Posted March 18, 2025
There's not a lot of information I could find about modding Tropico 4, and even though this forum is not remotely active, I thought I'd post a thread here with what I did manage to find for anyone like myself who buys the game in the future and wants to see what's available. This will be a bit lengthy, but I want to cover as much as I can in this one post, so please bear with me if you're interested in mods for Tropico 4. If you're not, why are you reading this? ;)
Firstly, there are very few still-functioning sites that even offer mods for Tropico 4. One is Nexus mods, here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/tropico4/mods
Nexus is usually a good mod source in my experience, but as of this writing all they have are two mods aiming to use Reshade, which I'm not familiar with, to improve the game's graphics. I haven't bothered with either of them. If anyone else knows how to use Reshade and can explain it in user-friendly terms, feel free to post about it here.
Next up is the Tropico 4 Mod Archive at tapatalk:
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/tropicomoddng/mod-archive-f16/?sid=3b39f00a8c83f38692df93d2163bf5c7
I have no idea how long this will be around, as the site seems fundamentally broken in that I was unable to complete a site registration to join it. It gets stuck in an endless loop of trying to sign in but not actually accomplishing that. However, you don't need to be logged in to download most of the mods they host, and some of them are quite useful. Be warned, however, that none of the mods by DarthPresidente seem to work on the GOG version of Tropico 4 anymore. At least some of them once did judging by other threads in this forum, but I couldn't get a single one of them to work. Guess there's a reason they're all marked "No Longer Supported."
Many of the other mods do work, however, and the ones I've installed and kept are as follows:
The Infinite Mining Mod - If the base resource amounts weren't so low, I'd probably have skipped this, but as it is my workers exhaust any mined resource in just a few years. It seems unreasonable to me to bother building expensive factories only to have to end up importing ALL the raw materials just a few short years later when you exhaust the mines.
The Home Quality Improvements Mod - I'll admit it bothered me that what should be the highest-end housing in the game didn't include the quality of life improvement mods that some of the lesser buildings did. This mod fixes that, and makes me feel better about charging more rent for those Mansions and Condos. ;)
The Infinite Crude Oil Extraction Mod - Just like the mining mod, except for oil. Deposits in the unmodded game simply disappear too quickly.
The Farm and Plantation Mod - There are two parts to this mod; one part makes crops grow instantly instead of taking many months to start providing food. I don't use that one, but the other one allows all of the crops to be grown in Plantations, and that one I DO use. Plantations cost more than a standard farm, but they produce more and provide more jobs, and it didn't make sense to me that you couldn't have, for instance, a Banana Plantation in the unmodded game.
And finally, the game has a population limit that I ironically seem to hit just at the point where my economy is finally on such solid ground that I'm making money faster than I can spend it. Right at that point, growth grinds to a halt because there's a population limit of around 1,500. Usually, at least in Sandbox mode, I still have around two thirds of my island's land undeveloped, but there's no point in building anything new because you can't get any more workers.
The No Limits mod drastically raises the population cap, to 20,000, which I'm pretty sure is impossible to actually reach in-game, at least on an island with a functional import/export economy. I have only found one place online where you can still acquire this particular mod, and that is via the description of a YouTube video that shows you how to use it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljjxai3gnLQ
This mod causes a problem, though, which I posted about in the video's comments, and linked to this thread from. In its unaltered form, this mod makes a change to the immigration system that, in my opinion, breaks the game. Normally, when a ship arrives at one of your docks, immigrants will come with it, depending on conditions on your island. Prior to me installing this mod, I usually got anywhere from 0 to 20 immigrants at a time, most often around 3 to 7. This is entirely manageable, as you will usually have some open housing spots available for them, and probably some open jobs as well.
However, with the unaltered version of No Limits installed, the number of immigrants skyrockets. Testing it with different saves and also with a brand new random island playthrough, I would get dozens at a time, and on one very well-developed map that had reached the PopCap, over 470 showed up on one ship! That is totally unmanageable, because it is very unlikely your island's housing, employment, and food supplies can take that kind of hit all at once without completely tanking your entire economy. In the case of the 470+ arrivals, shacks appeared on practically every available piece of land, crime skyrocketed as a result, and dozens of people started dying of starvation every year because my food supply couldn't absorb that many new mouths at once.
Since I still wanted to lift that PopCap of 1500, I started tinkering with the mod to see what happened when i changed various values. Nothing had much of an effect until I completely removed a few lines from the mod. If you want to use the mod but don't want the problems I've described, download the nolimits.lua file from the link in the video description (the link doesn't seem to ALWAYS work, I don't know why). You can then open it in Notepad or any other basic text editor to make changes. Remove the following lines, about a third of the way down the file:
ImmigrationRandomize = function(y)
return MulDivRound(y, MaxPopulation - CitizenCount, 375)
end
My best guess is that this bit of code was intended to help your population grow faster with the higher PopCap in place. And maybe on prior versions of Tropico 4 it even worked as intended. But in the current GOG version as of this writing, it causes the hugely out-of-balance immigration issue I described. But after removing those lines from the file, I still have the new, higher population limit, but I don't get broadsided by dozens or hundreds of immigrants at once. Instead, it goes back to normal amounts relative to the size of your extant population. By that I mean that in general, the larger my population gets, the more people seem to immigrate at one time. But with those lines removed, it has not yet been an issue for me to deal with the new arrivals.
If there is some other effect those lines are having, I haven't noticed its absence even after several new random island playthroughs with those lines deleted.
Well, I think that's everything. If you have questions, post here and I will try to help out, but I wasn't originally part of the Tropico 4 Modding Community, so my knowledge is rather limited. ;)
Firstly, there are very few still-functioning sites that even offer mods for Tropico 4. One is Nexus mods, here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/tropico4/mods
Nexus is usually a good mod source in my experience, but as of this writing all they have are two mods aiming to use Reshade, which I'm not familiar with, to improve the game's graphics. I haven't bothered with either of them. If anyone else knows how to use Reshade and can explain it in user-friendly terms, feel free to post about it here.
Next up is the Tropico 4 Mod Archive at tapatalk:
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/tropicomoddng/mod-archive-f16/?sid=3b39f00a8c83f38692df93d2163bf5c7
I have no idea how long this will be around, as the site seems fundamentally broken in that I was unable to complete a site registration to join it. It gets stuck in an endless loop of trying to sign in but not actually accomplishing that. However, you don't need to be logged in to download most of the mods they host, and some of them are quite useful. Be warned, however, that none of the mods by DarthPresidente seem to work on the GOG version of Tropico 4 anymore. At least some of them once did judging by other threads in this forum, but I couldn't get a single one of them to work. Guess there's a reason they're all marked "No Longer Supported."
Many of the other mods do work, however, and the ones I've installed and kept are as follows:
The Infinite Mining Mod - If the base resource amounts weren't so low, I'd probably have skipped this, but as it is my workers exhaust any mined resource in just a few years. It seems unreasonable to me to bother building expensive factories only to have to end up importing ALL the raw materials just a few short years later when you exhaust the mines.
The Home Quality Improvements Mod - I'll admit it bothered me that what should be the highest-end housing in the game didn't include the quality of life improvement mods that some of the lesser buildings did. This mod fixes that, and makes me feel better about charging more rent for those Mansions and Condos. ;)
The Infinite Crude Oil Extraction Mod - Just like the mining mod, except for oil. Deposits in the unmodded game simply disappear too quickly.
The Farm and Plantation Mod - There are two parts to this mod; one part makes crops grow instantly instead of taking many months to start providing food. I don't use that one, but the other one allows all of the crops to be grown in Plantations, and that one I DO use. Plantations cost more than a standard farm, but they produce more and provide more jobs, and it didn't make sense to me that you couldn't have, for instance, a Banana Plantation in the unmodded game.
And finally, the game has a population limit that I ironically seem to hit just at the point where my economy is finally on such solid ground that I'm making money faster than I can spend it. Right at that point, growth grinds to a halt because there's a population limit of around 1,500. Usually, at least in Sandbox mode, I still have around two thirds of my island's land undeveloped, but there's no point in building anything new because you can't get any more workers.
The No Limits mod drastically raises the population cap, to 20,000, which I'm pretty sure is impossible to actually reach in-game, at least on an island with a functional import/export economy. I have only found one place online where you can still acquire this particular mod, and that is via the description of a YouTube video that shows you how to use it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljjxai3gnLQ
This mod causes a problem, though, which I posted about in the video's comments, and linked to this thread from. In its unaltered form, this mod makes a change to the immigration system that, in my opinion, breaks the game. Normally, when a ship arrives at one of your docks, immigrants will come with it, depending on conditions on your island. Prior to me installing this mod, I usually got anywhere from 0 to 20 immigrants at a time, most often around 3 to 7. This is entirely manageable, as you will usually have some open housing spots available for them, and probably some open jobs as well.
However, with the unaltered version of No Limits installed, the number of immigrants skyrockets. Testing it with different saves and also with a brand new random island playthrough, I would get dozens at a time, and on one very well-developed map that had reached the PopCap, over 470 showed up on one ship! That is totally unmanageable, because it is very unlikely your island's housing, employment, and food supplies can take that kind of hit all at once without completely tanking your entire economy. In the case of the 470+ arrivals, shacks appeared on practically every available piece of land, crime skyrocketed as a result, and dozens of people started dying of starvation every year because my food supply couldn't absorb that many new mouths at once.
Since I still wanted to lift that PopCap of 1500, I started tinkering with the mod to see what happened when i changed various values. Nothing had much of an effect until I completely removed a few lines from the mod. If you want to use the mod but don't want the problems I've described, download the nolimits.lua file from the link in the video description (the link doesn't seem to ALWAYS work, I don't know why). You can then open it in Notepad or any other basic text editor to make changes. Remove the following lines, about a third of the way down the file:
ImmigrationRandomize = function(y)
return MulDivRound(y, MaxPopulation - CitizenCount, 375)
end
My best guess is that this bit of code was intended to help your population grow faster with the higher PopCap in place. And maybe on prior versions of Tropico 4 it even worked as intended. But in the current GOG version as of this writing, it causes the hugely out-of-balance immigration issue I described. But after removing those lines from the file, I still have the new, higher population limit, but I don't get broadsided by dozens or hundreds of immigrants at once. Instead, it goes back to normal amounts relative to the size of your extant population. By that I mean that in general, the larger my population gets, the more people seem to immigrate at one time. But with those lines removed, it has not yet been an issue for me to deal with the new arrivals.
If there is some other effect those lines are having, I haven't noticed its absence even after several new random island playthroughs with those lines deleted.
Well, I think that's everything. If you have questions, post here and I will try to help out, but I wasn't originally part of the Tropico 4 Modding Community, so my knowledge is rather limited. ;)