Hey Howdy Hey Tappers!
Sometime in the early New Year, we plan on doing an Addicts Live! episode all about going Nuclear in your Springfield…and we need your help! In case you don’t know…going Nuclear is when you push the Nuclear button in your game to “blow up” your town and basically put every single item & character (except Homer, Lisa & the Simpsons House) in storage to rebuild again. You can read more here and here)
I’m looking for a little early feedback from you guys about going Nuclear in your town & since we’ve got a little time to kill while waiting for the next update I thought let’s go for it now. So please take a minute, in the comments below, to share your Nuclear experience with answering questions like…
-Have you ever gone Nuclear in your Springfield? Why or Why not?
-Would you ever/are you planning to go Nuclear in your Springfield in the future? Why or why not?
-How many times have you gone Nuclear?
-How long did it take you to rebuild your town?
-Were you happy with the results? Or wish you never touched the nuke button?
-Did you lose anything as a result of going Nuclear in town?
Of course, those are just some ideas to get you going in the comments, please feel free to share more details about your Nuclear experience!
Thanks!
I have gone nuclear once. Chances are I wouldn’t do it again. It took me a few hours to put everything back in place but my town was just put together in a hurry so it was nice to be able to reset everything. After going nuclear I lost SideShow Bob he no longer showed up as a playable character.
My son hit the nuclear button recently and I’m still trying to get my town back together 😥
Other tips for nuking:
1. Put your buildings/characters in one corner with a nice square of road to walk on.
2. Start small chunks. I like to get Springfield Heights knocked out, because I want it to look rich and classy. You don’t need every single office building/Condo/Villa out there. Just what looks good to you. Then decide what you want outside of the Springfield heights and let it evolve from there.
3. The inventory does suck, but you can start unpacking it as you go thru looking for other themes.
4. Leave room to grow. There’s always going to be a Xmas event, so your Xmas side of town should be able to grow/evolve to accommodate future events. Put a few natural parks that can be used for buildings later.
It seems a lot of people nuke their towns either early on in the game or because of the monorail. The thought crossed my mind to move the whole monorail system but I keep putting it off, because of some serious rebuilding. I would like to have each station separate from each other with their tracks around the whole town. (3 separate sets of track)
Have definitely nuked and would like to again. Agree with others it is time consuming, unfriendly and with far from everything marked clearly for bonus percentages, a lot of work to lay an item, check percentage featurez, then remove or add more for every item. I nuked because with all the add ins my town is a mess.
Things to make nuking friendly:
A sell all button for each category to easily rid storage of unwanted items.
Ability to sell items currently blocked for sale.
List of all items just nuked, for easier placement after, in one spot seperate from rest of storage list.
Ability to lay down square and have automatica fill mode from selected category. Houses, roads, trees, looking at you.
All bonus percentage items in clearly marked own space in storage.
All items coming straight out of storage, in straight, easy to lay line.
Ability to keep place in storage line better. Lay one item, or sell,
and it bounces back to the beginning too often.
Roads need to have auto fill selection for selected space, even if we have to do road outline first.
Even select and store still takes a lot of work in smaller sections. These upgrades would make the game a lot easier to clean our towns up in.
Side note since its Christmas soon:
Would be excellent (wishful thinking, but its Christmas and in case Simpsons Santa hears) to have “property manager”, one who collects all rents. Even if its after all levels are done, as a reward for us who have finished all the levels but just love the game. Even better would be being able to add them into some sort of chart with Lisa managing it. And sending them there and out of our towns. Would make it a great way to make the game even better for us that have been with TSTO for ages. Better cashflow for donut mining so we can finally get even more of the donut buys we have been eyeing for years now.
Love the easier donut rewards, still takes a long time to get all the characters and other bits we want.
PS last of all, please lower donut price on whale. Seriously want one, but percentage points for donut price too little.
Thank you TSTO and TSTOaddicts.com for all the great work you do!
I have over 10,000 objects to place. I’ve gone nuclear twice now and both times it took me over a month to put everything back together. It’s much easier to shift areas around and slowly piece together changes than to just start for scratch. For me at least.
Similar to others here, I’ve used the Nuke function and regretted it in the short-term. The inventory system was such a pain to use, it took me hours to get my town back online the way I wanted it. The main reasons I nuked the town was that I was boxed in by some early road layout decisions that didn’t cooperate with the footprints that many events and buildings required. In layman’s terms, my new town enforced a euclidean zoning system that facilitated mixed-use development and reduced travel time to retrieve building rent.
I nuked my town once right after the monorail event. It took about 3 months to rebuild my town while also keeping up on current events. I’m a whale, so I have a lot of stuff. I placed my new monorail pattern down first and established the rest of the town around the monorail in themed neighborhoods. I loved the new design of my town. Since then, there have been so many expansions of land that my monorail and town center are no longer centered at all. Alas, my town is too huge and my inventory is too massive ever do it again.
It’s funny that you mention this because I’ve been wanting to blow something up for a while .
Come on 4th of July weekend .
🎬🎥🐒 . See ya bye . 👽
I haven’t yet for a couple of reasons. I may be off on the first one, but there seems to be no way of easily telling if an item has a bonus percentage on it, so I would end up losing out on items I have totally forgotten give out a bonus.
The second is, I just wouldn’t want to commit the time to rebuilding everything. I’m just not as ambitious as Homer.
It would, however be nice if we could draw larger rectangles to move things around
With your first reason, if you store a particular item (not nuking) just storing the individual item, when it is in your inventory box, next to the item is an ‘i’ if you click on the ‘i’ it will show you if the item has a bonus percentage
I hope this helps 🙂
I nuked my town after the wild west event. Regretted it around 2 hours later.
Got the basic layout sorted in about 6 hours.
Finally happy with it about 6 days later.
Then the next event occurred and realised I had left no room for anything new.
Now I just use the selection tool to nuke sections to be remodeled.
I was determined as a newby to keep things unique, but built a couple of KEMs and Krustyburgers for the conformity – before levels and events gave more eateries and shops – and did see clusters of houses in neighbours towns.
Eventually I decided to build a dozen or so of each house etc for the income, but the cost of land soon outstripped that so I built more houses etc to get the cash to buy land to build more houses…
Meanwhile the few things with odd intervals – 2, 3 + 6hr – and the stuff with regular tasks got grouped with some degree of design and all other buildings were squashed by interval, just for now ( yeah right – Superheroes event on..!! ) as more houses were built or crafted ( retro town house and spooky by the dozen – ok around 180 !! ).
Events kept bringing stuff needed to complete and random deccies so always next month after event then another starts.
Finally I realised the area select is 2 land by 2 land (32*32) so laid concrete with that spacing – wastes some land but I knew I could pick up and move any block.
Still the months went by, until I felt I had enough land to do something useful.
Roads I figured were a pain when you’re always moving stuff as they block placement so I’d laid out a parade ground with a square of road then a bigger square around it etc – great for finding wandering tasks or lawyers but not a great design.
I tried laying concrete as paths as a permanent design but it just looked grey and bland so a rethink and get the donuts for the cobbles.
– And now, my design hints –
I figured what was going where allowing for the “shadow” where possible so a gap of 8 for the smaller shops, 12 for bigger stuff or taller stuff, some at 20 and even 24 and 28 for huge stuff and some just as areas for farmland, futuristic, movie lots, spooky+magic and a festival site
Now the cunning plan, microsoft Excel, drag the column widths to form squares and draw a 4 by 4 box to allow possible road locations and plan out a road network and those areas – pic to follow.
Delete all ground tiles and lay concrete where you plan roads ( or rivers ) – then you can drag and dump the stuff you want in an area without restriction and line it all up to see if it works or tweak the concrete and adjust the design if needed.
Once happy, place the roads over the concrete and decorate it all – in my case still to do !!
SH, all is level one and huddled so I can dump stuff as I work and some areas still clustered and needing arranged too, but it’s better than it was.
Oddly I’ve used twice the land and it still seems crowded though but I’ll wait till EA clear the snow before I do any more and the land will take a while to buy at those prices too !!
I’ve added a couple of labels here, but the rest I didn’t shade as I knew what the area was for, but a piccy of that Excel page….
http://gstech.ezyro.com/tsto-pics/RoadMap.png
An area I’m not sure about, so the roads aren’t set yet…
http://gstech.ezyro.com/tsto-pics/RoadMap2.png
Never touched the button, never would.
I’ve worked too hard on placing each and every item. With the multiple items move available, I don’t think blowing it all away and rebuilding is necessary. Way to much time involved at this point to consider that option.
For those who do, best wishes to your new clean Springfield!
I nuked my town quite a while ago and really regretted it, the existing inventory system is just too limited. It took forever to find things I wanted and pre-nuke ideas I had (ooh, this would look great next to that) rarely worked because I was overwhelmed with the looooooong scroll of stuff.. There was no group grab option like we have now, there was all or nada. Given how much junk I have now, nuking would be a nightmare.
I heartily endorse the grab ‘n’ move approach. Clear an area of stuff you don’t want and fill it back in. This lets you build neighborhoods, shopping districts, whatever. I even have a few staging areas from events (like ‘palooza and the archeology event) that I’m playing around with until I find a final spot.
Never nuked my town even when I was doing massive remodels , which I’ve done twice , because I’ve had several sections I was happy with and didn’t want to change. Or had specific blocks I wanted to keep grouped together just moved. So a full nuke would’ve really set me back.
I’ve nuked both my towns, though I don’t think I would do it again unless the the inventory system changes. The first time I did it was a couple years back at least in my A town, when the ‘sprawl’ had turned into an unmanageable mess that was driving me crazy… this was before the selection tool was a thing. I think it took me a few says to get everything organised again, but if I’d had other things to do it would’ve taken longer. I don’t remember it being overly complicated at the time. I don’t think I’d do it again, honestly, because my town is so big now. I just did my year old, oft neglected, B town after I finished the Thanksgiving mini event – because I used to play it on my BlackBerry, and it was mostly just a dropped the new buildings down with zero regard for design because it was frustrating on such a small screen. I had one road and a bunch of buildings packed in like tetris – and it was a nightmare because the inventory system now means scrolling all the way through again. I’ve got all the important things back out, but I need to get some more land to get the magic academy back out, and get some greenery out. At least it looks like a town now.
I’ve done it. You have to hit the confirm button a 3 or 4 times before it actually does it. That’s to make sure that YOU ARE SURE. Only problem is that my Itchy and Scratchy mascots are permanently in storage. I’m unable to put them back out and that was over a year ago.
Any idea on how I can get them back out?
The mascots only go in Krusty land. 🖒
I know that. I nuked Krustyland too and those mascots won’t come out of my storage. They just make a sound when I try to put them back in Krustyland.
Also, in my normal play area, I can’t delete or build on a certain spot for some reason.
Silly question, but if you are in Krustyland, and you tap on the hammer and saw, then tap the Poochie and Princess icon (on the left) does it bring up an option to still buy the Itchy and Scratchie mascot/s?
Perhaps when you nuked and stored them- it may not have registered that you bought them?
Nope. Nothing available. But mascots still in inventory.
Oh dear 🙁
Those only go in Krustyland, don’t they?
I’ve considered it but not for long. Like many here, I can’t imagine the work required to put it all back.
INVENTORY
The main obstacle is the inventory system. I can’t remember the names of all the items and I’d be looking endlessly. I think the comments of others make it clear that the inventory system is time consuming and unfriendly.
I’d suggest that EA add a category of ‘Recent Items’ so that if I’m making a playground or a castle, I can find/use relevant items and switch between 10 or 15 of them them easily.
DESIGN
Nuking a very large town like mine doesn’t make designing a new one significantly easier. At least I don’t imagine it would be much easier. At least 10-20 percent of my town is likable. The original portion needs expansion and my streets are too close. I’d like to run the monorail through it but there is little space. It’s a real-world paradigm. All the land expansion is North and East yet I’d like to move my downtown Eastward. The fact that the selection tool(which I love) does not cut and move roads with the buildings you select is irritating.
An improvement EA could make to assist with redesign issues is that when the edit(redesign) button is selected, that gridlines showing the permitted layout of roads be displayed. I would use this **a lot** to place buildings/decorations and also as a tool to count length/width of my town as a means of creating a paper design. I haven’t tried to scope out improvements on paper because of a complete lack of scale which I need to measure since I lack natural skills in this area.
I’m looking for redesign coaching, suggestions, support or tools. The selection tool is good for that and each time I move my castle and western layout to expand with land purchases I try to adjust items to move in a block without overlap. I would certainly like to be able to select an area about 4-8 times larger than the current limit. I suspect that hits a programming limitation.
FRIENDS
When friends nuke their towns, they usually languish as small patches of civilization inside a sea of green. I eventually tire of the sight and unfriend them. I think respondents here who have nuked are the successful ones. I suspect there are lots of unsuccessful nukers who abandon the game. I suspect the inventory probably frustrated them too much to persist in redoing their town. I suppose we’ll never know if indeed they have abandoned their game.
SUMMARY
I’ll never go nuclear on my game
The Inventory System is a huge problem
Redesign is difficult for those who have very large towns
QUESTIONS
When your friends nuke their towns, do they rebuild and what size are those towns?
Do you unfriend them?
If I check to see the last time they played and it was recent, if I see some signs within a week or so that they’re starting to rebuild, no, I don’t unfriend them. Why would I?
Of course, I do have a pretty terrific set of neighbours, the majority of whom I “know” from here, so I’m loath to unfriend any of those folks, unless it’s clear that they’re no longer playing.
Good point. My friends are folks collected from ‘looking for friends’ posts. Less personal. After deleting those that go inactive for long periods, all remaining friends play every day like me. What’s the point of friends that don’t play much.
I’ve nuked about 20 times nearly I think. With the use of moving entire designs at once I don’t think I’ll nuke again unless I really need to. Most of the time I am happy with the new layout, yet sometimes I do prefer certain designs as they were before, *wink wink old nature design*. Might just store some things, and move the designs I like to the side while I redesign the rest of my town. I would recommend nuke, but be cautious if you have something you like the look of. Bring on Christmas! 🎄
i’ve been tempted but the more that is added to my town the less i want to do it so i don’t have to re-learn my own map! after the monorail stuff (and springfield heights to a degree) i was really like “ok, i need to nuke to incorporate this monorail and make things look prettier” but just never got the nerve to do it ’cause i know i’d have to be on my phone for like, 3 hours just to make it feel better than what i had. i also like keeping the natural evolution of my springfield, to see “how i’ve grown” in a sense.
I did once and was biggest regret. Plan was to have all my houses in big group easy to collect, and then have clumps of everything. But yeah now I just have a mess of space and ever new event I just buy new land and make a new event section.
Wish I would have bought bunch of land and moved stuff and rebuilt. Or nuked and took time to rebuild.
Thinking about doing again and make a real town, but takes so long and so hard to set up.
Best think was I only built a small road section so all. My characters just hang out there.
One section that looks nice is my springfield heights only grew it big after I nuked. Plus built the concert event there.
Other suggested questions: Have you ever nuked someone else’s town as a joke? How was the relationship affected after the nuking? Did they demand to nuke your town as retribution?
My favorite part of the game is town design, so I nuke pretty regularly. I don’t think of rebuilding as a chore, but a chance to try something new and play around with the layout. I nuke whenever TSTO starts to become stale and it never fails to reinvigorate my interest in the game.
That said, we really do need a search feature in the inventory.
Never nuked. Doubt I ever will. Too overwhelming to think of re-building so much. I prefer to redesign a bit at a time. Use the move tool to move whole areas if I need to expand a particular section.
I’ve thought about pushing that button for some time. But I’m afraid of the consequences. Ever since the monorail event my Southern Springfield has been a mess. It’s unorganized hodge-podge collection of buildings and weird land layout due to earning free land tokens which I spend on expensive parcels.
Now that I’ve read how long it takes to rebuild I’m going to resist pushing the button and try to organize my Southern part of town.
I nuked after the last major event. It’s a bear to rebuild. Biggest thing EA could do to make this easier – add an inventory search feature!! Just a tiny box that I can type in the name of what I’m looking for. I can’t express how much time that would save and make nuking not so scary!!
Big “YES” to a search feature, but EA should also disable that damned Inventory reset!
I’ve nuked once; it was very very soon after I had first started playing, and I just wanted to know what it actually did. I’m glad that I did it that early, because it would take an exceptionally long time to rebuild everything now!
That said… I actually might do it again, one day. I’ve never been entirely satisfied with my layout… but shifting, shuffling, swapping and all that is tedious, even without nuking. A nuke job could give me a clean slate, for when I decide to really cast aside all of my previous notions on how things should be arranged. That does hold a certain appeal.
Hey! Maybe if EA tosses us another real stinker of an event, that would be a good time for us to *all* cast our metaphorical vote of disapproval and/or protest, by collectively throwing the switch. 😉
I did it a few months ago. I still don’t have everything set out the way I wanted it; it’s just too hard with the way the inventory system is set up right now. I ended up throwing all the buildings that have people attached into one corner, so that I could keep sending people on tasks. I don’t think I lost anything in the nuke, but I can’t get my tree hugging rating back up no matter what I do.
Part of the problem is also that I play on my phone and the screen is very small. When I get a tablet that can handle the game, I might be more inclined because I’ll be able to see better what I’m doing.
I can’t imagine blowing up my town. I’m six years in and would lose the passion for the game. I would feel defeated.
I nuke my town a few times a year. I like redesigning it with the buildings that come from events. My wife, who also plays, thinks I’m crazy.