SimCity/SimCity 2000 Concepts

Two notable tricks (or glitches) involve the sea level tool in the terrain editor. By manipulating this tool, players can cause things that are not normally supposed to happen in the game, such as a rise in elevation without a hillside (like a cave) where a waterfall tile once sat and trees that sit on ground water (like a swamp). Although trees sitting on ground water are a fairly plausible terrain feature, it is not possible to achieve this effect by another means, and probably constitutes a glitch.

Another set of tricks involves using the terrain tools in the city mode which allows players utilize roads in ways that are not normally allowed in SimCity 2000. The first trick allows players build an underwater road tunnel; to do this, players are required to create a hill and dig a tunnel though it (the tunnel needs to be long enough so that its entrances will not be demolished during the next step), and then lower the hill using the terrain tool to a below-water level, thus allowing the tunnel to dip below grade under the water. The second is extremely difficult, involving adjustment of the terrain to allow a highway to connect at grade with a regular roadway instead of using an offramp.

With the release of SC2K came the introduction of a tool called the Sim City Urban Renewal Kit (SCURK). It enabled players to modify the images used in-game to represent various buildings, in much the same manner as general image manipulation software. The player was able to create basic bitmap files of a standard size with a standard 256 color palette. A number of pre-altered graphics packages were distributed, including some which replaced the "reward" buildings with images of various well known international buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower, but most buildings were made by fan-artists and shared on the Internet. Several SCURK designs influenced the designs of SimCity 3000's original buildings.

The SCURK is divided into three areas.

• Paint the Town — A graphics program fashioned to produce custom buildings for SC2K.
• Pick and Copy — A tileset (building set) modifier, which allows users to produce new tilesets that display specific custom buildings.
• Place and Print — A sandbox-style city builder with less restrictions as it would in SC2K, which also enables users to print cities on paper. The SCURK was also bundled along with Streets of SimCity and SimCopter, as the Place and Print aspect of the program was especially useful for non-SC2K users who intended to build custom cities for either games.