Happy Anniversary, Mayors!
The Cities: Skylines franchise turns 11 years this month, and to celebrate, we are releasing an Anniversary Patch! This patch won’t be the biggest one you’ve seen, but it still includes a new asset and a couple of new gameplay features. At the end, we will also be looking ahead; what we are currently doing, and what you can expect from us in the near future!
Let’s get started, shall we?
What is big, oval-shaped, and has the cleanest ice in the city? It’s the Iceflake Arena, of course! In the Anniversary Patch, we have added a new signature commercial building called Iceflake Arena, which provides your citizens with proper entertainment, like concerts and ice hockey matches. The arena gives your city a city-wide boost in attractiveness, as well as well-being, within 2 kilometers. And what would a proper Finnish asset be without a fancy sauna!
Have you ever thought about roads without any zoning, or only on one side of the road? Because we certainly have! Inspired by the amazing “Zone Tools” and “Easy Zoning” mods by River-mochi, we have now added a zoning toggle, which allows you to remove the zoning from any road where it is not wanted! You can choose to remove the zoning from either side, or both sides, depending on your preferences.
We are looking into developing this feature further in the future, so please let us know what you think about this first iteration!
We mentioned previously in our City Corner #1 that we were working on an in-game Encyclopedia, formerly known as the Glossary, which would have all the crucial information one click away. The first iteration is now finished, and we wanted to introduce it to you with the Anniversary Patch.
The Encyclopedia has information about different aspects of the game, which you can read about by browsing through different categories and DLC features. The information expands the tutorials you see during the gameplay, but reuses a lot of the information shown there. However, now the information is easily available. If you are looking for something specific, you can use the search function to find the information needed.
While we are in the process of finding out permanent solutions to many of the reported bugs, we have added a temporary fix for some of them in our Anniversary Patch. For example, office demand has several underlying issues that we are still working on, such as signature buildings sometimes preventing the demand completely. One issue we identified was that the demand was being limited too heavily by local consumption within the city, even though offices should be able to sell their services globally. We relaxed this limitation, which means you should be seeing more reasonable office demand after the patch is applied.
Another bug that is receiving a temporary fix is stuck citizens, especially when they are leaving the city. According to our investigation so far, there are issues with the pathfinding requests regarding outside connections, which cause issues when the citizens want to leave. This has been solved by shortening the waiting time for the pathfinding to reset. This also affects the criminals in your city, meaning they will be less likely to get stuck infinitely in the crime scene!
In addition to the previously mentioned pathfinding issues, citizens could also get stuck while searching for a place to live; this was especially noticeable with mixed residential buildings. In these buildings, the system checks whether there are free apartments available when citizens are looking for a home. However, due to a bug, businesses in mixed residential buildings were also counted as residents, which sometimes caused the system to think there was still housing space available, even though the remaining unit was intended for a business. We have now adjusted this logic so the system distinguishes between residential units and business spaces.
The work never ends, and although the Anniversary Patch offers some new features and bug fixes, we have a lot more in store for you in the near future! As we get closer to the second quarter of the year, we are already in the process of trying to fix many of the issues that you have pointed out in the forums.
Of course, since these fixes are still in progress, we cannot give you a direct timeline for when they will be finished, but we will keep you in the loop regardless! Once again, thank you for reading, and happy anniversary!
