New:

• SimCity Single-Player Mode. Enables Offline Play.
• Single-Player Mode includes multi-city play, regional interdependence, and city specialization. Regions are saved locally and there is no limit on number of save games.
• Autosave can be disabled in Single-Player Mode in order for players to experiment and load their regions at a previous save point.
• Save As a copy feature. Players can make copies of their regions at multiple save points.
• See FAQ on Single-Player Mode for full details.
• Friends Search now uses the Origin friend search.

Performance:

• Optimizations in the simulator to improve performance of both Multiplayer and Single-Player Mode.

Credit to endorken for making this.

And just for fun, so kinda cheats short cuts.  These are in the manual BTW.

• Alt-W = +$100k
• Alt-M = Sickness and Injuries Toggle
• Alt-A = Air Pollution Toggle
• Alt-S = Sewage Toggle
• Alt-F = Fire Toggle
• Alt-G = Garbage Toggle
• Alt-H = Homelessness Toggle
• Alt-P = Ground Pollution Toggle
• Alt-C = Crime Toggle

Some 4chan’er posted a comment last night on my story Play simcity 5 2013 in offline mode? The SimCity Jailbreak is only a matter of time now. Not what Maxis en-visioned.

It’s not a “jailbreak”(those are for Applefags). It’s called a crack you moron.

A fair point so elegantly stated.  I questioned his sanity and recommended he take up an unsafe hobby.  However, it is a fair point.  And if this person would had instead submitted a comment akin to what I’m about to write, I would have have engaged him and perhaps changed my mind.  Here is what he should have said.

First, let me take a shot at defining what is a Jailbreak:  A Jailbreak is a hack that removes limits placed on an OS and thus allows full access to the OS and hardware allowing programmers and SAAS providers to offer features and functions that would not be available under the restricted OS.   As with the examples I gave above, a jailbroken iPhone can do FAR more then a gated iPhone can.

Now lets apply this concept to SimCity.  Right now, people are working on a crack that will allow SimCity to run and save games offline. But why stop there?  One of the really annoying things that EA Maxis is doing is forcing people to pay for upgrades, new building types (like a marina for example) or more land.  This is pretty weak. Also as stated in my previous posts, EA wants you to be connected at all times to play the games.  What happens when the servers go down?  As it did.  Or somehow the games gets corrupted during saves, which it has. Or they want to update the game and you have to pay for it or it no longer works, which would not surprise me.  What is needed is a complete echo system where we can create and add mods like in SC4, but in addition, say you do want to connect to other cities, we should be able to do that as well ‘outside’ of EA’s servers. And perhaps come up with SAAS features that I have not even imagined yet.  Perhaps we could build military units and go to war against each other!  That would be interesting.  Focus on how do you keep you city running in war time. I would play that!

So is the coming SC5 hack going to be a crack or can we call it a jailbreak?  I expect most people will call it a crack, but I’m going to think about this a bit more before my next post on SimCity

And for the little 4chan’er, you bring up a good point.  Shame you are not educated enough to express it in any intelligent manner.  How is that playing in the traffic going for you?

Lucy Bradshall from Maxis made a blog post explaining why SimCity will not run in offline mode because it was not part of Maxis ‘vision’ for SimCity.  Here are the reason they give and my replies:

• We keep the simulation state of the region up to date for all players.  Even when playing solo, this keeps the interactions between cities up to date in a shared view of the world.

That’s great if the servers could keep up, but even with the doubling of servers and slowing SimCity down to Lama, it still takes hours for some city to city or person to person interactions to take place.  Fail. And for SimCity Players like myself.  I do not need much less want this.

• Players who want to reach the peak of each specialization can count on surrounding cities to provide services or resources, even workers.  As other players build, your city can draw on their resources.

Great.  Then make this an option.  This can easily be simulated in a single player mode.

• Our Great Works rely on contributions from multiple cities in a region.  Connected services keep each player’s contributions updated and the progression on Great Works moving ahead.

For who?  What is I only play perhaps once a week?  How am I suppose to keep up?

• All of our social world features – world challenges, world events, world leaderboards and world achievements – use our servers to update the status of all cities.
• Our servers handle gifts between players.
• We’ve created a dynamic supply and demand model for trading by keeping a Global Market updated with changing demands on key resources.
• We update each city’s visual representation as well.  If you visit another player’s city, you’ll see the most up to date visual status.
• We even check to make sure that all the cities saved are legit, so that the region play, leaderboards, challenges and achievements rewards and status have integrity.

I have the same answer for the rest here.  NON of these features and function require always on connections.  Changes in the city can be cued to be updated once a game year. One can open a socket and exchange and update that data (IF THEY WANT TO).  To force people in to a feature and function requirement that in all actuality has only a marginal effect on the inner workings of your City does not make any sense.

And that is we get to the enviable jailbreak efforts to run SimCity offline. Initially Maxis said the SimCity 5 2013 could not be run offline.  That was quickly disproved by a few hackers to got it to function fine, only missing a few features and the ability to save.  I think it will only be a matter of time before someone writes a packet sniffer, decodes the DRM protocol and  just redirects the send / get requests for saving a city, and placing it on a local hard drive.  So now, not only has this foolish ‘vision’ cost you customers, it will actually drive up the interest in pirate version because a majority of SimCity players, myself included, want to play SimCity as a fun diversion, not a goal focused game where you are trying to compete with other players.

Oh and remember this gem?

Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw told Polygon. ”It wouldn’t be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team.”

Not only did a hacker prove that wrong, a dev from Maxis said it outright!

A developer at Maxis told John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun. “They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything.

Its only a matter of time Maxis.  Someone will Jailbreak SimCity to allow saves and even fix the population issue and unlike Apple which benefited because the jailbreak community pushed the iPhone forward into development, people will (if possible) mod and expand the pirate version.

http://www.ea.com/news/simcity-update-straight-answers-from-lucy

As I hear more, I’ll update this.  Also, if anyone finds new cheats for SC 5, let me know.

Source http://i.imgur.com/eALiJPm.jpg

I have not bought SimCity2013 and do not plan to till there is a hack that will allow me to play offline. The main time I would play is on the train or stuck at the airport or other times when I have down time. I do not always have access to the web during these downtimes, so no SC2013 for me.  Will be very curious what the next iPad version of SimCity will be like.  Based on the video, there is a lot of data and graphics power needed to run this.  Could be the first major game that cannot play on all iPad.  Well see..  Anyway, check out the vid.  The graphics are nice.  BTW, cant wait for the day SimCity supports roundabouts.  As a past UK driver, I totally see the value in these.  The I forgot how to roundabout is from reddit.  Thank you Reddit!

As for cheat codes. I have not personally verified these, so let me know.

These only work in sandbox mode.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gXBfzL7cZw