Water System

Learn how to design an efficient water system in SimCity 2000. Discover pump output formulas, optimal placement, water towers, desalinization plants, and treatment plants.

The development of a fully functional water system is the single most important factor in raising citywide land values, as any given city tile will have drastically higher land value when it has access to water. It is best to design a system of water pumps that can service your entire city even in seasonal droughts while also not wasting too much land building more pumps than you actually need. A single water pump's output can be measured with this formula:

PumpOutput = SeaLevel * 5 + BorderingTiles * 10 + Precipitation / 2

This gives you the total number of city tiles that the pump can supply water to over the course of the following month. (The game multiplies this value by 720 to report how many "gallons" of water that the pump produces. This is what's displayed when you examine them with the query tool.)

• SeaLevel (can range from 0 to 31) is the most important factor, and it can only be adjusted during the terrain editing phase; it's locked into place once you start building. (This is why several scenario cities have very inefficient water systems; many of them are built on maps with a bone dry sea level.) The default value for this is 4 when you create a map with the default terrain editor settings. To maximize this value, create a completely flat map in the terrain editor that is at the highest possible elevation, and raise the sea level to its maximum height as well. If you think flat maps are boring and want to play on more varied terrain, then you can lower the sea level a bit; just be aware that doing so will slightly nerf the output of your water pumps.
• BorderingTiles (can range from 0 to 8) is the number of fresh water tiles that border the pump. To optimize this value, you can build a row of pumps, then a row of fresh water tiles, and keep alternating between the two. As your city grows, you can expand this water pump layout in a square as needed for maximum efficiency. Arranging your water pumps like this is much more important in cities that have a very low sea level than it is in cities that have a very high sea level.

P W P W P W P P = water pump
P W P W P W P W = fresh water tile
P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P As your city expands and requires more water, extend this layout by adding one row or column at a time. Keep it arranged in a square to maximize its efficiency.

• The Precipitation value randomly changes from month to month and can be retrieved from the newspaper weather reports. It usually ranges from 0 to 28, and it can go higher than that during severe weather conditions (Blizzard, Hurricane, Tornado). You should design your system of water pumps to account for the worst-case scenario: months in which your city is experiencing an extended drought and in which your pumps won't receive any bonus from the weather.

So, to summarize the water pump output formula with an example, let's say that we've built a pump on a map that has a default sea level (4), is bordering 6 tiles of fresh water, and is undergoing weather with 15mm precipitation:

PumpOutput = SeaLevel * 5 + BorderingTiles * 10 + Precipitation / 2
PumpOutput = 4*5 + 6*10 + 15/2
PumpOutput = 20 + 60 + 7.5
PumpOutput = 87.5 (rounded down to 87)

This single water pump would then be collecting 87 tiles' worth of water this month, and it would distribute that water out to 87 of your city's tiles during the following month.

Water towers store excess water that your pumps produce, and they'll distribute their reserves to the rest of your city during dry months in which your pumps can't produce enough water on their own. Unfortunately, droughts in SC2K can randomly last a very long time and completely deplete your towers' reserves anyway, which means that it's usually more effective to just build more water pumps in optimally designed patterns than it is to spend money and land area on water towers.

(For the record, the query tool isn't accurate for water towers. The query tool says that water towers store "40000 gallons" of water, but it's more accurate to say that they store "400 tiles" of water, which would be equal to 288000 gallons based on how the game calculates water pump output. Water towers always operate in multiples of 100 tiles at a time. If your city's pumps produce an excess of 60 tiles of water in a month, then it'll round this up to 100 and fill up one of your water towers by 1/4 of its max capacity. If your city experiences a 60-tile drought in another month, then one of your water towers will lose 100 tiles of its reserves to cover that gap. This can result in strange rounding errors in very small cities where 50 tiles is a significant percentage of its total land area. These rounding errors become less common as your city grows in size and as you add more water pumps.)

Desalinization plants only work when they border salt water tiles. Their output can be calculated with this formula:

DesalinizationOutput = BorderingTiles * 20

In this case, BorderingTiles naturally refers to neighboring salt water tiles, not fresh water. What complicates this formula a little bit in practice is that it isn't run just one time for the whole plant; it's run 9 different times for all 9 tiles of the plant, and the output is summed together. Don't think of desalinization plants as a single building, but more like 9 individual buildings that work together.

In the vast majority of situations, it's better to just stick with normal water pumps than to bother with desalinization plants. A group of 9 water pumps will almost always output more water than a desalinization plant in similarly advantageous terrain. So, just keep building your water pump layout with optimally-placed fresh water tiles. I would only ever consider building a desalinization plant in cities with a low sea level and in which pre-existing terrain is extremely advantageous for a desalinization plant, such as having a small and perfectly-shaped peninsula where a single plant could be built already surrounded by salt water on 3 of its sides or so. Those situations are going to be few and far between.

A water system does introduce a high amount of pollution to your city at first, but this can be neutralized by the construction of water treatment plants. A single treatment plant can service up to 2000 city tiles; if your water grid is bigger than that, then you'll need to build more treatment plants before they become effective. Try not to build too many of them, though, as the plants themselves do produce a little bit of pollution.

Finally, if you've scoured the internet for tips for this game, then you may have come across something called the "phantom water pump trick." The idea behind this trick is that you build a single water pump, connect it to power, but DON'T connect any pipes to it. This appears to make the game believe that you have a water surplus: the Graphs window reports a surplus and both the status window and newspapers stop nagging you about shortages. In truth, this trick only gets rid of those messages; it does not make your entire city function as if it was watered. If you attempt this trick, then your unwatered tiles will still exhibit the same low land values, stunted development, and slightly higher crime rates as they would in any other un-watered city. The only way to reap the benefits of a water system is to actually give your city water. (That being said, this trick can still be useful if you just don't care about any of that stuff. If you don't mind having lower population density or higher crime, but you still want to get rid of the nag messages related to water shortages, then that's the one and only time that the phantom water pump trick is actually useful.)