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Frequently Asked Questions

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algernon-A edited this page Aug 28, 2022 · 25 revisions

Why does my service building (police/fire/harbor/school/power plant/garbage depot/whatever) no longer work and instead thinks that it's a Residential/Industrial/Commercial/Office building?

This occurs when a local RICO setting has been added to that building. To fix this:

  1. Open the Ploppable RICO Revisited settings panel.
  2. Find the building in the list (if you opened the settings panel via the Ploppable RICO button on the building's info panel then it should already be selected for you).
  3. Press the 'Remove local' button to remove the local settings.
  4. Restart the game (quit and exit to desktop, then relaunch and load your city).

Can a building be both a Ploppable RICO building AND a service (e.g. electricity/water/hospital) building?

No. A fundamental limitation of the game is that each building can only be of one type. If you convert a service building to a Ploppable RICO building then it will only work as the new building type that you've selected for it, and will NOT retain any of its old special functions.

You might be able to work around this using mods such as Move It to 'hide' one building inside another to give the illusion of a single multi-purpose building (e.g. hide a small office building inside a power plant, or a park inside a RICO office tower).

Can a building be mixed-use (e.g. commercial and residential in the same building)?

No. A fundamental limitation of the game is that each building can only be of one type.

However, you can work around this by using mods such as Move It to place one building inside another to give the illusion of a single multi-function building (e.g. hide a small commercial building inside a residential building).

There are a large number of commercial shopfronts available on the Steam Workshop for precisely this purpose (ground-floor commercial buildings to be placed 'inside' residential/office buildings to replicate mixed-use buildings)

There are also 'modular' building collections (e.g. Smilie's Mixed Use sets) where you have entire buildings designed to be placed above other buildings with matching footprints, so you can have e.g. a commercial building for lower floors and a residential building for upper floors - the end result is two buildings that look and function as though they are one single mixed-use building.

Why am I seeing buildings with 0/0 households or workplaces?

Because you've reached the game's CitizenUnit limit. Note that this is not the same as citizens (population): CitizenUnits are an internal game data structure that's used to help manage citizens, and are used in buildings, vehicles, and other places in the game where the game needs to manage people (not just citizens, but also visitors such as tourists and 'temporary' cims such as emergency services workers).

For more information, see the page on the CitizenUnit limit.

Why do my buildings keep disappearing after I place them?

Firstly, make sure that you're not using Plop the Growables as well as this mod. Then, make sure that you either:

  1. Only plop the buildings in a zoned area with the relevant zone type for that building (including with any applicable district specializations), OR
  2. Have selected the 'Growable buildings can survive outside of the correct zone' options in the Growable options panel.

Why don't my buildings disappear when I remove or change the zoning underneath them?

This is because the 'Growable buildings can survive outside of the correct zone' options is enabled in the Growable options panel. Disabling this option will revert to standard game behavior (NOTE: doing so will requires all growable buildings to be in correct zoning, as per the standard game behavior, so any plopped growables not inside the correct zone will also despawn).

Why is my residential demand so high after I place RICO employment (Industrial/Commercial/Office) buildings?

See the page on Residential demand.

Why doesn't placing RICO commercial buildings with high worker counts seem to reduce my commercial demand?

Commercial demand is only partially satisfied by commercial workplace counts; to properly reduce commercial demand, you need visitor/shopping places. With Ploppable RICO on its own, the game will only allocate the standard number of visitor places to each building, which may not be enough to make noticeable reduction in demand if your visitor places aren't keeping up with your population.

You can address this by making sure you build parks and other entertainment buildings to provide additional visitor places, or by using a Realistic Population mod to better balance out the visitor numbers for commercial buildings.

Why can't I make buildings larger than 4x4 growable?

This is a game limitation, and not a Ploppable RICO issue. See the pages on growables and ploppables and 'growable RICO' for more information.

How do I make my RICO buildings visible in Building Themes?

Make sure that you have the 'Growable' option selected in that building's RICO settings (you'll need to restart your game after selecting this option, otherwise Building Themes won't recognise the building). The building will then be selectable in Building Themes just like any other growable building.

Of course, you can't make buildings larger than 4x4 visibile in Building Themes, as such buildings exceed the game's maximum size for growable buildings) (this is a game limitation and nothing to do with either Ploppable RICO or Building Themes).

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