Felicity Island Reimagined

Short answer: I didn't. Those lots were placed on a terrain with roads. I used special programs to replace the terrain with roadless one, and then used another program to remove the roads from the lot.

Looong answer:
This neighborhood template that I built in SimCity 4 actually has a copy. That copy has roads. Roads I put into the "sister" terrain don't look pretty - the roads are purely of functional purpose: so that lots could snap to them.

I started the hood by selecting the "road" terrain. Once it loaded, I used in-game tools for placing lots (Lots & Houses > Empty Lots). Both beach and regular lots work with this method.

After placing around 60 lots, I loaded each and every one of them. This is crucial because of how the game interprets loaded and never-loaded lots (difference can be seen in the lot file size in Neighborhoods folder; non-loaded lots are 1 KB, while empty loaded lots are ~160 KB in size).

Once I loaded every lot (enter, save, exit), I quit the game and ran Mootilda's HoodReplace. Using the program, I switched neighborhood terrain to the roadless one. I loaded the game once more just to be sure that there won't be any issues later on, because LotAdjuster causes quite a few (temporary!) ones.

Next up, I loaded LotAdjuster and was faced with a challenge: there are two methods that I will be doing. The first one is easy, where only a single lot is snapped to one part of the road. The second method was used for lots that used shared roads, i.e.:

--------------------
[lot1]
===V/\=== (road)
[lot2]
--------------------

V & /\ represent that arrow symbol game uses when you move a lot around the nhood. (Where the game "snaps" the lot to the road.)

Since those two lots share one piece of road, only removing roads using LA wouldn't be enough, because the lots would then overlap. Therefore, it's necessary to either shrink lot1 for 1 neighborhood tile (completely remove the road part), or leave it the same size, but shift it back 1 neighborhood tile, so that it would look like this:

a) shrinking lot1
--------------------
V (lot1, now only 1 tile deep)
/\
[lot2]
--------------------

or

b) moving lot1 further north
--------------------
[lot1]
V

/\
[lot2]
--------------------

Of course, one would always prefer to choose a line with less resistance, in this case b). However, when it comes to densely placed lots, such as the example in my first post - Friendly Village South - where each lot has at least 1 neighboring lot, it almost always came down to me shrinking lots instead of shifting them.

After I went through every 60 or so lots with LA, I loaded the game and entered every lot, made a structural change (move the mailbox, delete the phone booth...) and saved. Doing so made the neighborhood terrain geometry go back to normal, since removing roads caused bunch of holes in the terrain to appear (that's the temporary LA issue).

(Slight issues do arise after, examples are portals. Unless you want no service vehicles, carpools, taxis, etc. (not recommended at all), you'd need to put at least 3x3 or similar flat surface on your lot reserved for car portals. Pedestrian portals, however, can be placed on any 1x1 (flat) accessible area of the lot.)

------------

... and that's how I "put down" roadless lots. This method comes best in handy with special neighborhoods such as medieval, island or tropical themed ones, where it is all started out by planning neighborhood terrain etc. I don't think it's worth all the struggle to put a roadless lot in a regular neighborhood, though, for example, because you'd have to edit the nhood terrain to add a piece of road, use HR, place the lot, load the lot, use HR again, use LA and then finally re-load the lot.

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