What Ploppable RICO Revisited does

Functional large buildings

Ploppable RICO Revisited's main function is enabling you to have functional RICO (Residential, Industrial, Commercial, Office) buildings that are larger than possible with the unmodded game, and enables you to change the properties of those buildings (type, level, household/workplace counts).

The basic 'growable' RICO buildings in the game are limited to a maximum of 4x4 cells in size (32m x 32m). This is unrealistically small for any moderately large real-world building (like apartment blocks, factories, office towers, shopping centres, etc.). Ploppable RICO enables you to have much larger RICO buildings - with two key constraints:

• Firstly, these large buildings can't grow themselves - they need to be manually plopped (hence, 'Ploppable RICO').
• Secondly, you need an existing building to act as a 'template'. Ploppable RICO can't just create new buildings out of nowhere - you need an existing building model that it can use. The way this is usually done is for asset creators to create their building as a park or unique building; Ploppable RICO then 'overrides' this building and converts it into a RICO building.

Ploppable RICO is told what to do with which buildings by a settings file. If you see a workshop asset that is advertised as 'RICO Ready' (or similar), then that means the asset creator has included a RICO settings file for that building. This file will be automatically loaded by Ploppable RICO so that your new building will be ready to go, without you having to do anything (if you don't have Ploppable RICO installed, then the buildings will still be placeable in your city - but they'll be parks/unique buildings/etc. instead of functional RICO buildings).

If you want to change the creator's settings for a building, or even create your own settings for buildings that don't have any, then you can do so in the settings editor.

Placing growable buildings with Find It 2

Ploppable RICO Revisited's secondary function is to enable the manual placement ('plopping') of growable buildings (buildings that normally only grow by themselves in designated zones), in conjunction with the Find It 2 mod.

Using Find It 2, players are able to select and manually place growable buildings. However, if these buildings aren't placed in a zoned area (with, for specialized buildings, appropriate district policies in effect) they will quickly despawn (disappear). Ploppable RICO 2 enables these buildings to be placed anywhere, without regards for zoning and district specializations, while still continuing to function as normal.

One example of when this function is particularly useful is for when you want to rotate growable buildings away from the zoning grid, such as when placing buildings between roads at odd angles. Another example is when you want to physically combine buildings (placing one building within another) to emulate multi-use zoning (there are a number of commercial storefront buildings on the Steam Workshop designed for exactly this purpose).

Other abilities

To support the above functions, Ploppable RICO Revisited includes a number of other abilities as well. For example, complaints regarding low land value and/or too few services can be disabled - particularly useful when you want to place a premium building in a location that doesn't meet the game's criteria, or when you want to slowly develop a new area (such as an office park) before placing services.

Other functionality includes the ability to automatically apply the 'make historical' option to plopped buildings, and/or to stop plopped buildings from levelling-up (in conjunction with the Advanced Building Level Control mod).