[SOLVED] Lost city? Tile erased after crash

[alexandicity]

Hello all!

I've been playing Simcity for ages but yesterday lost my most recent creation. My game has a habit of crashing to desktop from time to time. I've never understood why, but it's sufficiently infrequent that I just save every half hour and the loss is acceptable. But yesterday, after a standard crash to desktop, I went back into SC to find *GASP* my city tile replaced by a flat green plain...! All progress lost!

I see the city tile file still exists in my region folder and is several megabytes large - so presumably my city exists somewhere. I imagine it is corrupted somehow. Is there any way to recover a tile file that might have been corrupted like this? I tried the Win7 Previous version but have none...

Thank you!

[rikkeflik]

Hello all!

I've been playing Simcity for ages but yesterday lost my most recent creation. My game has a habit of crashing to desktop from time to time. I've never understood why, but it's sufficiently infrequent that I just save every half hour and the loss is acceptable. But yesterday, after a standard crash to desktop, I went back into SC to find *GASP* my city tile replaced by a flat green plain...! All progress lost!

I see the city tile file still exists in my region folder and is several megabytes large - so presumably my city exists somewhere. I imagine it is corrupted somehow. Is there any way to recover a tile file that might have been corrupted like this? I tried the Win7 Previous version but have none...

Thank you!

Have you tried to import your city?

Place the .sc4 file in your My Documents \ SimCity 4 \ Regions \ Downloads folder.
Start up SimCity 4
Click on a city tile of the appropriate size in your region, and choose "Import City"

Sometimes this helps.


Simcity 4 is an older game, and running it on a windows 7 (64-bits)  could cause these crashes. Many people have these problems. The easiest solution is to install simcity on a virtual computer running xp (that's what I did, and now, I can play simcity safe without any crashes).

[CasperVg]

Have you tried actually loading the plain green tile? I've seen many of my tiles go plain green (because of a save error), but usually the city itself is still the same as it was on your last save, and the region view restores itself once you save the city again.

Hope that helped,
Casper

[alexandicity]

Casper - no, I hadn't (probably out of fear of doing further damage). But after you suggestion, I loaded it up and BAM the tile was restored... I really should have tried that before, so thanks for the suggestion Now only 1 hours of work to do rather than 20+

rikkeflik - Thanks for the suggestions; I'll keep them in mind

[SC4BOY]

The only caveat for using that method is that the "load from download" method is a "destructive read" so be sure you have other backups.. if you lose that tile for some reason, once you have "inserted" it via this method, should you fail, it is GONE