February 2015 Update
or
Oh Snap!
Greetings... If you have added the Springfield that we use to create this Guide as a neighbor in your game in order to make use of any courtesy offerings we share you will likely have noticed that our original town was destroyed and so a new layout for our Springfield now exists in the game.
The simple answer to the question of "What Happened?!" is this: We have no idea...
On 4 February 2015 when we logged into our game we got an update - and after we applied the update and logged into the game our town was gone.
All that existed was a very large green grass field with a handful of Buildings on it.
We tried restoring from the save and that did not work. After calming the panic we thought to look in our storage and there was all of the contents of our Springfield, neatly stuck in storage. It was as if we had nuked our town - though we had not nuked our town.
Super Cheats Springfield 2.0
It turned out that we had no choice but to rebuild - but thankfully as we say all of our stuff (as far as we can tell anyway) was there in storage so it was just a matter of rebuilding our Springfield!
There was no way to duplicate what we had had before - even though given the option we would have preferred to do just that. Instead we ended up taking a sort of modern city planner approach in which we sort of set up imaginary zones and placed the Buildings and support structures within that scheme.
You will notice we got rid of a lot of Decorations. True. All of the Buildings are still there however, we just chose to build with a focus on future Expansion.
To our friends and Neighbors - we apologize if this inconveniences you - rebuilding our Springfield took just over 8 hours of real-world time (no joke) and while we would have preferred to have the original town back, we are happy with what we have created and we hope you will be too.
Cheers!