HexTopia

XXVI century. Humanity went into space and learned to terraform… the Earth.

This has opened up new opportunities for the exploitation of the ocean depths. An ideal site was found underwater and the process of turning the ocean floor into Elysium began.

But human nature has not changed over the centuries. If there is no need to reach out to the stars, then there is a desire to rise above the ones. The ideal place to live took the form of a futuristic social ladder, where every other level above sea level is an indicator of the social status of its inhabitants.

This is where your story begins. Will you maintain the balance between natural beauty and technical excellence in futuristic urban planning? Or will your concrete jungles replace the tropical ones? Will you obey human nature or will you level the playing field? It’s up to you. Let’s start!

The map does not require any paid DLC. All you need is a HexTopia 4K Tropical Theme and some tree assets. For convenience, all necessary items are collected in ONE COLLECTION.

The map contains all types of resources. Also, there are ore and oil in the sea (see figure above).

Several of the hex islands contain fertile land and have a minimum number of trees to allow agriculture to develop.

Full range of external connections:

• highways 4/4
• train tracks 4/4
• ship paths 4/4
• plane paths 4/4

Start tile has enough water flow for a safe sewage system.

The water flow and depth are well defined, so you can catch any fish on the map (see figure above).

Number of trees: 205,000 in total, so without using Tree Anarchy 1.3.5 you can plant more than 50,000! There are no any vanilla trees on this map, but most of the trees are low-polygonal, so no impact on performance.

For fans of the vanilla game mode, all 19 hexagonal islands fit perfectly into 9 tiles. In this mode all external connections are available, and some buildings can be placed in the «wild» part of the map. See figure above.

The map is better revealed in 25 tiles. In this mode, in addition to the flat central hex islands, there is a hilly terrain at the foot of the mountains that challenges your creativity. In the rough coastal area you can organize resorts — hotels, small bungalows, cabins in the woods, etc.

The 81 tiles game mode is also available, although there are a lot of mountains on the map. The map edges are less detailed and there are less trees. You can add any woodland using Forest Brush Revisited v1.3.11 if your PC can handle it.

7 out of 10. The development area consists of many islands with a flat surface. The islands have different heights and the closer they are to the center, the higher the altitude difference. The strict hexes’ geometry hints at the usefulness of making a decision about the district specialization in advance.

For aesthetic reasons, the highway on the hexagonal islands is hidden underground. Only 6 outer islands have predefined highway connections, for others transport systems need to be planned. If you wish to expand the underground part of the highway, underground interchanges can be found in this collection.

Another difficulty is the abundance of mountains in 25 tiles game mode.

• Beware of forest fires.
• There are two train lines. One line can be dedicated to passenger trains and other to cargo.
• One of the island has 0m height above sea level, so seawalls will be useful to protect it.
• Gravel roads on some hexagonal islands are just decorative. It is recommended to remove them.

Loading Screen Mod Revisited 1.0 decreases load time and used memory.
Tree Anarchy 1.3.5 makes forest not so regular as in the vanilla game.
Perfect islands’ geometry needs Precision Engineering.

Most screenshots above were made using Relight, Render It!, ULOD and RelightAverage color correction scheme.

Cleyra – Color Correction, Nemesis LUT and Coastal LUT are good for HexTopia 4K Tropical Theme.

If you have a vanilla game without the DLC, you need at least 8Gb RAM to play this map. DLC increases memory requirements.

This map uses a theme with 4K textures, but even on old Geforce GTX 660M-level laptops, the game run at quite decent 25-30 FPS.

There are many trees on the map, but most of them are low poly, which has little impact on performance. Several «colored parks» are planted on the central islands, where FPS can slightly drop when the camera is very close. If the drop of the FPS will be significant, it is worth to bulldoze a part of these «parks».

Fluxtrance inspired me to create the map with his magnificent tutorials of map making. All the trees on the map were created by MrMaison and pdelmo — I do not know how they achieve such detail. First version of HexTopia map would not have been so beautiful without the Monte Belo theme, whose author Mark Fire has demonstrated an excellent balance in the combination of different textures. I also thank the modders community, which has allowed Cities Skylines, created by Colossal Order Ltd, to thrive for more than five years.

And a special thank you to my wife lesenkin for inspiration, patience and love. And also for the amazing editing of the original version of this description in Russian and especially for the Prologue (all the mistakes in the English version of this text are my fault). lesenkin, you are a miracle.

—
sh_nick

P.S.

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