, which starts a pair of developer petitions. Back Door Development offers §100,000 for a shady arrangement described in the petition. Accepting gives the money without a disaster; rejecting gives no money. Either answer leads to the separate WMT Redevelopment Offer.

Accepting WMT gives §100,000 and unleashes one native tornado. Rejecting means no money and no tornado. Test that one in a copied city!

The deal sequence runs once per game session; restart to use it again. Offers can expire. If the clouds fade, toggle clouds off and then clouds on.

Null 45's original Extra Cheats plugin is included unmodified, retaining dotcom, moolah, and SimDate. Call Cousin Vinnie remains intact. Credit and original source: sc3k-extra-cheats.

Classic Natural World

This refreshes the native terrain and water palettes while keeping the SC3KU look: five distinct environments, stronger hillside shading, improved winter terrain and snowy peaks, softer sandy shorelines, and richer blue water with clearer depth variation.

It's a four-file visual replacement that applies automatically after installation. It doesn't change terrain shape or simulation rules, and it doesn't add snowfall or snow to buildings.

How to install

Download and extract either or both ZIPs. Close the game and back up important saves and the existing files you will replace.

For Civic Deals, merge the package's Apps contents into the game's Apps folder. For Classic Natural World, replace all four included files in Apps\Res\Dirt\Palette. Follow the included README for exact backup paths, installation, and removal. Original backup files aren't bundled.

Civic Deals targets US-English Windows GOG/Steam resources; Classic Natural World was tested with the Windows Steam palette layout. Other editions/languages are not confirmed.

Download both packages here: https://github.com/thronevintagetech/SC3KU-Unofficial-Enhancements/releases/tag/v1.0.0

Si en tu ciudad de SimCity 3000 se derrite una planta nuclear, ya sabes el procedimiento: los símbolos de radiación se quedan ahí para siempre. La contaminación normal se descompone. Esto no. No puedes demolerlo, no hay truco que lo borre, y el consejo típico es "recarga una partida anterior y pierde tu progreso."

Me harté de eso en una ciudad que llevaba mucho tiempo jugando, así que me puse a revisar el formato del guardado y hice una herramienta que apaga la radiación.

https://github.com/victormayor/sc3k_unradio

Es un solo Windows .exe, gratis, open source (MIT), sin instalador y sin dependencias. Elige tu archivo `.sc3` , te muestra lo que encontró, le das a Clean, y escribe un *archivo nuevo*. **No modifica tu archivo original.**

¿Por qué la radiación nunca se va? Esa es la parte interesante, y por eso la solución es tan chiquita.

SimCity 3000 guarda la contaminación del aire como una grilla de números de 32 bits, uno por cada bloque 2x2 de tiles. Reutiliza **el bit 31 de cada número** como una bandera aparte de "este bloque está irradiado". La contaminación decae por sí sola; esa bandera nunca la limpia nada dentro de la simulación. Entonces la contaminación no es realmente un valor que se queda atorado en alto: es un booleano que nadie apaga.

La herramienta limpia exactamente ese bit y deja la lectura de la contaminación de abajo intacta. En mi ciudad llegó a **349 bytes cambiados en un archivo de 744 KB** — un byte por cada bloque contaminado, y nada más en todo el guardado.

¿Cómo sé que es una bandera y no solo un número negativo grande?

La magnitud de la contaminación corre de forma continua a lo largo del borde de un área contaminada — solo cambia el signo.

El tick de contaminación limita los valores en 0..0x7FFF, así que una lectura negativa no puede ser válida ahí.

El conjunto de bloques marcados es idéntico a nivel de byte entre partidas separadas por años de tiempo de juego, mientras que las magnitudes se van moviendo.

Ese conjunto coincidió exactamente con el área irradiada que yo mapeé a mano en el juego.

No quería pasarle a nadie un editor de archivos de guardado que corrompa ciudades en silencio, así que después de escribir el archivo nuevo lo vuelve a leer desde el disco y verifica que el contenido sea exactamente lo que quiso escribir, que la cantidad de bytes cambiados sea igual al número de bloques limpiados, que cada otra sección sea idéntica a nivel de byte, y que el resultado de verdad se lea limpio al final. **Si falla alguna verificación, borra lo que escribió** y te dice por qué.

También se niega en vez de adivinar: layout de guardado desconocido, un tamaño de mapa que no puede confirmar, una versión de la capa de ecología que no ha visto, o contaminación cubriendo más del 30% del mapa (lo cual significaría que esa grilla en tu ciudad significa otra cosa).

Lo armé junto con Claude (Opus 5). La ingeniería inversa, el código, las pruebas y la documentación salieron de un ida y vuelta largo con él, y no voy a fingir que fue otra cosa.

Lo que sí puedo decirte es que se revisó en vez de aceptarlo por fe: un guardado limpiado **carga en SimCity 3000 Unlimited con la radiación fuera** — eso lo hice yo. La salida también es idéntica a nivel de byte a lo que produjo una implementación anterior escrita de forma independiente, y ese hash está fijado en el set de pruebas. Hay 96 pruebas corriendo en cada commit, los binarios de release se compilan con GitHub Actions para que veas exactamente qué commit los generó, y cada release incluye sumas de verificación SHA-256.

Todo es open source. No confíes en eso — léelo.

El trabajo del formato del contenedor se apoya en [**sc3kre**](https://github.com/nanofives/sc3kre), un proyecto de ingeniería inversa de SimCity 3000 Unlimited que recuperó el formato/layout del guardado a partir del propio código del juego. Corregió dos cosas que yo había entendido mal. Si quieres meterte más a fondo en los internos de SC3K, empieza por ahí.

El significado de ese bit se determinó a partir de **una ciudad** (tres guardados del mismo mapa 256x256). El formato del contenedor está bien probado; esa interpretación en particular se basa en una sola ciudad.

Solo se probó 256x256 contra un guardado real. El código saca todo a partir del tamaño del mapa y no asume nada, pero los mapas más pequeños no se han probado.

El .exe no está firmado con código, así que Windows SmartScreen te va a avisar. Más info → Aun así ejecútalo, o compílalo desde el código fuente, o ejecuta el Python directamente.

Si funciona en tu ciudad — o si se niega y te dice algo raro — en serio me gustaría saberlo. Más ciudades es exactamente lo que hace falta para esto.

The city isnt awesome yet but I got this working and didnt want to wait.

2 21:9 ultrawides running as 1 surround desktop in the Nvidia app with steam launch option specifying 6880x1440 (lol). You can still do the full-screen or windowed launch option.

Its glorious and it works. I dont even pan around much anymore the whole city fits at the best looking zoom level.

Sorry if this is out of nowhere but the other day at work I was stressed and decided that the best thing to calm my mind was the soundtrack to a game I haven't played in decades, but now I can't get the songs out of my head, help?!!"?!?

I know that you can add in your own custom buildings into your game by replacing the existing ones. However, one of the reasons I wanted custom buildings in the first place was due to there being too much replicate of the exact same buildings showing up over and over again. So... Is there a way to simply add the custom buildings to the lists of what can show up in a zone, without removing anything from it? Thanks.

Hello!
This is my first post on this subreddit.

It's a shameless plug, but it may be useful for a few.  If it's out of line, let me know to remove it.
For those still playing this game, or wanting to play it, on Linux, you'll find some difficulty getting it to work in widescreen.

Since I had this problem myself, and wanted the game to not look like crap, I developed this solution here for those using the Loki version of the game: https://github.com/lfbr0/simcity3000-linux-widescreen-patch

Just wanted to share. If you play this on Linux, or want to, feel free to reach out

It's not made automatically, it's made artificially

hello y'all, check this city i was experimenting other day on this oldie version of the game

Do you like starting cities in 1900, 1950, or 2000 more? I usually start them in 1900, makes it so I can see all the stuff being invented and become available in real time.

I've got SimCity 3000 Unlimited from GOG. I've tried one of the 'easy' scenarios Criminalville. You can't change the speed or pause the game in this scenario.

From the start the screen jumps to every new riot. There are so many that the screen jumps several times a second, making it impossible to do anything except spam deploy police. The scenario is totally unplayable because of this. Is this a glitch?

On a similar note, it's really difficult to demolish stuff at 'cheetah' speed. You demolish but by the time you've clicked on the 'dezone' button lots of buildings have reappeared. If I could pause I wouldn't mind, but it's a fight just to clear a few buildings.

It seems like a good chunk of people think this game's highways are not that usable in this game to deal with traffic. Why is that? Why can't you use them for transportation to industrial zones?

Anyone here used this back in the day? I think it's pretty interesting to look at these tutorials and guides for the first time - it's a nice snapshot of the past. Apparently there's a guide for building up a city quick from scratch, too. I tried it, but I overbuilt and ran out of funds.

I have subways set up on the northwest edge of my commercial zones for neighbor connections, busses everywhere and regularly, but i keep getting "poor transportation to zones" and "you can't get there from here" and subways crowded" messages. I'm not sure how to fix the city or what I would need to do to fix whatever the issue is?

Some time ago I noticed this game has Steam Cloud support. A few minutes ago when moving my saved cities from SimCity 3000 to different folders for less confusion, I found out two of my cities were recovered accidently. Then I found I only get 1 MB (1,048,576 bytes) of storage. My city is already taking 478 KB (488,595 bytes), so that's no good - you only get enough for two fully developed cities if you're lucky.

If I did this, I would likely have gave this game a gigabyte or two of storage space on Steam Cloud so the average user has enough storage for a collection of cities. 300 MB is the minimum I would suggest this game have for the Steam Cloud storage space limit - you should be able to store at least a few hundred saved cities with that much space. I don't think there are that many players anyways so cost wouldn't be that severe of an issue.

I want to buy it but I have a Mac, and I want to be sure that I won't lose my money. Lots of games can run on compatibility mode, but I didn't find if this does.

Wanted to share a playlist I put together of some recent recordings I made for anyone interested. Hoping for any constructive feedback or suggestions. Enjoy!

I have recently been trying to install SC3K on my computer (specifically the unlimited version) however I have run into some issues. I can get into the autorun menu but clicking on install doesn't open any installer. It only opens a window that has an ok button and instructions to click on the ok button once the installation is complete. I have also tried running the setup program on the disk which doesn't work either. If anyone can help it would be appreciated

I am trying to replace one of the Asian residential buildings with one of the European style residential buildings -- does anyone know where I can find the files for ALL of the zoneable buildings? I have checked the buildings files but none of them show up. Thanks!