Cities Skylines II released a little over two years ago, and since then, has had mostly negative reviews with little communication from the developers in recent months, however, today they have provided a developer diary update on Bridges, Bikes, and other bug fixes coming.
Bridges and Ports DLC
Firstly, is news regarding the upcoming Bridges & Ports DLC, which was originally schedule to release in Q2 of 2024. The developers state that they have completed modelling of the buildings and bridges, and completed them with props and internal pathing. They also state that there are now even more options to choose from due to the latest delay to the DLC, which was announced a few months back due to it not being considered ready/polished enough.
They also provided a single screenshot of one of the upcoming bridges, which appears to be a draw bridge.
Bikes
Bikes are something that has been highly requested by the community, and were missing at release. The team state that as they have wrapped up bridges and ports, they have now begun working on their next project, which is adding bicycles to the game.
Bicycles will be a free update, and available to everyone who owns the base game. They state that during development of the game prior to release, the animations suffered delays, which resulted in bicycles not being included.
As it stands currently, citizens in your world can choose to either walk, take public transportation, or drive if their household owns a car which isn’t being used by another household member. With the update, bicycles will offer a new method of transportation that is faster than walking, and doesn’t rely on vehicle availability of public transportation.
The update will also include new roads and paths with dedicated bicycle lanes. The road upgrade tool can also be used to add these lanes to existing roads. Additionally, roads with these dedicated lanes provided a higher comfort, which affects pathfinding, which results in cyclists choosing dedicated lanes even if the route is a little longer.
When it comes to the parking of bikes, existing bike rack props will function as storage if they are available. If they aren’t, the bicycle is stored away until it’s needed again. The update will also included dedicated bicycle parking buildings, giving citizens a place to park.
Finally, just like in Cities Skylines 1, new policies will also be added to influence cycling, though they state the details on these policies are still being fleshed out.
Old Town Assets
A new asset pack is also on the horizon, focused around older towns. The pack will not cover all zone types, and there’s no word on exactly which zone types will be supported, but the pack will cover both European and North American styles.
New Service Buildings
There’s also a small mention that new service buildings are currently in the works, ranging from a smaller cemetery and a new campfire site, to new depots and stations for public transport, including a new tram station. According to the developers, they will vary in both style and functionality, though there’s sadly no preview of these yet.
Multi-Select Transport Model Feature
A small new feature mentioned in the blog post is a new multi-select feature for transport lines, allowing you to select as many options as you’d like for bus models instead of just one.
Tourists
We then move onto the last few talking points, which are mostly bug fixes. Tourism is one of the main issues that has received bug fixes, and the developers note that cities are currently not seeing as many tourists as they should, even when having a high City Attractiveness.
The developers state that they have been working on a fix for this issue, and currently have a fix in testing that bases the probability of tourists appearing directly on the current number of tourists and the city attractiveness, so that cities should now see the correct amount of tourists visiting.
They state that while investing the issue, they discovered a few other issues including the profitability of hotels, which ultimately boiled down to the calculations being incorrect, resulting in tourists not lodging or paying the correct amount. This is something the developers are also testing a fix on, along with balancing changes allowing tourists to stay at hotels while allowing them to spend more time and money in the city.
Lastly, we have mail, which is another feature that is getting some bug fixes. The developers note that despite fixes in patch 1.0.15f1, the post sorting facility still currently appears to do nothing when a cargo facility, such as a cargo harbor, was placed in the city.
This is something that should now be fixed when the update this bug fix is included in releases. The fix ensures that the posting sorting facility picks up unsorted mail from the cities post offices, so it can be processed instead of shipped out of the city like it previously was.
Once sorted, if a mail piece has a receiver that is located outside the city, it is shipped to outside connections directly by truck or through an existing cargo facility, while mail for receiver inside the city is delivered to post offices before being distributed locally.
Should your city not have a post sorting facility, unsorted mail be will be picked up by an outside connection or cargo facility so it can be shipped out of the city for sorting.
New Content Coming Soon?
Ending off the post is a small hint, noting that there’s a rumor that Paradox and some creators from the modding community have a small surprise that will be announced tomorrow.
The general community consensus on this, looking at Reddit, is that it’s likely to be another asset pack released on the in-game mod browser, possibly related to train stations, but needless to say this is all speculation.
We’ll be sure to post tomorrow when the news drops.
Summary
And that’s wraps up the developer diary from Paradox/Colossal Order. Unfortunately, there’s no release date for any of the content/updates talked about, and it’s also noted that these features will all be released across different updates. It’s not yet known when this first update will release, though they do say bridges and ports is coming very soon.
