Sheyenne River Valley

If you liked this item, please rate it up on Steam Workshop page.

Author: Ozzyski

Last revision: 13 Mar, 2021 at 01:22 UTC

File size: 14.24 MB

On Steam Workshop

Description:

An artistic 1:1 recreation of Valley City, North Dakota, USA

This is my very first published map! If you like what you see, please rate, favorite, and comment below to let me know! If there are any errors or issues with playbility you may come across, message me and I will do my best to fix them. Thank you!

Please read "Mods" and "Info" sections below before playing – all mods and assets can be found in the Sheyenne River Valley Collection

Situated along the Sheyenne River floodplain, Valley City is known for its many bridges over the Sheyenne River, which have earned it the distinction of being called the "City of Bridges". Before it’s settlement in 1874, surveying of the territory began in 1867 using Thomas Jefferson’s notorious 1785 Public Lands Survey System, which became the defining feature across the mid-west and much of the North American continent. The landscape of this map is dominated by huge swaths of farmland and gentle hills with easy slopes.

Two rail lines cross the map from the four directions, the most famous of which crosses the valley along the Hi-Line Bridge, while the other runs along the river and underneath the Hi-Line before veering off into the Great Plains. Many rail lines have come and gone through this region, and some can still be made out to this day since their adoption by motor-vehicle and cattle traffic.

A single Interstate crosses the map from the baseline East/West directions, adopting the path of the original highway, skirting around the city, then rejoining on the other side.

The pre-built town will fall almost entirely within the center start tile, but can be easily removed should you want to make this map your own – I will release a Free-Style version soon, containing everything except Valley City.

Utility lines are built in, allowing easy expansion as your city grows – this will mean that each tile will have a small "maintenance" cost in addition to the purchase price.

Paved roads, highways, and rail are all appropriately graded, but dirt roads are left raw within reason.

As is, this map will support 31K residents with 85% traffic flow (TM:PE assisted).

81 Tiles is required to build to the map edge; I recommend to at least have 25 Tiles so that you have wide access to the farmland, though the map will work just fine without either of those mods. If you want to start with only one tile, make sure you are NOT subscribed to 81 tiles at the time of first load, and if you don’t want to build up to the map edge don’t use it at all, as it will unlock all tiles automatically post-load – use 25 Tiles instead.

Theme Mixer 2 and the Sheyenne River Valley Theme Mix are required to see the map as I intended. Without them and mix dependencies, it will not appear as it does in the photos. Not having them will not break the game, but I can’t promise it will look pretty.

TM:PE is highly recommended to tame the unintelligent pathfinding AI along the Interstate, since traffic will sometimes take the exit only to get back on.

**You must subscribe to any dependencies associated with the assets and mods included in this collection – I highly recommend you check their individual pages to see if they need any mods themselves to function, though I did my best to include them all in said collection – anything listed as deprecated has been tested and is confirmed functional**

I will admit that the tree-count is not well optimized for a map with this level of detail, and there are a huge variety of trees that are included – because of this, you may want to subscribe to only whats used plus a small handful of decorative trees to use for detailing; I’ve essentially chosen your entire vegetation library for you – I’m sorry. I originally never intended to publish this map, and only chose to after much of the work was already complete and you wonderful people encouraged me to release it – so thank you immensely for that! Future versions of this and other maps will take asset variety into core consideration.

For growing cities beyond 31K population, you will probably want to think about adding a dam to provide your residents with enough drinking water; until then you should be able to get by with water towers. It is not recommended to use water pumps in the river, as it will suck in more than what flows downstream. – IRL, there is an earthen dam upriver just outside of the mapped area for you to draw inspiration from – Click here to see! [goo.gl]

The field immediately northwest of town is planned for a small municipal airport – with mods, air traffic routes can be removed or moved elsewhere should you choose.

Please note that because this map has surface roads included, their render and texture will look odd if they aren’t within your city’s boundary; once the tile they are on has been purchased, they will immediately look normal. There is no workaround or fix available at this time – this is normal game behavior to reduce RAM usage for unused tiles.

Special shout-out to Winter who volunteered their expertise to solve a conflict that would have prevented this map from ever reaching the workshop! Thank you a million! Everyone enjoying this map owes you a debt of gratitude.

[paypal.me]