INSTALLING, RUNNING AND SAVING
Tip #1 --- Saving Your City to Disk

Saving your city to disk is tricky and it's easy to loose your file!

Step-by-Step Instructions for Saving Your City:

1. Create a new folder on the hard drive or floppy drive and name it "FutureCity".
2. In SimCity 3000, click on [Save As], and then change the "Look In" pulldown to the new folder you've created. 
3. Make your "File Name" the same as your "City Name" (so the judge's don't get confused), and then hit the check mark button.
4. Before continuing with your city development, test that you have the file in the right spot by clicking on [Load] and then opening your city back up from the saved file.

If any problem occurs while saving, the city just turns to water. When this happens, you have to go back to the last time you saved it, or start all over!

Some teams have reported that it is better to save to the hard drive, and then copy the file to a floppy once you're all done for the day.  That way even if something happens with copying the file to the floppy, you still have the original on the hard drive and you won't have to start over.

Save your city with a new file name every time (like City1.sc3, City2.sc3, City3.sc3, etc.). That way if your save is unsuccessful and the program crashes, at least you can go back to the last time you saved.

Some Points to Keep in Mind:

• SimCity will default to save in strange locations, such as on the program CD-ROM or buried way down on the C drive.
   
• SimCity will only save into a folder, so if you want to save directly onto a floppy disk, you'll need to create a folder on the disk first.
   
• If you try to save to a location that isn't available (i.e. to the floppy drive but there's no disk in the drive), SimCity may appear to save correctly, but it's actually saving to some previously used directory on the C drive and the file may not be where you think it is!

Troubleshooting and Recovering Lost Files:

• If you get an error message that "City Save Failed", it's probably because you're trying to save to a read-only CD-ROM drive.
   
• If you can't find your saved city, try looking in the folder C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 3000 Unlimited\Apps (this is a common default save location).
   
• If you still can't find your file, use Windows to search the entire hard drive for your file name.