Simsonian Museum - NO CC

Any great city will have a huge museum for the richest city residents to donate to in an effort to improve their public image, and for busloads of school children to visit on a field trip at the end of a science or history class. SimCity should be no exception, hence this, the Simsonian Museum!

There are a number of different exhibit halls throughout the building on the upper floors, each with a different part of Sim history as its focus. The basement also houses a cafeteria and gift shop, as well as the administrative offices and utilities for a massive building like this. Unusually for a building this size, only a few NPCs will be generated (4, by my count), so while it’s still a large lot your computer won’t be additionally taxed by large numbers of NPCs to run all the time too!

I’ve playtested a clone of the building to ensure that routing and interactions work as intended, and I think it’s too the point where just about everything that looks like you should be able to interact with it will actually work as intended. This even includes most of the exhibits behind glass, since the windows are just placed with move_objects, they’re not actually set into a wall in most cases. While it’ll work well as just a normal community lot, I encourage you to play this as an owned lot so that you can have the full gift shop functionality, as well as charging for attendance (as so many museums sadly do).

It should be no great surprise that this is still a big and expensive lot, since it takes up almost all of four stories of a 5x3 lot, and rings in at $1,065,726 (which is actually less than I was expecting). Older computers may run slowly, especially on higher graphics settings, so just be forewarned! As with all of my uploads though, it’s entirely CC-free, so as long as you’ve got all the EPs and SPs or the UC, you should be able to just drop this right into your city and start playing immediately! As always, please let me know if you do find any issues with this lot so I can try to correct them, and with that I think I’ve covered all the necessary technical elements!

Feel free to read on for a brief vignette from a SimCity second grader on their first trip to this grand museum though!



Mrs. Miller told everyone to behave before we got off the bus or they would lose a Good Kid star on the board in the classroom but Joey was already trying to run ahead up the stairs because he wanted to see the swords in the castle room even though Mrs. Miller said we were just going to start with the jungle exhibit, and Becca and Jessie were talking really loud behind me so I couldn’t hear so good. I started to make a face at them but Mrs. Miller clapped her hands to get everybody to pay attention so I turned back around, since I didn’t want to get in trouble.

“OK everybody, we’re going to go into the jungle room now! Remember, you’re in second grade now, so you need to be responsible big kids. We all need to keep our hands to ourselves and not touch things while we’re in there, OK?” Mrs. Miller said. “Yes Mrs. Miller” we all said, but I didn’t think Joey was going to, he always got in trouble for not listening to the teachers.



I was right too. As soon as we got in the room Joey ran over to the giant gorilla and started trying to get through the ropes to climb on it. Mrs. Miller didn’t see him but one of the museum people did and he grabbed him and made him come back over to the class. Mrs. Miller was mad at him and told him he’d lost a star. He started to whine about it but then the museum announcer said the fire dancer was going to perform in just a few minutes and Mrs. Miller told everybody to line up and we went up the stairs to see.

The fire dancer was really cool though! I was worried he was going to drop one of the sticks and catch things on fire by accident but he was really good at it. I think Joey was even paying attention during that part of the field trip!



Next we went into the oceans exhibit but since we didn’t talk about the ocean in science class this year Mrs. Miller didn’t have much to say about any of it and there weren’t any shows or anything like the fire dancer there, so we didn’t spend very long there. Everybody went downstairs to the cafeteria to eat lunch. I thought we were going to get food from the museum but the school just sent a bunch of lunches on the bus with us so that wasn’t fun.

After lunch we went all the way upstairs to see the castle exhibit. We just finished reading Robin Hood in reading class and everybody was really excited to see what a castle looked like. Becca and Jessie were both talking about how they wanted to see the rooms a princess would have lived in even though Mrs. Miller told them there weren’t any princesses in this castle, but they didn’t listen.



The castle room looked like it was all made out of stone on the walls just like in a real castle though. Joey started to talk about how lame it was that there wasn’t any torture chamber stuff, until a museum person came and showed him the gargoyles that came from some of the castles, and started to talk about how they were put in buildings to scare away evil spirits and stuff. Becca and Jessie both really liked the lord and lady’s bedroom and even though Mrs. Miller told them that it wasn’t a princess’s room they both kept saying it was.

I really liked the big table in the banquet hall. The museum people told us that people in a castle would have huge feasts with all sorts of different food for different holidays that we don’t celebrate anymore, and I asked Mrs. Miller if we could have a feast in the classroom sometime. She said that sounded like a really good idea and she’d have to talk with some of the other teachers about it.

It was almost time for us all to get back on the bus now though, so everybody went back downstairs. The bus driver was supposed to pull the bus up in front of the museum but he wasn’t here yet, so Mrs. Miller said we could look at the gift shop since everybody’s parents were supposed to give them money for a souvenir. I found a little carved bird that looked just like one from the jungle room and put it in my backpack after Mrs. Miller helped me pay the cashier for it. Once everybody bought their souvenirs we all lined up in front of the museum and got on the bus to drive back to school. Mrs. Miller said that we were going to talk about the Far East in history class next month and that if we all paid attention and got enough Good Kid stars we might get to come back to the museum and see the Takemizu Village tea room the museum had too!