author: Hed
Big update for Cities: Skylines features landscaping
There’s a new free update for Cities: Skylines, introducing new functionality: the tools to shape the terrain are now at our disposal. The patch, available for free to all who own the game, also brings us new structures and the ability to build canals.
Cities: Skylines, probably the best city-builder available on the market, just got even better. The new update brought in two very relevant features: tools for land transformation and canal building. The creators at Colossal Order posted notes on the 1.4.0-f3 patch on the official forum of Paradox Interactive, the game’s publisher, The new functions are available for free to all Cities: Skylines owners; simply updating the game is enough to access them. The developers point out that the update is quite big, and fair enough, as the list of changes introduced by the patch is rather impressive.
In the coming days, the developers of Cities: Skylines are planning a short break after having completed the update. They have announced, however, that further updates, tweaks, and expansions will follow this spring. Our own cities could very well use the management and development strategy employed by Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive. You can see where those 2 million copies sold on Steam came from, and for such a seemingly niche strategy game at that.
What’s new?
- Cities: Skylines is a strategy game focusing on city design and management
- The game was released in March, 2015 on the PC, gathering very good reviews
- There are currently two paid expansions available: After Dark and Snowfall
What exactly comes with the patch? The most important feature is the landscaping system, allowing us to modify elements like terrain elevation or gradient (up until now the game provided very limited capabilities in that matter). To manipulate them, the developers have provided several „brushes” that will also help us change the looks of an area in general (for example, smoothing out the slopes). At first, the developers wanted to separate this function from the gameplay and implement it only in the map editor, but eventually they changed their mind. ‘”(...) there are cases when modifying the terrain makes sense while building the city”, as they rightly admit on the forum.
One more important novelty is the new water infrastructure, including canals, quays, and floodwalls. Being able to modify the shoreline has two functions: expanding our means to create beautiful cities as well as enabling us to direct water where we want it. The team reminds, however, that canals have their limitations, i.e. their width is predefined. In return, we can set things like water depth. The developers also believe that new waterfront options will help us set up beaches introduced in the After Dark DLC. Maybe now we can manage it through proper (water) channels.
Finally, the patch introduces numerous changes to the UI, as the authors decided to reorganize some of the tabs. We’ll skip most of the details as you can find them on the forum – just for example, the Decorations service was renamed and now focuses on different categories of parks. The game has also seen the addition of some new objects to be placed on the map (things like castle ruins, abandoned cars, felled trees, as well as various types of rocks). Now think about the new Steam achievements, dozens of tweaks to the UI, gameplay, map editor, and mod compatibility. Yes, that’s a lot.
