Garbage BURYING ME.. help! .. glub glub...

[SC4BOY]

hehe.. well I feel guilty for being the big bother recently on "general support".. don't know why I'm having issues I've not had before. My new problem is this...

Summary of city status:
-City.. < 300k .. been using this city for years playing with CAM (since CAM was first released) Pretty sparse really.. large city tile.. fairly advanced development demand as level 14+ CAM lots routinely grow, but only about 1/3 of area occupied
-New additions.. I have put a very few new changes in the city, but they were rather routine. I reviewed my downloads in LEX and am updating those flagged "RED X SQUARES" .. haven't really put many in.. added updated goober bus stations, added updated BSC and JRJ mega paks.. added the new NAM ..
-Garbage mods.. None.. and I had no garbage or recycle lots in the city to date.. was exporting all garbage...
-Just expanded some residential areas to grow the population a bit and re-routed a few transport items.. rather routine

I glanced at the graphs for power, water and garbage as I always do to keep cities from getting out of control. I noted that city garbage was getting out of hand and ramping up at approximately 100 units per month. Decided to build a garbage lot and maybe a recycle lot.. in the meantime, I was going to export more.. so I changed the "neighbor deals" .. at that time I was exporting approximately 2500 units /month.

Problem.. when I change the deals, it didn't take..(it showed up as a "deal" but never changed on the garbage display) From this point on I can't affect garbage output/accumulation in any way. Any garbage lots I built effectively are non-functional (of the several I tried.. I mean they did what they were supposed to do.. recycle etc, but never impacted the garbage graph.) No matter what I do I simply can't stop my city from getting buried under garbage.. its rather minor now, but the future is clear

I can go to other cities and they seem to work fine.

-One last point, and I have no idea if it had an impact.. I changed the date.. it was roughly 85 yrs and I changed it to 45 or so.. no real reason, but I read the thread on changing dates and just thought I'd try it out.. hehe... I had played with this on a smaller city and it didn't seem to matter so I doubt this is it, but thought I'd mention it in the interest of disclosure .. hehe

-Oh and I had used the "You don't deserve it" cheat while I was working on transport and landscape, etc to avoid having to wait for MML lots to take effect. I've used this on various major rebuild occasions before without ill effects.

Any ideas?? Any help would be appreciated. Or if you have any tricks to snap it out of its ignominious decline.. I did plop the "minister of garbage" to track garbage data details.. it shows pretty much the same things as the garbage graph.

[Diggis]

I would say that changing the date you impact your graphs signifigantly.  See if it's the same on your power and water graphs.

Oh, and I moved this from the LEX help to the playing the game help for you. 

[SC4BOY]

I would say that changing the date you impact your graphs signifigantly.  See if it's the same on your power and water graphs.

They "hiccuped" but then fairly quickly recover.. But I'd say no or not much.. I can change the power generation and water by moving sliders or adding pumps, etc and they change as expected. School, fire, medical etc also seem to behave as expected. I was suspicious myself so had tried it on small cities after backing up just to test.. I say that GENERALLY there is little affect from changing the date, contrary to my expecations... but ya never know... maybe it is related, so that's why I mention it.

what really amazes me is the fact that even DOUBLING or ZEROING the garbage import/export won't even budge the graph.. Even the red "import" line stays flat.. usually that almost instantly causes a step in the graph. Even though I can't move the graph by changing garbage items, the "accumulated garbage" (green line) steadily climbs and eventually garbage is starts to accumulate (orange line)

I did think of a few other relevant details.. I've been not playing SC4 for about a year and just started back up a couple of weeks ago.. have never had problems with SC4 over many years of play.

The first thing I did was start a few updates as noted by the red x on the LEX status report for my dl's. I only put one in.. the BSC megaprops file... almost immediately I stated getting frequent CTD's on the cities (size doesn't matter nor general level of development.. it just crashes. Now of course I know that CTD's are not new to SC4 and there are known causes, but it crashes on me absolutely randomly and frequently under a WIDE range of actions no matter  how small.. zoom, open menu, select a lot, opening a city, etc etc  I know that to further test this I should have dl'd the "save check tool" but haven't done that at this point.

I have absolute confidence that this is not caused by the BSC file at all, but I'm curious if I've crossed some threshold for my particular file size, file count, pc capability, etc etc.. I did also read the prop pox thread which I don't have but peaked my interest and I looked at my city size and the largest city is over 8Mb so I'm wondering if the disk i/o and processing has taken some mysterious step function.. This issue is aside from the garbage issue, but my thinking about it caused me to post the history here just in case anyone has thoughts on it.

Oh, and I moved this from the LEX help to the playing the game help for you. 

np..

[SC4BOY]

Just to follow up.. As I mentioned, I placed some moderate "cleanup" lots (ony a couple.. didn't want to get into the "negative wraparound" that instantly buries your city in garbage). I have continued to play and slowly, slowly the garbage started to turn around. Finally it PLUMMETED to zero (new garbage) and the accumulated garbage soon followed. It took over 20 years to cleanup whatever it was. Is it possibly that some lots are "super garbage" lots that make a LOT of garbage? I'm trying to remember what I may have placed or grown during that period....

After it was clean, I removed all but two "cleanup" lots and have more than enough garbage handling capacity.

Perhaps it was the "redate" I don't have evidence to say.. I know it didn't affect any other city commodity, but who can say? At any rate that brings this to a close other than the curiousity about how suddenly garbage generation soared.

Here's the history:


Notice in the graph that it took years for the "export increases" to show up on the graph. I made the changes in the export way early while the garbage was on the steep rise, but they didn't "register" til much later... weird.

[SC4BOY]

In followup.. and I can only assume its caused by the "date change" experiment I did.. the garbage graph is "broken" permanently for that city tile.. weird. Those of you playing around with it might take warning from my situation. I have made no "mod" changes to the city otherwise. (Well I changed from one z simulator to a different one ...medium to high or something like that.. but I don't see any way that could have an effect.)