SimCity has been under the hammer ever since it launched due to its always online requirement, but modders have now managed to bypass that restriction.

“UKAzzer” has published a video on YouTube showing himself playing around in the game’s debug mode, which allowed him to bypass the game’s 20 minute offline shutdown timer, edit the highways outside of cities, and fix the boosted population count.

“You can edit the highways ANYWHERE – even outside of your city boundary and even if you quit the game and log back in later, it’s all saved safely on the server,” he said. “This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too.

“Other things I have modded out with a quick change: Unlimited time to remain disconnected (won’t get booted at 20 minutes, can now be disconnected “forever”). Population count now shows REAL figure, not the “artificially inflated” figure.”

Of course there are some limitations, to save your city you have to be connected to the servers and Region play is disabled while in offline mode. However, it’s an indication of what can be achieved.