Hullo! How do you make such perfectly rectangular shallow canals in SimCity when you’re making your maps? I tried to do it myself, but all I managed to make is lakes lmao
Oh, let me tell you about it! It’s possible thanks to the terrain levelling technique which is very popular among SC4 builders in combination with God Mode terraforming tools cheat that makes all the tools available even after the city is started.
First of all, make a small hollow somewhere on the terrain just to reach the water level.
We need this because we want our average terrain height to be quite close to the water level. To do so, choose levelling tool and start level the whole map by pointing the cursor over the shore, not too far from the water.
Look for the area where the grid disappears. That’s a good sign of that the terrain is really close to the water level.
Once your map is completely flat, feel free to start a city. But before we start laying down roads, let’s take care of our canal.
To do so, pick a lowering tool from the mayor mode terraforming tools and dig a hole just to reach the water and go little bit further. That’s how deep our future canal will be.
It’s also good to dig that hole somewhere on the route of our future canal.
Once you’re happy with the depth, switch back to God mode. But not just by clicking the sun button. We need the terraforming tools. At this point we can only access those by holding Ctrl+Alt+Shift and clicking the Sun Button.
In the God mode terraforming tools, we need to raise terrain level by one click, like so
Now let’s get back to mayor mode and choose the road tool. This is where the fun begins. In Simcity 4 single road pieces placed next to each other always inherit the height of the previous road piece. Single road piece is always 100% flat, therefore the result of placing multiple road pieces placed next to each other is completely flat terrain. There are slope height limitations but since our future bank isn’t too high, this should work like a charm.
First, we need to place one road piece at the bottom of our hole, like so
Then just spread in in the directions of our future canal. The banks can be levelled the same way. In the end you should have something like this:
Let’s add another canal, but we gonna make it narrower than the main one
by deleting the road pieces at the bottom and adding a row at the top
Let’s also add basin area, be creative, have fun!
Okay! Time to get back to God mode terraforming tools! Ctrl+Alt+Shift and click ‘Sun’ again, but now we need to lower terrain by one click.
The terrain is lowered and the canal is now filled with water!
Now it’s time to add roads and make some more terraforming.
Impotant: though lakes, hills and mountains can be added and created at any time you like, roads should be added only at the point when there’s no need to lower or raise the whole terrain level using the god mode terraforming tool. Each use of this tool with erase everything which is not part of terrain (roads, buildings, structures, etc.)
Okay, let’s import our new map into the game!
Looks nice! Now we can add some bridges and enjoy our new neighborhood with perfectly straight canals!
Hey Criquette, can you explain in more detail about the bank width requirements for your embankment set? I haven’t used that terrain cheat ever in my life and I’m not sure I understood your note about it correctly. Did you mean the slope has to be one tile until it reaches the water?
Well, it’s not critical, and it’s more of suggestion rather than a requirement really. For example, on this map straight from SC4, embankments work just fine
But what I tried to refer is this
The only way to have one tile between the bottom and the bank terrain level is to modify the terrain with the cheat with two main options:
a – level the bank ground by adding one tile wide strip
b – level the bottom by adding one tile wide strip
P.s.: if your finger is still intact after scrolling through this,
you may want to click here to get the SC4 terrain from this so called tutorial
