Greetings, Mayors!
With the last traces of winter snow finally retreating from Tampere, Finland, the timing couldn’t be better to unveil our latest update: Spring Cleaning. This patch brings a fresh wave of content, refined gameplay mechanics, UI enhancements, and visual polish. True to the “Spring Cleaning” theme, we’ve also scrubbed away a variety of community-reported bugs—we’ll dive into those details toward the end of this City Corner.
Grab your virtual dusters, and let’s get into the details!
New Additions
We know how frustrating it can be when a beloved building design is lost due to an automatic upgrade. To give you better creative control, we are introducing the Historical Building designation. By marking a structure as historical, you effectively “lock” its current level, preventing it from evolving further or being abandoned. This allows you to preserve the architectural character of your city neighborhoods exactly as you intended.
The Historical option is conveniently located within the visual customization panel.
We are also debuting the Universal Mod Button. This quality-of-life feature allows modders to consolidate their UI elements into a single, organized location. This update should resolve those pesky issues where icons and buttons overlapped, ensuring a clean and functional interface even when running multiple mods.
You can find the Universal Mod button integrated into the right-hand side of the UI.
Furthermore, we’ve expanded your UI customization options. You can now manually adjust the scale of the toolbar and toggle the transparency for both the toolbar and panel backgrounds. Adjusting the toolbar scale will automatically resize the buttons and associated UI elements, while transparency settings allow you to dial in your preferred look, from opaque to fully translucent.
The User Interface now features a full 0-100% transparency slider.
Benchmark Tool
As previewed in our fourth City Corner entry, we have implemented an in-game Benchmark Tool. This is a foundational step in our ongoing commitment to performance optimization. This tool allows you to monitor how game updates impact your system’s performance over time. The data gathered helps our team identify specific areas that require further optimization. You can trigger the benchmark directly through the Main Menu or by utilizing the -benchmark launch parameter.
Gameplay Refinements
This patch introduces several critical adjustments to our core simulation systems:
- Education Balance: We’ve recalibrated the education system to better synchronize demand between elementary and high schools. Previously, elementary schools were perpetually overcrowded due to an imbalance in study duration. We’ve leveled the playing field, and we have also corrected a bug that prevented students from engaging in leisure activities outside of class hours.
- Office Dynamics: Office demand was previously skewed toward software production, largely ignoring consumer usage. By smoothing our production statistics over a longer temporal window, we have reduced erratic demand fluctuations. We’ve also resolved an issue with Signature office buildings that incorrectly categorized them as “for sale,” which previously suppressed office demand.
- Pet Control: While we adore our digital pets, the household populations had become a bit unruly. We have adjusted spawn rates and household pet limits to bring the number of dogs in your cities back to a realistic level.
- Traffic & Transit: To mitigate congestion, we have restricted citizens from using taxis for moving house. Additionally, we’ve addressed the “infinite boarding” glitch that caused buses, trains, and trams to stall at stations, snarling traffic. For the cycling enthusiasts, the Urban Cycling Initiative policy now boosts bicycle usage probability from 20% to 50%, making bicycle-centric urban planning more viable.
- Bridges & Ports: Players utilizing the Bridges & Ports DLC will see improvements to port logistics. Commercial and industrial sectors will now correctly utilize port upgrades for importing goods and mail, ensuring proper building progression.
Beyond these, we have tackled a host of other reported bugs, including fixes for citizens getting trapped during robberies, connectivity issues with non-highway roads, and discrepancies between Photo Mode settings and in-game rendering.
What’s Next
Planning for our next update is already underway, with a primary focus on traffic AI, pathfinding logic, and further stability fixes. We hope you enjoy the Spring Cleaning update when it arrives at the end of April! We are eager to hear your feedback on these changes—let us know which additions you’re most excited to test out.
See you soon!