Creating Tunnels

The engineers will automatically offer a tunnel as an option, whenever a Mayor tries to run a road up a steep slope. The slope has to be the steepest kind -- a "slope four" in road-crew jargon. Also, if you’re running a road from a flat plain up to a hill, you won’t get a tunnel right at the base of the hill. Tunnels have to start at the second steep slope above the flats, or higher.

Release the mouse at this point and the engineers will ask you whether you want to spring for the simoleons needed. Tunnel-building is expensive, so it pays to be careful about where you go digging.

If you tell us “no way,” the engineers go ahead and do their best to make a road up the side of the hill. Like as not they’ll have to hack around with the terrain to make it flat enough for Sims to drive on. If you say “yes,” they wil get out their spades and dynamite.

Another thing to watch carefully is where the tunnel’s going to emerge on the other side of the hill. They take their orders from you, and they can’t guarantee that digging a tunnel through a particular hill is a good idea. If it’s too steep on the other side for you to run a road to the tunnel mouth, you’ve just paid a whole lot of money for a nice hole to nowhere. Maybe you’ll be able to salvage it by jiggling some terrain on the other side, but that can drain the treasury almost as fast as tunnel-building.