SimCity 3000 Beginners Guide: Your City, Your Way

Old, Gold, and Speckled with Platinum

SimCity 3000 came out right at the end of the 1990s, but it’s still very much popular nowadays. Fans of the SimCity series have loved the older SimCity games, especially since the developer butchered any recent titles in the series. Those picking up SimCity 3000 during an online digital sale might want to look for good tips or a guide on how to play this game right, and this is the right article you’re reading!

What Does the Best Layout Look Like?

Since SimCity 3000 lets you fix the terrain that you want to use before you start constructing your city, you can really optimize your city’s layout. If you really want to be optimal with a good layout for SimCity 3000, then you’ll want to have a terrain that is completely flat with no hills at all. If you have hills or other elevated terrains, then you’ll be wasting space you could be using to optimize your layout. However, it might be helpful to have water going through your city that heads out to the sea. There’s plenty of potential doing this when you’re building and optimizing your seaport.

After flattening your terrain, then you’ll want to decide on the center of your city so you can work on a grid going from the center outward that stretches all the way across the map. A good layout that starts from the roads will have your industrial tiles separate from your residential tiles as it could affect your land value. You also have to keep in mind that there is no growth beyond three tiles from the road, so you’ll need to make sure your layout accounts for transportation planning.

Subway-to-Rail Connection

You don’t have to rely only on roads for transportation for your Sims. You can have a good rail system to really bring development to your city. All you need to do is lay down rails and have train stations placed strategically throughout your city. Building a subway is a little more expensive than having a rail, but it’s a little more convenient because it’s underground and doesn’t take space on land. However, if you have a rail system in place because of its affordability but don’t want to demolish it completely, you can combine the subway and rail with a subway-to-rail connection.

If You Absolutely Must Cheat

There are a couple of cheats you could use simply by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + C during your game. After typing in that combination, you could try a couple of different cheats here:

• UFO Swarm – Aliens will terrorize your city! Run away…!
• I am weak – Everything is free of charge!
• Power to the masses – You’ll have access to all of the power plants.
• Stop forcing advice – Sometimes, we just want to work in peace. So, slap that zipper onto that advisory!
• Fund – When you just can’t get enough money. Which is always!

These are only some of the cheat codes, we won’t give you all of them because SimCity 3000 is a game where most of the fun comes from playing the game legitimately!

What’s Your City Look Like?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re playing with or without cheats, the important is whether your city is truly beautiful! We hope our tips and tricks here have helped you in your city construction. We’d love to see what you’ve done with it, in SimCity 3000, and even in its older version, SimCity 2000! Old is definitely gold!