The inevitable has occurred: SimCity has been modded so it may be played offline indefinitely.

A Reddit user posting as UKAzzer has accessed the game’s debug mode, and although most developer debug features such as terraforming were unavailable without a debug version of the game, a few things did still work.

"You can edit the highways ANYWHERE - even outside of your city boundary," UKAzzer said, "and even if you quit the game and log back in later, it's all saved safely on the server.

"This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too."

UKAzzer was also able to fix a bug with the game’s population count, and disable its server disconnection timer so offline play was possible.

Of course, when disconnected from the game’s servers, SimCity's region features weren’t available, but the game saved as normal once the connection was re-established, said UKAzzer.

In February, SimCity creative director Ocean Quigley was asked whether modding of the game’s package files would be allowed, to which he replied, “I say go for it, but it'll be a little while before we can provide any support”.

However it seems EA is keen to deny players access to this latest mod, with an unconfirmed report from another Reddit user claiming the game’s most recent patch closed off access to said package files.

EA and Maxis have been heavily criticised for making the game always-online, a move they claim was necessary from a computational standpoint.

"We offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud," said Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw.

"It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

Before the game’s launch, Maxis also claimed the online requirement would give players “choice”.

Earlier this week, one of the game’s developers said that – contrary to Bradshaw’s claims – it didn’t require server access to run.

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing,” the anonymous developer said.

“They’re not doing anything. I have no idea why [Maxis is] claiming otherwise.