Ready for more content? Today we have a look at the 2nd half of the free update Hubs & Transports, which will be available tomorrow. Yesterday we covered the new transport options being added to the base game as well as After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, and Mass Transit, but today is all about the base game and Natural Disasters. So let’s start unpacking the gift bag!
For anyone with Natural Disasters, we have a set of higher capacity helicopter depots. Whether you play with random disasters enabled or not helicopter services offer a quick way to reach remote or difficult-to-get-to areas of the city. With Hubs & Transports, you will have access to higher capacity depots for fire, police, and medical services, as well as a new Disaster Response Air Base, all with significantly more helicopters ready to respond to your city’s needs bypassing any terrain obstacles or traffic jams.
The new helicopter depots can be found in their respective service menu.
New Decorations
Next up we have a series of new decorations for your city, which you may have spotted in the screenshots yesterday. Parking lots have been a popular request and we have three decorative parking lots as our gift to you! Both the Small and Large Decorative Parking Lots can be placed side-by-side to create a large area filled with parking spots, or you can save space with the Multistory Decorative Parking Lot which comes in 2 variations. These are all available to everyone who owns the base game and will automatically be added to your game in the patch tomorrow.
Beautify your cities with the new decorative parking lots.
The Landscaping menu has 7 new items which do not require any expansions - as long as you have the base game, you will get these too. The new Suburban Fence offers a decorative option for your neighborhoods or parks, while the new City Quay brings new life to your waterfronts - the trees can of course be replaced with your favorites like on roads. And speaking of trees, MrMaison has done it again and added 5 additional trees to the official collection with several species native to Africa in celebration of the Cities: Skylines World Tour.
Give your cities a unique look with the new decorative options.
And, as the icing on the cake, we have a special plaza to commemorate Cities: Skylines' 8-year anniversary: The Birthday Plaza. This decorative plaza offers a place for your citizens to gather and celebrate Cities: Skylines, providing entertainment to the surrounding area. And it of course has a giant cake so there’s enough for all your citizens to grab a slice.
What better way to celebrate than with a giant cake?
New Options & Improvements
A free patch is a great opportunity for us to add quality-of-life options and improve on existing content, and Hubs & Transport is no different. The first of these improvements is new filters in 3 menus: Roads, Public Transport Hubs, and Content Creator Packs under Unique Buildings. In the Roads menu, you can filter all your roads by one-way or two-way, by decorations, or only display roads including public transport lanes - a great way to find the new roads added by Hubs & Transport! Similarly, Public Transport Hubs have a filter for each transport type, which can be enabled or disabled. Looking for a hub that combines metro and trams? Just select the metro and tram filters and you will see hubs that feature both these options! And last but not least the Content Creator Pack tab under Unique Buildings has filters for each pack, so you can jump directly to the buildings you want to browse.
Filters help narrow down the options when browsing.
However, filters are not the only new option to help you find a specific item, we have also added a search function to all menus. Simply click the magnifying glass to open it and type anything. The search is applied to the entire menu, for example searching ‘bicycle’ in the Roads menu will display all roads with ‘bicycle’ in their name, regardless of how small or large they are. No need to dig through each tab to find the item you’re looking for! Another place you can search is when loading a save, so if you have a LOT of savegames finding the right one is about to get a whole lot easier!
Search for asset names in a category to find what you are looking for.
Roads & Vehicles expanded the options for public transport vehicles quite a bit and with the new vehicles in Hubs & Transport, we take that one step further. As a result, we decided to rebalance the vehicle upkeep costs to account for the new passenger capacity options. Instead of a flat upkeep per vehicle, the cost of a transport vehicle now has a base cost and a multiplier for passenger capacity. This means vehicles carrying only a few passengers are cheaper than ones with higher capacity, and selecting the high-capacity options for busy lines is cheaper than having many more low-capacity vehicles. All in all, this means optimizing transport vehicles for weekly passengers doesn’t just make your lines more efficient, it also makes them cheaper to run.
We also improved the forest fire spread mechanic in Natural Disasters. If you’ve ever had a forest fire spread out of control in your city, these changes will give you a better chance to respond to the fires and limit the spread. The changes include the following improvements:
- Forest fires have a noticeably lower chance of spreading
- Forest fires burn with slightly less intensity
- Fire helicopters can carry twice as much water
- Fire helicopters can put out fires faster
Forest fires can still be devastating to the city if your city lacks fire helicopters.
And now, to the last item in our goodie bag! In 1.16.0 we added the option to select specific submesh variations for most ploppable buildings. With Hubs & Transport, we’re expanding this selection to growable buildings. This option is automatically available on growables that use the random submesh feature, whether they’re official buildings or from the workshop, and lets you choose between the different options. If you have a particular mural from Plazas & Promenades you love, you can now select it for your Wall-to-Wall specialization buildings.
Variations are selectable for growables using the submesh variations system.
That leaves us with just one thing to cover: The patch notes, which can be found here. Thanks to your diligent bug reports we have a long list of over 65 bug fixes along with improvements and, of course, a list of all the new content. We hope you will enjoy these new additions and improvements.