-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 6
Growables and Ploppables
Cities: Skylines has two basic building types: Growables and Ploppables.
Growable buildings are those that spawn (and upgrade) automatically, without direct player intervention. These are the Residential, Industrial, Commercial and Office buildings that grow on the zones that you place in the game. Note that you don't place these buildings individually; you tell them in which areas they can grow (by designating zoning), and then they grow by themselves. They can also upgrade to higher-level buildings of the same type (the 'make historical' option will prevent them from upgrading visually, but they will still 'invisibly' upgrade).
Growable buildings are limited by the game to a maximum of 4x4 tiles in size. Unlike Ploppable buildings, they also can't include any network assets (such as paths, roads, or tracks).
Ploppable buildings are those that you, as a player, place individually. All your service buildings fall into this category. Eduction, parks, healthcare, police, firefighting, water and sewerage buildings, waste management, transportation, and so on and so on.... unlike growables, these buildings cannot spawn by themselves, and they never upgrade.
Ploppable buildings can be much larger than growable buildings and aren't limited to the 4x4 maximum size for growables.
Note - a building can either be Ploppable or Growable - but not both!
Ploppable RICO's original function was to allow for Residential, Industrial, Commercial, and Office buildings larger than 4x4 in size. Due to the game's limitations around growables, these new larger RICO buildings necessarily had to be ploppable (hence, 'Ploppable RICO').
In order to do its job, Ploppable RICO has to change building types (e.g. changing a park into an office, or a monument into a factory, etc.) and stats (such as level, number of households/workplaces, pollution, etc.). These abilities are extended to the user through the mod's settings panel, enabling customisation of each building.
Originally, Ploppable RICO buildings were just that - Ploppable. If you created RICO settings for a building that was already growable, then it would no longer be growable and become a ploppable instead.
Version 2.0 of Ploppable RICO Revisited added support for the user to designate buildings with Ploppable RICO settings to be growable (if they meet the normal game requirements to be growable buildings, e.g. the 4x4 maximum size). Buildings with this designation will then spawn and grow normally like any growable building, while still being able to be manually selected and plopped from the Ploppable RICO tool (noting that, like any growable, it will quickly despawn unless you've either placed in into a zone of the correct type, or are using 'Plop the Growables').
This means that Ploppable RICO Revisited can be used to modify some or all of your existing growables (changing their stats, or even their type) without you having to manually plop each and every individual building.
NOTE: if you take an existing growable building, and convert it to a Ploppable RICO building without ensuring that the 'growable' option is selected in the Ploppable RICO Revisited settings for that building - then that building will now be a ploppable, NOT a growable! Without the 'growable' option, that building won't spawn or grow naturally any more (instead requiring manual placement by the player), and won't be recognised as a growable building by mods that only work with growable buildings (such as Building Themes - see below).
From version 2.1 of Ploppable RICO Revisited, when you create new RICO settings for an existing growable building, the 'growable' option will be pre-set for you.
To assist with managing growable buildings (both Ploppable RICO Growables and 'normal' Growables), Ploppable RICO Revised includes additional configurable functionality. The following options are enabled by default for Ploppable RICO buildings:
- The ability to plop growables instantly (without having to wait for the building to be 'constructed').
- The ability to survive outside of building zones (or in zones of the incorrect type).
- For specialised buildings (e.g. leisure/tourism/eco/specialised industry), the ability to survive outside of districts with the required specialization.
- The 'low land value' building complaint can be disabled.
- The 'too few services' building complaint can be disabled. In the mod's options panel, all of the above options can be extended to include all growable buildings (not just Ploppable RICO ones) - or even disabled entirely (reverting to base-game behaviour for growables).
An additional option is also provided (but disabled by default):
- Make all plopped buildings historical - this automatically applies the 'make historical' setting for all plopped growables, to prevent them from changing appearance when they upgrade to the next level (not that this does not apply to buildings that grow by themselves, just to ones that are manually plopped by the player).
The Building Themes mod provides a mechanism to help further manage which specific growable buildings grow where, by allowing you to designate which collections ('Themes') of buildings can grow in which districts.
Building Themes only works with growable buildings (naturally, as there's no need for such a control mechanism for buildings that are manually placed by the player). If you have a growable building in a theme, and then convert that growable to a Ploppable RICO building (and don't select the 'growable' checkbox in that building's Ploppable RICO settings), then it will no longer be recognised by Building Themes as a growable building (this is correct behaviour, as the building is no longer growable, and hence can no longer be managed by Building Themes).
Plop the Growables was a mod for Cities: Skylines originally released in 2017 by TPB. TPB has since retired from Cities: Skylines modding, and Plop the Growables is no longer being maintained.
As of Ploppable RICO Revisited 2.4, all of Plop the Growable's functionality is now incorporated within Ploppable RICO (noting that the 'disable automatic level-up' option also requires the Advanced Building Level Control mod). Plop the Growables is no longer recommended for use with Ploppable RICO Revisited.
It is still possible to use both Ploppable RICO Revisited and Plop the Growables together if you wish, as they aren't technially incompatible - you just need to make sure that their settings are compatible and that they're not going to 'fight' over the same behaviour. If you do wish to use both mods separately, the easiest way is to disable all the relevant options in one mod's options panel (for Ploppable RICO Revisisted, under the 'Growable options' and 'Complaints options' tabs), and let the other mod manage those behaviours instead.