Cityforge

About the game

You start with a patch of empty land and a pot of money, and you are the mayor. Mark out residential, commercial and industrial zones, connect them with roads and rails, run power lines from a plant, and watch tiny buildings sprout. People move in when there are homes, jobs and shops within reach, and they leave again if the commute is a mess or the air is bad. A gauge at the side shows how much demand there is for each kind of zone, so you always know what the city wants next.

Money is the other half of the game. Taxes pay for police, fire stations and roads, and the budget window lets you decide how much to fund each of them. Build too much too fast and you go broke; build too little and the city stalls. Along the way you can face fires, floods, plane crashes, tornadoes and the occasional monster (they are switched off by default; the settings turn them on), and you can build parks, stadiums, a seaport and an airport as the population grows. There is no end: you keep going until you are happy with the skyline, or until it burns down.

Playing it here

Press Play, give your city a name and pick one of the generated maps (or let it generate another). Use the toolbar to choose zones, roads, wires and other buildings, then click or drag on the map. Pause the simulation with the Pause button, change its speed in Settings, open the budget to set taxes and funding, and read the Evaluation window to see how the city is doing. The Save button keeps your city in this browser (localStorage); Load game on the first screen brings it back; the city is stored under its own key, so it never mixes with other games on this site. Clearing your browser data deletes the save. The game is built for a mouse and a roomy screen, so it will not fit on a small phone.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Power first. Zones without electricity never grow. Build a power plant early and run wires so that every zone touches one; a zone that shows a blinking lightning symbol has no power yet.

Roads are the engine. Every zone needs a road within a few squares. Traffic jams drag the city down, so give busy zones more than one route and add rails or a seaport when you grow. Coal plants pollute, so keep homes at a distance.

Keep an eye on the demand bars. If they show residential demand, build homes; if they show jobs, build industry or shops. Building against the bars is the fastest way to a stalled city.

Save before trying disasters. The Disasters button starts a fire, flood, crash, meltdown, tornado or monster on purpose, which makes for a fun experiment and a bad day for a city you have not saved.

Credits and licence

Cityforge is a modified version of a free JavaScript city simulator, written by Graeme McCutcheon and contributors, which in turn is derived from the city simulator code that Electronic Arts Inc. released under the GNU General Public License. Credit for the simulation goes to the original designers and to Electronic Arts, who made the source available. This version has no connection with Electronic Arts or its staff and is not the original program; it is published under its own name, as the licence requires, and does not use the trademarks of the original game.

The code is released under the GNU GPL version 3 with additional terms from Electronic Arts, reproduced in full in the licence file (LICENSE.txt). Changes made for this site: the game was renamed, and the Twitter button, donation prompts, external links and a web font loaded from another site were removed, so the game does not contact anyone while you play; the save is stored under its own key. The Chunk font is under the SIL Open Font License and jQuery under the MIT licence. The unmodified source code, the patch and the build script are linked from this page.