-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 6
'Growable' RICO
In addition to its historical purpose of enabling and customising RICO buildings larger than the maximum size for growable buildings, Ploppable RICO Revisited versions 2.0 and later also add the ability to designate buildings as growable (or not).
Due to game limitations, there are two important restrictions on which buildings can be designated as growable:
- A growable building CANNOT exceed a 4x4 tile footprint (i.e. cannot be longer than 4 tiles in any horizontal dimension).
- A growable building CANNOT include any net assets (e.g. paths or roads - including the invisible paths found in assets such as public transport buildings).
If you can't see the 'growable' checkbox in the RICO settings panel for a building, it means that that building is not eligible to be growable for one of the above reasons (typically the first, as the second case is much rarer).
The primary use of the growable function is to customise your growable buildings. Apart from changing stats such as the number of households or workplaces in the building, you can also change other aspects, too. Examples include:
- Change the building's level: useful when you feel that a workshop asset's default level doesn't match with your view of what it should be for that type of building, or how it fits in your city.
- Change the building's subservice: maybe you feel that a particular commercial building on the workshop should be something other than generic commercial - change that nightclub into a leisure building, or that souvenir shop into a tourist building. Perhaps you like the look of that oil processing building but don't want to bother with specialised industry - turn it into a generic industrial building. That organic cafe should probably be an eco-commercial building, too... and so on.
- Change the building's service: Maybe you want that office building to be a commercial building instead, or vice-versa. Maybe that wall-to-wall commercial would suit you better as residential. Go for it!
Of course, there are other uses for this function too, including converting smaller unique buildings (or even service buildings) to growables, if you find some that you think would work well in that role.
Eligible buildings with Ploppable RICO Revisited settings with the 'growable' option selected will be seen and treated by the game as an ordinary growable building. They will spawn naturally in zoning of the relevant type: from empty zones (for buildings set as level 1) and/or via upgrading of existing buildings (for buildings set as level 2 and higher). They will also level-up and upgrade to other buildings in accordance with base-game growable behaviour (note that the 'make historical' checkbox can be used, as with any other growable building, to allow the building to continue to level up without changing into a different building in the process).
These buildings will still be visible in, and placeable from, the Ploppable RICO Revisited tool panel. Ploppable RICO provides some additional functionality (similar to that provided by the 'Plop the Growables' mod) to help manage these buildings:
- By default, Ploppable RICO Growables will be able to survive outside of zoned areas.
- By default, Ploppable RICO Growables with specializations normally requiring a district setting (e.g. leisure/tourism/eco/industrial specialization) will be able to survive without that district setting.
These defaults can be changed in the mod's options panel, and also extended to ALL growable buildings (not just Ploppable RICO buildings). Note that if you disable these options, normal growable restrictions will apply: if you place one of these buildings outside of a relevant zone, it will quickly despawn.
Ploppable RICO Revisited also includes an option to mark plopped growables with 'Make Historical' by default (to save you having to do so manually). Doing so will mean that the building will no longer change its appearance when it upgrades to the next level.
The reverse also applies too - if you take an existing growable building and apply Ploppable RICO Revisited settings to it, and de-select the 'growable' option, then that building will no longer be growable - it will no longer spawn on its own, and will only be placeable in your city via Ploppable RICO Revisited (or via the Find It mod's Ploppable RICO integration).