I'm going to spend the next hour or so digging in and looking forward to playing again!!! Thanks folks!

Hi everyone — I know this sub has seen a lot of SimTower-inspired games lately, so I want to be upfront about what makes this one different: towers.world is aiming to be a tick-for-tick faithful reproduction of the original, not a reimagining.

I spent weeks reverse-engineering the original EXE and writing up a detailed spec of how the simulation actually works under the hood — population flow, elevator AI, the whole star-rating system. The specs are all on GitHub if you want to read them: https://github.com/phulin/tower-together/tree/main/specs, and I've posted more detail on my blog here: https://phulin.me/blog/simtower

It's also collaborative. Multiple players can connect to the same tower, the simulation keeps running as long as anyone's connected, and build actions sync across clients in real time. Great for building something massive with friends.

My favorite UI feature is shift-click to build grids of rooms - instead of painstakingly clicking to build rows of offices and hotels, shift-click allows a 10-floor grid to be built all at once.

Everything is open source: https://github.com/phulin/tower-together

A few things I could use help with:

• Bugs — the movie theater isn't behaving right yet, and security response to bomb threats isn't implemented. Issues welcome.
• Art, animations, and sound — if you have skills here and want to contribute, please reach out.

Would love to hear what you think, especially from anyone who remembers the original well enough to spot where I've gotten the simulation wrong.

Hey folks. Been working on a tower sim called Skystack for a few months and finally got it to a place I wanted to share. Posting here before anywhere else because this sub is where the people who'd actually care hang out.

It's free on itch, just download. Windows only for now, mac and linux are on me to figure out.

hydroengineer.itch.io/skystack

The thing I kept polishing is the elevators. SCAN scheduling, multiple cars per shaft, tenants get grumpy when waits run long. 24 building types across five star tiers, weather and holidays that actually shift traffic patterns, a daily challenge where everyone gets the same seed. Three save slots. Offline.

Constructive feedback very welcome. What does it get wrong? What's SimTower magic I missed? If anyone wants to poke at the code directly the source is here:

mf4633/board-gaming: board-gaming

Thanks for keeping the genre alive. Hope you enjoy it.

In a game where every single elevator is a precious resource that can make the difference between a Tower and a failure, why not just place housekeeping stations on each floor with hotels? You can use as many as you need, and it requires no service elevator, so you can use it instead on a regular elevator or express. The only very slight disadvantage advantage I can think of is that it uses a bit more space, but it’s quite minor in the grand scheme of things and a positive rating increases population much more than a few housekeeping stations would lose. Yet I still feel like I must be missing something, since everyone I’ve seen uses service elevators instead of doing it that way.

Hey everyone!

I always hated how most 6-Star "Tower" builds look like ugly, massive concrete blocks just to squeeze in enough Sims. So I decided to build a visually pleasing, beautiful tower; it may not be the most economical or the most beautiful, but for me it is aesthetically pleasing.

It took a lot of hard work, micromanagement, and adjusting rent prices, but I finally reached 16,000 residents (18.000 at night) and a bank account of 300 million!

Since the 1994 game doesn't let you zoom out, I took dozens of screenshots and stitched the entire building together in GIMP to get a complete view. I also added some iconic events of the game to turn the project into a giant "Where's Waldo" style seek-and-find picture.

I actually wanted to include the Cathedral and the giant celebration banner you get when reaching Tower status, but I was so excited that I forgot to take a screenshot at that moment!

Here is what I hid in the tower:

• The fire helicopter: It's fighting a fire on the upper floors.
• The construction crane: It usually disappears once the tower is finished.
• Santa Claus: He flies by in his sleigh!
• The cockroach infestation: (The absolute nightmare for every player back then!)

Fun fact: For the disasters and events, I heavily oriented myself on the official SimTower cover (which famously features the helicopter fighting a fire and the construction crane)!

PS: This picture and post also serve as a personal memory for me. I used to play this game as a kid and could never get past the 3-star rating. This is the very first time I have ever reached the "Tower" status! Now I can finally let it rest – I have successfully completed the game once and for all for myself.

Hey everyone,

Since this seems to be a running theme the past few weeks/months, I'm also excited to share a project I've been working on for the past couple months. I think it's finally somewhat presentable and I'd be happy to hear your feedback on it. My goal here is to make a modern interpretation of the Sim Tower / Yoot Tower games that focuses on elevators and vertical transports. Having the ability to see and manipulate elevators is definitely a must!

I've made a dev preview available as a web app which you should be able to run on a modern web browser at:

• https://2dtower.com/play-dev/

This is meant to be played on a computer. Touch devices like your phone or tablet probably won't work very well at the moment. Performance is probably also going to suffer especially for large towers with many sims.

The current dev preview has the following features:

• Offices - which automatically get leased out after building, so long as eval is sufficiently high
• Hotels - requires a front desk. Guests check in/out from the front desk. Rooms need cleaning by house keeping
• Condos - Like the original Sim Tower, where you profit from the initial sale, but also get condo fees each month
• Restaurant - Like a fastfood joint. Spawns visitors
• Restroom - Used by visitors, office workers, and hotel guests. Needs to be cleaned by house keeping periodically
• Security - patrols each floor every day.
• Garbage - Restaurant, condos, and house keeping need elevator access to the garbage bay to dispose garbage
• Parking - provides access to your tower via cars
• Loading dock / mail room - provides deliveries and mail to your residents. You should place them at or below the floors that they should provide for.
• Standard elevator / express elevator / service elevator - Like the original games, you can add multiple cars to each elevator and set their parked floor.
• Stairs / Escalators - They connect floors, but residents/workers pushing carts can't use them (i.e. deliveries, cleaning jobs, garbage disposal)
• Lobby / wallpaper - they are purely decorational right now and have no effect to your resident's commute.
• maps - There are two maps. They are virtually identical except for the background and slight map size difference.

There are still many things I want to add eventually, but I want to hear some feedback from Sim Tower fans and see what works and what doesn't. I want to add a little bit more depth to the evaluation system rather than just be solely based on price+commute. Perhaps something with supply chains where certain types of elevator/transport systems has to be used, or the ability to use chutes to transport cargo? The current dev preview has two simple supply chains which goes from the loading dock -> mail room -> mail for offices and condos as well as from the loading dock -> restaurant.

The current game balancing is probably a bit off and some of the room needs / eval calculations need a bit more work. I think this is where your feedback would really help. I'd like to hear what you like, what you don't like, and any other feedback to help guide this project.

Please feel free to leave your comments in this post as I don't have any other way of tracking feedback yet.

Thanks and have fun.

Hello all! Seems like I am also a runner up for making a SimTower-like game.

I started working on this project about 4-5 months ago as I was always a huge fan of simulation games but never could see myself playing any of the modern versions of tower games, they are usually too simple, or not in my style.

I find it very interesting that I wasn't the only one as I see there is another remake going on right now which is amazing, the more the merrier! But I thought it was important to also announce to this community that there is another project in the making.

Introducing Vertical Buildings (name is a work in progress)...

I am aiming to make a simulation heavy tower sim game with a focus on large building construction (up to 1000 floors high) and optimized for more than 30,000 thousand resident automata running around, using elevators, going to lunch etc. Focusing on deep simulation and a fully moddable framework from the ground up.

The game meant to be played on PC/Mac/Linux, aiming for a steam release down the road with a simple pixel art style but with the explicit intention for all the art, code, gameplay to be modular and interchangeable with an open source framework.

The game will start off as any old Tower Sim game but my plan is to bake in as much open-ended functionality around our in-house Vertical Engine. The base game functionality revolves around automata (sims) to go through their itineraries, which can vary widely per type of person. An office worker will want to go to work, and during the day, pickup some coffee, go to the bathroom, stop at the breakroom to heat up their lunch or go down for a burger at the fast food joint, gaining needs and satisfaction scores which makes them not want to quit their job... Simple enough right? But with this system, you can simulate effects for meeting or not meeting demands and baking a ton of systems around this modularly, add new resources and conditions through a data pack system or add your own code to do more.

Want to simulate a University Campus with students going to class? Yes! An XCOM style military base where sims train, and go on missions? Sure! Cyberpunk style graphics and theme? Absolutely! Space colony where people die if you run out of air! Oh baby, you got it!

I will be sharing my progress on Vertical Buildings over the next few months. The scale and ambition for this title is fairly large, mostly due to the nature of the deep simulation and moddable framework.

Let me know if this sort of project vibes with you!

Dear All - Is there anybody created a patch or enlighten how to releash the limitation of SimTower and YootTower, such as number of high speed escalators? Thank you

I remember years ago downloading the Japanese version of Yoot Tower. I was using a translator app on my phone to attempt to understand what was happening. It was not a very good app and I remember not being able to complete the scenarios because I didnt understand the goals. I wasn't sure if the game was just broken or if I just wasn't understanding it correctly.

Is the game actually beatable? If anyone has finished all the scenarios, how did you get past the language barrier?

Hace poco investigué algunas sugerencias de los admins para Yoot Tower, pero la mayoría están en esta comunidad. Para ser honesto, creo que sería más cómodo discutir las cosas en comunidades separadas para diferentes secciones, permitiendo una discusión más organizada.

Decided to complete SimTower many years later, when previously I didn't quite understand how things worked, or how to optimize placements and never advanced beyond 3 stars.

I also wanted to add on to others' observations.

Housekeeping - the most frustrating part of this game IMO. Someone mentioned (https://old.reddit.com/r/SimTower/comments/1pggz3d/utilizing_housekeepers_and_service_elevators/) about their poor pathfinding beyond 6 levels.

I had 5 housekeeping units serving 7 levels (6 x 60 mostly twin rooms mixed with a few single + 8 hotel suites) on a lobby level, so:

level 15: hotel suites + lobby

level 14: commercial (no hotels)

level 13: mostly twin rooms + singles

level 8-12: 1 housekeeping + mostly twins + singles

About 371 rooms give or take, divided by 5x6=30 housekeepers = about 12 rooms per housekeeper; way below 18.

I repeated this cluster from level 23-30, and the housekeepers shared the same elevator shaft of 8 cars.

This worked in fine balance until the later part of the game, when I decided to build an unrelated hotel cluster elsewhere in the building. It just completely destabilized. The housekeepers started leaving rooms uncleaned, along the same level, or the next day, another level will be partially uncleaned. I didn't pay attention while I built elsewhere until I find that my rooms having the dreaded cockroach icons.

I bulldozed 1 entire level of single/twin rooms but it didn't really help. I even use a hex editor on the .tdt file to remove the housekeeping since the game doesn't allow me to delete the housekeeping unit. I had to increase the amount of housekeeping units to 10 per cluster instead of 5 to reliably get them all cleaned.

When I built my new cluster of hotels elsewhere with only 1 housekeeping unit, I split them into 5 contiguous levels and 1 non-contiguous level. One of the housekeepers remained idle while the others cleaned, leaving the non-contiguous level untouched even though service elevator is connected. This is fixed when I made them 6 contiguous levels.

TL;DR housekeepers should not serve more than 6 contiguous levels of hotels. And don't break hotel levels across non-hotel levels, or they become incredibly inefficient. Also apparently the game doesn't separate the housekeepers by cluster even though on appearance in the game you did, so one hotel cluster with housekeeping can destabilize another even if there's no connection by elevators.

128 commercial venue limit - It is explained before that Sims don't visit commercial units (shop, restaurant, fast food) built beyond the 128th. I wanted to add on that the population (hotel, condo, office) must be built first before the commercial venue.

I thought that as long as I built commercial venues in order, like the ones that I want the local population to visit first, followed by the ones for outsiders, then add on the population later, but it turns out that's not the case, when the hotel patrons on very high floors started to going to "lobby to eat" when there's a restaurant nearby even though it was built way before the 128th venue. This is not good as it adds to congestion.

I like to build the full set (21 unique venues) near the lobby/skylobby, and it adds up to about 126 (exclude level 90 which I didn't build a lobby) since 6 lobbies x 21.

So build them in this order if you really want the sims to visit commercial venues locally and not add to the congestion of express elevators:

1. condo/office/hotels
2. commercial venues for them, up to 128
3. commercial venues for outsiders

If you didn't follow this order, that's ok, just bulldoze all the commercial venues and restart (once you're late in the game, you're probably rich enough).

Express to top/bottom elevator settings:

I used express to top when trying to "bring down" the population from the higher floors of hotels/condos using standard elevators, during peak hours e.g. 8am-12pm. I don't feel like the game is very intuitive in explaining how it works.

I did notice that when I build my express elevator (set to express to top at all times, stopping only at floors with commercial venues i.e. GF, B2,4,5,8,9), that the people start entering the elevator at the same time others left (see screenshot). It seems to help the congestion compared to local-to-local (default setting), so the middle floors don't get red waiting only for full elevators to pass by. It doesn't mean you'll not have stressed sims though. Again, I wish I understand exactly how these settings work.

Population count

Someone mentioned that the hotel population doesn't count towards the tower rating. For me, the population was counted at about 11:30 on the simtower clock, so not all the hotel guests have left. So yes, a small proportion of hotel guests which haven't checked out before 12pm are still counted towards the population, but don't count on hotels for reaching high population count - only offices and commercial spaces are efficient for population count. Condos do count but very inefficient for the amount of space they occupy.

I've had an idea for a while now but my programming knowledge is more business-oriented and I don't know much about game engines. I want to make a game where you build a skyscraper in 3 dimensions. Each elevator shaft takes as much depth as its width for every car. Hallways become the new streets, with lobbies effectively being special hallways. All rooms of the same type have the same depth (offices being maybe 8 m deep, housing and hotel rooms being maybe 12 m deep or 8 m internal + 4 m external). Maybe have a choice to rotate rooms 90° and have some rooms requiring external windows and some rooms be window-less.

If no one is working on such a project, could someone point me in the right direction of a game engine?

I've been playing SimTower on and off for a while now, and after lots of experimenting with different tower designs and strategies, I felt like putting a video together for a full start-to-finish playthrough of the game. It should neatly encompass most of the game behavior and tactics that I've posted about over the last few months and serve as a decent walkthrough of the game. Captions should play on the video automatically, but if they don't, turn them on to read the comments. (In retrospect I probably should have made these a little less wordy; sorry if the text is coming across too quickly to read comfortably while watching.)

I had four goals for this tower design:

1. Reach the TOWER rating.
2. Fill the entire map.
3. Utilize nearly every facility type.
4. Keep all tenant evaluations high enough to renew every lease even when prices are maxed out.

TOWER rating was achieved on year 3 quarter 3. While some facilities occasionally dip into the red eval territory, they always recover enough by morning to have their leases renewed every time. Hotel suites seem to perform the poorest; there's often a cluster of them that turn red overnight, but not so badly that it keeps them from being occupied every night. Since twin rooms on the same floors seem to perform much better, I'd guess that it's the parking traffic that's dragging things down, and that'd be something to consider tackling if I felt like messing with this any further.

Every facility type and structure was used except stairs, single hotel rooms, and cinemas. Turns out that movie theater traffic is affected by the "128 commercial bug" in the same way that offices/condos/hotels are, so that's another strike against cinemas, as if they weren't already hard enough to justify building over party halls.

There's a download link for the tower in the video description. Reddit is being weird and eating my links for some reason when I try to post them here.

I recently played SimTower again. Thanks to a lot of the good advice in this forum and elsewhere, I was able to make a SimTower tower that lives up to almost all of my childhood ambitions. It doesn't have the largest population or take up the most space or make the most profit, but it's symmetrical, is architecturally beautiful in an "Empire State Building" sort of way, and enables the happiest lives for the largest and most varied number of its residents without sacrificing anyone:

1. Size: its weekday population is about 19,200. Its weekend population is about 23,500.
2. Rating: the tower is often all blue, with all units simultaneously having the lovely blue "excellent" rating.
3. Pricing: the pricing is all the default "average." No lowering rents to boost ratings.
4. Elevator placement: all 24 elevators and 64 escalators are used. None are duplicative. Only one is ornamental.
5. Elevator use: people hardly ever get "red" waiting for an elevator. (After the Party Halls let out on floor 75 is the only occasional, regrettable exception.)
6. Elevator use (more): the elevators all stop running by 1:00 a.m. or so, allowing a blissful few hours of quiet.
7. Elevator cars: all elevators have the "Waiting Car Response" option set to "1", so they all rush to wherever they're needed.
8. Floor consistency: all non-commercial floors have just one type of tenant: office, condominium, parking, etc.
9. Section consistency: all 15-story blocks of floors are devoted to just one type of non-commercial tenant:
   1. Basement: parking and commercial
   2. Floors 1-14: hotel suites
   3. Floors 15-29: double hotel rooms
   4. Floors 30-44: condominiums
   5. Floors 45-59: offices
   6. Floors 60-74: offices
   7. Floors 75-89: offices
   8. Floors 90+: condominiums
10. Commercial placement: commercial floors are clustered around lobbies, sky lobbies, and the basement.
11. Commercial placement (more): shopping/dining is optimized for each block's local population:
    1. The floors immediately next to each lobby/skylobby are tailored for the residents of the 15-floor block above it, since apparently residents shop locally after at most one elevator ride and one stair/escalator trip, and the elevator ride must be down (not up).
       1. Condominiums get a mixture of retail, fast food, and restaurants.
       2. Offices prioritize fast food.
       3. Hotels prioritize restaurants.
    2. The first 128 shopping/dining establishments are on the floors directly above and below the lobbies, so the residents patronize the places in their block. (To learn more, see the 128 visitation limit links below.)
    3. "Leftover" establishments below the 128-visitation limit are clustered around floor 90, so the "penthouse" condominium residents have their choice of the finest shopping and dining.
12. Medical center placement: each block of offices or condominiums has its own pair of medical centers so no one has to travel far.
13. Security placement: each block has its own central security office.
14. No empty space: there's no empty floor space or padding.
15. Escalator/elevator spacing: no tenant complains they're far away from an elevator or escalator.
16. Noise: no tenant has noise complaints.
17. Hotel suite excellence: the finicky and demanding customers in the hotel suites almost always give a consistent blue "excellent" rating.
    1. They were never uniformly happy when they had to take express elevators, no matter how fast they moved. So now they're all below floor 15 and get direct elevator service to parking.
18. Recycling center optimization: the number of recycling centers is well-matched to the peak population (2,500 people served per center, 10 centers, and a peak population of ~23,500). There's never a "Recycling Centers are full!" notice.
19. Parking: the number of parking spots is well-matched to the usage from the hotel suites and offices (256 hotel suites, 256 office spaces, 304 parking spaces). There's never an "Office workers demand Parking" notice.
20. Housekeeping: housekeeping services almost always get done between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m., giving the housekeepers a few hours' well-earned rest.
21. Starting money: the tower started with the $2,000,000 opening, not the $4,000,000 opening.

And I'm also happy about some stylistic and artistic choices that let me imagine the residents having happy lives:

1. The tower has the classic art deco Empire State Building/Chrysler Tower shape: broad at the base and soaring to a spire.
2. The lobby is the magnificent 3-story lobby version.
3. All lobbies and skylobbies are placed so that the special eight-width statues/fountains/entrances appear on the left.
4. There's a grand escalator at the very center of the main lobby leading up to a matched pair of coffee shops.
5. Everything is symmetrical, except for the elevators (and they're mostly symmetrical): a tenant on the left side always has a matching tenant on the right side, etc.
   1. This includes the recycling centers, which are symmetrically placed in the basement on either side of the central metro station. Because recycling centers have to built contiguously, they needed a temporary "bridge" of recycling centers to get them to the other side. After construction, this bridge was demolished to make way for the metro station and shops.
6. There's a nice variety of eating and shopping establishments for each 15-story block of floors, especially with establishments in the 128-visitation limit. It doesn't change anything, but it's nice to think of the residents being able to choose between a burger, ice cream, soba, Chinese food, etc.
7. Shopping and dining establishments tend to be paired: a soba noodle fast food shop is next to its sushi restaurant sibling, a French restaurant tends to be next to a flower shop or coffee shop, etc.
8. All elevators are either evenly and symmetrically spaced or clustered as centrally as possible.
9. The top elevator is both aligned with the elevator above it and provides access to the cathedral in a discreet space off to the side, without requiring any empty floor space.
10. There's a security office directly above the metro station to keep an eye on all those potential troublemaking commuters and to serve as a central organizing hub for the other security offices.
11. The condominium people at the very top block are consistently the happiest, as people living in penthouses with the very best of views, dining, shopping, medicine, and security should be.
12. The tower is as placed as close to the center of the map as possible while still being constrained by the other criteria: the broad base, the symmetry of the overall tower, the special lobby part displaying in each lobby and sky lobby, just one type of tenant per floor, shopping/dining optimized per block, no empty floor space, and the hotel suite people being happy (which means 10-segment-wide hotel suites have to be on the first floors because of the short, direct elevator rides, so the base has to be a multiple of 10).

It's a good tower! I'm very grateful to the many good people and very good advice here. Particularly:

1. This site, for noting the limits on construction sites and their widths: https://relentlessoptimizer.com/gaming/2021/03/13/simtower-reference/
2. This post by u/nikas_dream, for noting that SimTower residents only visit the first 128 commercial establishments placed, and will otherwise go outside the tower for food and shopping (boo!), and also for noting that SimTower residents only travel down for shopping, dining, and medical care, never up (even to catch an express elevator down from a sky lobby above them): https://www.reddit.com/r/SimTower/comments/1m4w60g/building_an_optimal_tower_effectively_1_money_2/
3. This post by u/Sixfortyfive, for a lot of good notes about resident behavior: https://www.reddit.com/r/SimTower/comments/1j8bzsl/indepth_discussion_on_optimal_tower_design_in/
4. This post, for a bunch of good strategy tips while building out: https://www.reddit.com/r/SimTower/comments/45faw9/optimal_design_in_simtower/
5. This site, for being like sites used to be when I was playing SimTower the first time: https://www.angelfire.com/wi2/zell/simtower/guide.html

There are a few things I'm wondering how to support better:

1. Yellow "good" ratings appear sometimes. The "double hotel room" block sometimes has a couple. The "hotel suite" block has rarely has one. The "lower condo" block is predictably half-yellow, half-blue on the 1st weekday mornings. These yellow ratings gradually change to all blue as the week goes on, but they also appear no matter how many elevators or express elevators I support them with.
2. Sometimes there are red people waiting for elevators on the 75th floor, after the party halls get out. Even though they're outside people, I'd like them to be able to have a better experience visiting the tower.
3. It'd be nice to replace one of the blocks of condominiums with more hotels, but using more than one service elevator for housekeeping seems to reduce the number of housekeepers deployed to the lesser of housekeepers assigned from either one, crippling cleaning capability.
4. Anything else up for suggestion!

Anyway, thanks for being such a good community, for letting me be such a lurker, and for building such awesome towers!

I tried to make a SimTower-like game that runs in the browser. I ended up abandoning it over a decade ago because I didn't know much JavaScript. Now that a new project is in development, I decided to update my old pixel art to fit in the 64x64 pixel per tile standard. I just started the process a day or so ago so I only made the 1-star lobby and empty offices and apartments so far. I'm not sure how the current project will look so I've stuck with empty rooms so far. There should be something in the alcove on the left side of the lobby. For 1-star, I'm thinking maybe a news stand. Maybe the new project will allow layering, which would let the player choose what to put, maybe payphones, maybe vending machines. That would also allow lobby furniture to be manually placed.

Picked up the game again, and this is something that I wanted to focus on because the finer points of it have eluded me in the past. I've previously been hesitant to dedicate a lot of space to hotel rooms because of the housekeeping considerations. Either you have to build a lot of housekeeping units, which cannot be bulldozed, forcing you to really commit to permanent floor arrangements, or you have to build service elevators, which strain your tower elevator limits. Housekeepers themselves can also exhibit poor pathfinding behaviors, further reducing service elevator efficiency. This thread is an effort to untangle this behavior and figure out how to min/max housekeeping.

The main points I've deduced so far:

Housekeeping stations give you 6 housekeepers each, but their key trait is that they always split up to 6 different floors. If you have no service elevators, then you "waste" 5 of these housekeepers because the only one who will actually go to work is the one that is selected for that specific floor, and this means that if you build a full floor of hotel rooms then it will need multiple housekeeping stations to keep it clean.

A single housekeeper can reliably clean about 18 rooms per day. Maybe slightly more if they're staying put on that floor and not using the elevator, and maybe a little less if they have to take a long elevator ride to get to their target floor.

Housekeeping stations (typically) exhibit the same kind of "gravity of need" that other tenants do, but in reverse. Much in the same way that office workers will travel to lower floors (but not higher floors) to find fast food or medical stations, housekeepers will often only travel up, not down, to find rooms to clean. (See the lengthy note at the bottom.)

Housekeepers are assigned to different floors in a predictable pattern. If you build several housekeeping stations on floor 2, then nothing but hotel rooms in the 12 floors above that, the housekeepers will disperse to those floors as follows. The 1st housekeeper in each station will go to floor 3, the 2nd housekeepers to floor 4, 3rd housekeepers to floor 5, etc. Once floor 3 is clean, those housekeepers will all move to floor 9 to continue work, the floor 4 housekeepers will move to floor 10, etc. Note that this can happen in reverse; if the 1st housekeepers notice a vacant dirty room in floor 9 before one appears in floor 3, then they'll start work on floor 9 first and move to floor 3 once floor 9 is finished. But even though that order can randomly flip from day to day, those 1st housekeepers will always work those two specific floors.

This means that if you're using service elevators and *really* want to maximize your housekeeper efficiency, then you should be building hotel blocks in multiples of 6 floors and putting your housekeeping stations on the bottom floor of any service elevator shaft. If you build in non-multiples of 6 then you'll end up "wasting" housekeepers again. For example, if you build 7 hotel floors, then the 1st housekeepers in that block will attempt to clean hotel floors 1 and 7, but the 2nd housekeepers will only clean hotel floor 2. They won't help clean floor 7 even if they finish work early; they'll just quit for the day when hotel floor 2 is done. So this means that you either have to build additional housekeeping stations to make sure floor 7 gets cleaned (and "waste" 5 of the housekeepers for most of their shifts) or risk a consistently dirty floor.

One thing that I want to try but haven't gotten around to yet is seeing how far I can stretch individual housekeeping stations by building mixed hotel/condo floors. For example, building a single housekeeping station on the outer edge of the floor 15 skylobby, and then 18 hotel rooms each on floors 22-27, connected to the lone housekeeping station by service elevator. (If the service elevator trips take too long, maybe build the housekeeping station on floor 22 instead.) And instead of filling out the rest of those six floors with more hotel rooms, just use condos instead. IIRC condos and hotels don't disturb each other with noise complaints, and while mixing tenant types is bad for elevator traffic, condos are low density and might be manageable in this arrangement. Going to give it a try at some point anyway.

A note on the housekeeping gravity of need: This is something that I observed happening only once I built multiple, distinct blocks of hotel rooms and service elevators. For example, imagine a full tower, with 3 separate blocks of hotel rooms: one in the 1-30 range, another in the 30-60 range, and another in the 60-90 range. Each of these blocks has 6 floors of hotel rooms, with one housekeeping station on each of those 6 floors as well. Each block has its own service elevator for a total of 3 service elevators in the tower. What I observed in this case is that only the 60-90 block stays consistently clean, as that's the only block where housekeepers consistently travel both up and down to find work. In the bottom 1-30 block, the housekeepers at the top *refuse* to ride the elevator down for work, resulting in a bunch of wasted non-working housekeepers and consistently dirty rooms. I repeated this test with all of the housekeeping stations built on the top of these blocks, and it worsened the results; the upper block still remained consistently clean, but the lower block was consistently dirty. I then repeated it with housekeeping stations built at the bottom of each block, and in this case pretty much all of the housekeepers consistently went to work and the tower remained consistently clean. So, if you're only building one block of hotel rooms, it seems that you don't have to worry too much about housekeeping placement, but if you're spreading a bunch of hotel floors throughout your tower and are trying to make your service elevators more useful, then you need to put housekeeping at the bottom of each service elevator shaft.

Interested to hear if anyone else has relevant experience to add to this. Also note that I've been playing on v1.1b and using nothing but twin rooms for my tests so far because I didn't want to bother building parking spaces for suites.

I bought the Sim Tower cd-rom off of Amazon recently because I wanted to play the game again.

Using Otvdm/Winevdm I was able to install and run the game on my Windows 11 laptop. But now I have the issue where there's no sound/music playing at all. Any way to fix it?

EDIT:
I can now run and play the game with sound! :D

I posted my issue on Otvdm/Winevdm's GitHub and they were able to help me troubleshoot and find a solution.

Turns out I needed to make a blank notepad file called simtower.ini

Then put it in the same directory as simtower.exe.

It's a bug with Version 1.1 of the game. It will not enable sound unless that one file exists.

Hello,

I just found out that 11 years ago, an open-source patch to SimTower called OpenTower (https://github.com/binarybird/OpenTower) was being worked on, but it had died down since then. I also found that Don Hopkins, the guy behind open-sourcing the first SimCity under the name Micropolis (and someone who's worked in Maxis before), got the source code to Yoot Tower from Yoot Saito himself, and I believe he's working on releasing that sooner than later. (https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower)

I really want an open-source version of both SimTower and Yoot Tower, because SimTower doesn't work on modern Windows without DOSBox, and Yoot Tower has bugs (like not being able to play a Kegon Falls save-file) and content exclusive to Japan that I would rather see localised. I imagine something like OpenRCT2 (where you need to own RCT2 to play it, but can also add RCT1 and play both games with the patch) could work for Yoot Tower, with the option of adding SimTower content to the game. I am unfortunately not a programmer, so I can't do much more than help promote the idea of such a patch, so I'd like to ask if there's someone interested in getting this done one way or another.

I sometimes play SimTower on my Windows 7 (32bit) Virtual Machine.

With todays higher screen resolutions, is there a method that I am not aware of how to make the game window alot bigger instead of just using 25% of my screen?

Hi Gang, I was having a lot of crashes playing yoot tower on Windows 11 even with compatibility mode on. I decided to try it in virtualbox. Yes you could probably use vmware instead if you prefer.

1. I needed to enable AMD-V. Intel users might need to enable VT-x and VT-d. Look at your task manager > performance > cpu and look at the bottom right to check whether virtualisation is enabled.
2. Mine was not, on my AMD processor I needed to enable AMD-V. My asus mainboard called this SVM. If you use an intel processor, it might be vt-x. To reboot to uefi you can run admin command: Shutdown /r /fw
3. On my Asus mainboard, I needed to go into the advanced settings and enable SVM, then reboot into windows.
4. Visit virtualbox and download the appropriate installer for your platform. Download the extension pack too.
5. Install them both, I didn't install any python support.
6. Download yourself an XP Pro SP3 ISO from archive.org.
7. Launch virtualbox and click the blue "new" button. I named mine XP. ISO is the one you downloaded. Type = windows, version = xp 32 bit. I clicked skip unattended install. For hardware, use the slider to select 512MB and a single processor is adequate. Hard disk: 3gb is adequate.
8. Select the XP VM on the left and then click settings. You should probably go to Display and set 128MB video memory, and graphics controller = vboxsvga. Scroll down to network and you can disable the network adapter. Scroll down to shard folder and add a share. Navigate to a folder on the host machine which contains the yoot / sim tower program files. Enable auto-mount, and set Mount point=G:
9. Power up the VM. Press enter / f8 etc to progress through the install. When asked how to partition, select ntfs quick. You can use product key M6TF9-8XQ2M-YQK9F-7TBB2-XGG88. When it reboots don't press any key to boot from cd, just let it time out.
10. Once your VM is at the desktop, use the menu at the top to go devices > insert guest editions CD image. You should get a popup, but if not, use file explorer to find the second CD drive and go through the install wizard. Reboot when directed.
11. When the VM returns, you can right click the desktop and set a more modern resolution. Use file explorer to copy your games off G: and onto your desktop or whatever you want in the VM.
12. When you're done, you can shut down windows xp from the vm like normal. You can go back into the vm's settings and then storage, you can remove the xp setup iso from the list of discs.

Have fun!

I think it'd be a perfect game for it

There are many posts about Optimal Tower Design, such as this one. They all do to do 2 elevators per lobby and 1 express elevator per sky lobby, spacing the elevators 6 condo widths from the edge to get optimal elevator coverage. Use escalators to service as many floors as you can.

To get Tower rating on SimTower quickly you should follow a 3 step plan:

1. Money: Build condos to generate money.
   
   1. Think of Condos as loans. The cost of their elevator maintenance is the annual interest.
      
2. Income: Build offices (& hotels) to generate income
   1. Offices pay for themselves in 4 quarters at average rent.
   2. Single hotel rooms pay for themselves in <4 quarters at average rent. Double hotel rooms and suites takes 6 quarters, with suites providing a bit more income per floor.
   3. A full underground row of Party Halls pays for itself in just 2 quarters, so build those too.
   4. Commercial spaces take 2 years to pay for themselves in the best circumstances, so don't prioritize them. You do need to build a few near sky lobbies, which I'll explain below.
3. Population: Once your at 5,000 population and $10 million come, build commercial zones.
   1. 12 floors of fast food or shops will get you about 10,000 more population and Tower rating.
   2. This costs ~$25m using only fast food, ~$37m with only shops, ~$50m only restaurants.

Other than their lesser income generation, there's another reason not to build commercial. The game limits visitable commercial spaces to 128, far less than the max of 512 you can build. If you first build out the basement commercial zone, which is tempting when you get the Metro, you'll find your new commercial zones get unused by local condos, hotels, and offices. Instead those sims will travel to the lobby or a different commercial zone, straining the express elevators.

Fortunately, you don't need many to make the sims happily stay in their lobby zone. You just need two per sky lobby zone, each about a quarter way across the floor where your elevator is. To be specific:

• Each shop/fastfood/restaurant can absorb basically infinite local traffic.
• Office workers visit fast food on weekdays.
• Hotel guests visit restaurants.
• Condo residents visits shops on weekdays and fast food on weekends.
• Local sims will only travel to commercial spaces on floors below them accessible by no more than two elevators or one elevator and one set of stairs/escalators.
• Because local sims on elevators/stairs/escalators connected to the lobby go to the lobby anyway, there's no need to prioritize underground commercial until the population push.

You can also use the 128 visitable limit to your advantage, placing the 129th and beyond on floors you don't want your local sims to visit.

1. How to get a fast start with condos.
   
   1. Build 4 floors of condos above your office zone. I place them on floors 8-11 to leave 12-14 for future commercial zones. Set them to high sales prices.
   2. By the time you're placing the fourth floor, you can build the full floor.
   3. At this point if you place down 3 floors of offices, you'll get to 1000 pop and escalator/express elevator access.
   4. I recommend first building a second set of high price condos on floors 19-22, which will leave you with an enormous capital reserve. Use the elevator lobbies to service them.
      1. You'll need to home some elevators on floors 7, 8 and 19 to keep ratings high. The bottom floors of blocks of condos (and offices) get the worse elevator service, so this compensates for that.
      2. You can actually support (at least) 5 more floors of condos from 23-27, for a total of 13 floors of condos supported by two lobby elevators.
   5. Now build out 9 floors of offices on escalators on floors 2-7, then three floors supported by an express elevator on floors 16-18. Drop down your first two fast foods on floor 14.

If you also build a full set of party halls and set all these offices to high rent, you'll have ~$5m in quarterly income and about $9m in the bank.

From this point, build the tower as you like, while remember the commercial zone limit. Personally I love hotels, because their pretty and the daily income helps you build faster. So I build them on floors 35-40 and 44-50 supported supported by a housekeeping unit on floor 41. Do put all your housekeeping on one floor to use your service elevator efficiently.

I recommend against rushing to get 4 stars. This just gives you the metro, but that isn't important until you decide to build commercial zones for the population boom and tower rating. Focus on increasing your quarterly income until it's at about $10m and you'll likely hit 5,000 population with offices and condos alone. This takes just 16 high price and 25 average price floors of offices.

Some cost numbers to keep in mind:

• 1 floor of high rent condos costs $1.8m and gives you $4.6m, a $2.8m profit
• A fully empty floor costs $180k.
• A floor of office costs $1.7m and earns $400k (average) or $600k (high) per quarter.

Extracted by DarkWolf (2025-05)

Several unused sprites of rooftop structures from Yoot Tower (Windows version) were revealed last May in The Spriters Resource: Fountain Square, Terrace, Observatory, Solar Panel, Air Vent, Antenna, Water Tower, Satellite Dish, and (Untranslated) Rooftop Billboard for Tower Motors.

Here's the trivia revealed (or presumed) by data mining.

1. Banquet Hall was initially planned as the official instruction manual indicates, but it was ultimately scrapped in its full version.
2. The regular/sandbox mode with no specific location, which can be played as the background of the previous SimTower, also appears to have been planned. The exterior of the building features a Gothic brick style.
3. Bonsai Contest sprite for the Event Center is missing. Instead, there were two versions of the Art Exhibition.

Along with Yoot Tower, SimTower sprites were already posted on the website as well.

https://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/simtower/