Moving is stressful at the best of times, and while moving to a new country is exciting, it also adds a layer of logistical complications, especially when it comes to tech. As someone who’s tackled several international moves — most recently, from my native Australia to the US in mid-2023 — here are some tips for figuring out what to bring and how to bring it, and for making sure that your tech works with you, not against you, in your new home.

Before you leave

With all the paperwork and legwork involved in moving countries, it can be easy to put off more minor matters, like what to do with your electronics. Laptops, tablets, and phones should travel with you, but if you’re planning on taking relatively large, bulky items like monitors, desktop computers, stereo equipment, TVs, and so on, it’ll be cheaper (and easier) to ship them in advance, along with other similarly bulky items like furniture.

If you do decide to do this, you’ll need to decide between air freight and sea freight. The former is faster; the latter can take months but is generally far cheaper. If there are devices you need with you right up until departure and / or as soon as you arrive — a work computer, for instance — then by all means send them by air freight or bring them as carry-on baggage (which may be your only option for devices with lithium-ion batteries). But the more you can get away with sending via sea, the more money you’ll save.

Whatever you decide, before you pack all your gear, look at the voltage specifications on each item’s power supply. The US power grid operates at 110-120V, as does the rest of North and Central America and a good chunk of South America, but with the occasional exception; the rest of the world’s power is transmitted at somewhere between 220V and 240V. If you plug a device designed to receive 110V power into a 240V socket, you’ll be greeted with a big blue flash and left with a dead device.

These days, many devices come with universal power supplies that can handle AC current anywhere between 100V and 240V at 50-60Hz; they’ll work nearly everywhere with a simple plug adapter. Nearly all modern devices with rechargeable batteries, like phones, tablets, and laptops, come with a universal AC adapter or can be used with one, which is the same for most electronic devices — it’s usually cheaper for the factories to build one model that works everywhere. However, there are still a surprisingly large number of devices that don’t, as many a forlorn musician facing a whopping great bill to replace all their amps and synths will attest. This really is one case where it’s better to be safe than sorry. Both the device itself and its AC adapter (if it has one) will have their power requirements listed; check everything you plan to bring with you.  

 If you do have a device that only accepts low-voltage inputs, you’ll need a step-down converter to sit between the mains and your device. These are widely available and often come in the form of outlet adapters—just be aware that most plug adapters are not voltage converters. The other option, of course, is just to buy new devices when you arrive, which might prove to be less trouble for relatively cheap household devices. A good rule of thumb is that anything that runs on mains power and has either a motor or a heater in it — hair dryers, blenders, coffee makers — is best replaced unless it’s listed to work in your new home or expensive enough that a transformer is cheaper. 

Factor in two-factor

The next thing to consider is how you’re going to maintain access to your various accounts. Two-factor authentication can be a real pitfall here. If you have a bunch of accounts trying to send 2FA codes to a phone number you can no longer access, you’re going to have a bad time — especially if that means you can’t access those accounts to change the phone number.

Again, preparation is important. Ensure you have an alternate way of meeting two-factor requirements. SMS is really the authenticator of last resort; if an account allows for the use of an authenticator app, use that—it’s both the safest and most straightforward option. Google and Microsoft both make such apps. Otherwise, make sure you can get a code sent to your email, at least until you have a new local phone number. The advent of eSIMs has made hanging onto your old number far easier than it used to be; instead of having to physically swap between your local SIM and the one from your home country, you can just keep both active until one or the other is no longer necessary. (If you do this, however, be careful of roaming charges on your home country’s plan.)

And finally, tell your bank where you’re going. The last thing you want is for your card to get blocked — or, worse, swallowed by an ATM — the first time you try to use it in your new home. (Sadly, this is one lesson your correspondent learned the hard way.) 

While you’re speaking to the bank, also ask about reciprocal ATM arrangements. Using an overseas ATM often carries a whopping transaction fee, and these can add up awfully quickly if you find yourself needing to withdraw cash regularly, unless your bank has a reciprocal arrangement. For example, my bank in Australia charges $5 for most overseas ATM transactions, but lets me use Bank of America ATMs in the US for free.) Opening a local bank account can take a while in some countries; this can help tide you over. And if you need to transfer money between your accounts in different countries, a service like Wise can help avoid otherwise exorbitant transfer fees. 

In a similar vein, ask about foreign transaction fees for your credit/debit cards. Again, these can add up quickly, but some cards waive these fees; if your bank offers such an option, it may well be worth signing up for.

Once you arrive

If your destination has a power grid that’s less reliable than you’re used to, there are a couple of items you might want to consider getting hold of.

The first is a universal power supply, or UPS. These are essentially batteries that ensure continued power supply for your home if the power goes out, and they’re invaluable in places prone to brown- or black-outs. The battery charges itself from the grid while the power is on and then discharges if the grid supply is interrupted.

The other thing to consider is some form of surge protection, which protects against abrupt increases in mains voltage. One common cause of power surges is the restoration of supply after an interruption, so if a country is prone to blackouts, it’ll also be prone to voltage spikes. (For this reason, UPS devices often come with built-in surge protection.) It’s worth investigating whether surges are common in your new home, because they can spell real trouble for electronic devices.

Location-specific apps

Once you’re up and running, you may find that some apps simply refuse to work. Some apps just aren’t designed or intended to operate abroad. The latter problem is especially common with finance apps, to avoid fraudulent access. 

Sometimes the app in question isn’t available in your new country for licensing or other reasons. Streaming apps are particularly prone to this; for British people, moving abroad means resigning themselves to the loss of the BBC’s excellent iPlayer application, and for this Australian, moving to the USA meant abandoning any hope of watching the cricket. Apps like Netflix likely will work, but the selection will differ from country to country.

 It’s also important to be aware that suddenly logging in from a different country might trigger protection for various accounts. Unlike calling your bank in advance of your departure, there’s no real way to guard against this, so the best thing to do is be prepared for it to happen: make sure your recovery options are up-to-date and easy to access.

Ultimately, anything you can do in advance to mitigate the problems you can foresee will give you more time and space to deal with the problems you can’t. And once the initial period of trying to get everything working properly is over, you’ll be settled in a new home — hopefully, without any burned-out devices to replace!

Search for “SimCity 4” on YouTube, and you’ll see players constructing multilevel highway interchanges and intricate railroad networks, or maybe even a swooping flyby of a sprawling metropolis. None of these features came with the original game, which was released just after the turn of the millennium. They’ve been developed slowly and painstakingly over the 22 years since its release by dedicated aficionados — a thriving community that continues to push the game’s limits.

The work is a labor of love, and it’s a lot of labor and love. Modder Tarkus says that after all these years, he’s drawn to the deep and complex nature of the game’s simulation, which he says remains unmatched by newer games like Cities: Skylines (2015) and its sequel Cities: Skylines 2 (2023) — and even by SimCity 4’s own sequel, which was released in 2013 and simply called SimCity. Modder Ulisse Wolf says that, for him, it’s ultimately a question of community. Perhaps because of the game’s age, he finds that SimCity 4 enthusiasts are “more mature … guaranteeing you a quiet place to live in [peace] with other members.”

SimCity 4 was released in 2003, the fourth in game company Maxis’ series of city-building games. It was reasonably successful, garnering positive reviews and selling well enough for Maxis to release an expansion pack later that year. The ability for players to add their own content to the game was a key part of SimCity 4’s appeal from the start: it came with a set of tools that allowed players to create and add their own buildings to their cities. Players soon began sharing their creations online via exchanges hosted on fan sites like Simtropolis and SC4 Devotion (now defunct, but relaunched recently as SC4 Evermore), as well as discussing tips and ideas in the accompanying forums.

Players soon began to look beyond the officially supported methods of adding their own content to the game and wondering what else could be done. Could the game’s road system be expanded? What about the railways? Early modding efforts were made easier by the way the game stores its data, which, as modder Matias93 explains, is in a database whose format was shared with previous Maxis games. The database stores information about the game’s various elements: for a type of road, the database would have entries for everything from which textures to display on screen when the player placed the road down to how much traffic the simulation would allow it to carry.

The game’s built-in tools provided no way to access this database, so the community developed its own — no easy task, as Matias93 explains: “[This] required the development of a veritable suite of tools able to decrypt hexadecimal symbols into legible databases, and to import and export multimedia files from and to them.”

As early modders began to find their way around the database, however, they started to find entries for systems that weren’t in the game: features that were either unfinished or never implemented. “SimCity 4 shows clear signs of having gotten less content and expansions than its creators [intended]. While some of these elements are almost irremediably broken … many others were relatively at reach to be repurposed,” Matias93 says.

Using the tools they’d developed to tweak existing entries, modders were able to build the rudiments of these unfinished features into entirely new ones. One of the first such features to be repurposed was an unused road type, apparently intended to be a dirt road for use in rural environments. SimCity 4 comes with several types of roads for players to place in their cities: suburban streets, two-lane roads, two-lane one-way roads, four-lane avenues, and highways. Players soon chafed against the limitations of the latter: there was no way to build a highway with a variety of lane widths, and connecting a highway to a road network required the use of one of several prebuilt interchanges. Players who wanted to design and build their own interchanges, or construct highways with a variety of widths, were out of luck.

The discovery of the unused dirt road meant that there was space for one more road type, and modders used it as the basis for what became the “real highway” mod, a more flexible and customizable alternative to the game’s built-in highway system. Suddenly, players had multiple highway widths to choose from, as well as modular pieces they could use to build their own custom interchanges. 

Tarkus recalls coming across an early version of the mod in 2006: “I was absolutely floored. [Even though] it was an extremely limited mod at the time, I could tell it had potential.” Real-life commitments took him away from the game for most of that year, and on his return, he found that development had stalled. “It became clear to me that if I wanted to see more happen on the transportation modding front, I needed to learn how to do things for myself.”

Today, Tarkus is the lead developer on the Network Addon Mod (NAM), a sprawling package that includes the RHW mod along with a huge amount of other transport-based content: pedestrian malls, a new railway system, roundabouts, canals, bridges, and underpasses, as well as a comprehensive reworking of the game’s traffic simulator. The mod remains in active development — its 49th version was released in March 2025 — and is maintained and developed by a constantly shifting and evolving team, whose membership spans the globe.

Lucario Boricua, who spearheads development on several of the mod’s features, lives in Puerto Rico and is a civil engineer by day. He estimates that, as of early 2025, the team has around 25 full-fledged members, along with other part-time contributors, playtesters, etc. The community is friendly in general, too — members gather in both the long-running forums and newer channels like Discord, and both are generally nice places to spend time, with veteran members welcoming new fans and what Wolf calls “political bullshit” notably absent. 

It’s not just the NAM that remains in active development, either. In 2025, SimCity 4 modding continues to evolve and encompass new possibilities, largely because of improved access to the game’s source code. Matias93 explains that “the first 15 years of modding, more or less, [had nothing] to do with coding per se.” Instead, they involved customizing and extending the game’s databases. However, that changed in the 2010s because of two key developments.

The first was the release of a portion of the game’s code, provided by the late Paul Pedriana — the game’s original chief programmer — in response to a request from the community. This allowed for the reimplementation of some of the game’s internal debugging features, which were essentially cheat codes that allowed developers to do things like quickly set up cities without worrying about practicalities like having enough in-game cash, place specific buildings instantly, and many other useful features. Then, in 2019, a 64-bit macOS port of the game was released — with an unexpected bonus for modders. “A lot of the game code [was] legible on the released executable, allowing modders to identify certain possible hooks to work with,” Matias93 says.

Modders continue to lack full access to the game’s code, but even limited access has allowed the use of techniques that would have otherwise been impossible. Foremost among these is the use of dynamic link libraries (DLLs), which allow custom code to be loaded into the game’s executable at runtime. The ability to write custom DLLs has allowed modders to fix long-standing bugs in the game — most notably, one notorious issue that could lead to save game corruption in large cities. It also let them dream up features that would not have been possible otherwise: recent additions include a 3D camera, the reimplementation of the game’s long-broken water system, and a Steam Workshop-esque interface for finding and downloading custom content.

Nevertheless, the process of creating these features remains far less straightforward than for modern games, which often come with dedicated development kits designed for modders’ use. So what is it that keeps the NAM team and its fellow modders working on SimCity 4, painstakingly implementing new features and testing the limits of what’s possible?

Lucario Boricua says that working on the game today feels like “standing on the shoulders of giants.” The decades of work that modders have put into the game provide a platform for today’s creators to push the game into places its designers probably never imagined: “We’re focused on doing revolutionary things that redefine what’s possible.”