You can play around with a few BMP files located deep in your SimCity 3000 installation directory that influence the color of the terrain you see while playing the game. For example, you could have red land (Mars) or white snowy land (Minnesota in January).

If you want to play with the colors, you'll find some standard BMP files in the following directory of your SimCity 3000 root directory: "/game/res/dirt/".

From there you will see 9 BMP files. Back these files up before tampering with them! The file that appears to affect the actual land coloring is palland.bmp. The file pallunder.bmp appears to affect colors in the below ground view. Using Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop's gradient fill tools, you can load these BMP files and probably come up with your own wacky color schemes. The only rules seem to be that the files must be saved as 24 bit BMPs. Experiment with the other BMPs at your leisure.

Here's what one SimCity 3000 player, named Ben, suggests:

"Back up the palland BMP. Open it in your paint program. These are the terrain colors. The higher the colors, the higher the elevation. Change the colors to whatever you want!

Note: scribble on them with a whole bunch of differant colors an then go into SimCity 3000 and make a big hill. Cool! Remember: the higher the color, the higher the elevation.

Changing Water Colors

Go into the same directory and back up the pallwater BMP. Open it. The lower the color, the deeper the water. Now change the colors to anything you like!

Note: it's fun to change all the colors to jet black or all purple or pink or any color. Remember: the lower the color, the deeper the water."

Please note that SC3000.COM does not provide support for this and does not recommend tampering with your installation of SimCity 3000. Please do not contact SC3000.COM with questions or problems with this information.