Cities: Skylines II’s Next Patch Will Tidy Garbage Routes and Terrain Lighting
The update will also rebalance company rentals, residential demand, citizen finances, tree detail, and building windows.
Cities: Skylines II is preparing a patch focused on the systems that keep a city running, from garbage collection and company rentals to residential demand and citizen finances. The developers outlined the changes in the City Corner #11 announcement, which also detailed several visual improvements.
The patch is still upcoming, and the announcement did not include a release date. Once it goes live, mayors can expect changes to both everyday city management and the way terrain, trees, and building windows appear on screen.
Garbage trucks will save room for urgent collections
Garbage trucks will receive a new logic pass. Instead of filling their cargo space with small amounts of waste from buildings along the way, trucks will now reserve enough capacity for the garbage waiting at their intended destination.
Buildings with only minor waste accumulation can be skipped during a route, allowing trucks to prioritize locations that need service more urgently. The adjustment applies across all building types and should reduce garbage-pileup notifications in cities with adequate waste-processing capacity. Clean homes will also provide a larger happiness bonus, giving reliable garbage collection a more direct effect on residents.
Company rentals and residential demand get recalculated
Companies will no longer compete for zoned locations on equal footing when the city needs certain resources more than others. Businesses producing resources in higher demand will receive priority, while companies focused on less-needed resources will wait until those locations have been claimed.
That should make newly zoned areas more likely to fill with businesses that serve the city’s current needs. It will also create more variety among nearby company types and make resource-demand bars respond more accurately. The developers described the change as groundwork for future improvements to the resource economy.
Residential demand is also being corrected for larger cities. The previous calculation could cause demand to fall sharply as a city grew, even when the overall housing situation did not justify such a drop. The new calculation accounts for city size more accurately and includes the number of vacant residential properties, which should produce a steadier demand reading.
Citizen decision-making is moving from accumulated wealth to income. Happiness, shopping, and leisure choices previously relied on a resident’s total wealth, a number that can rise and fall as money is earned and spent. Using income instead should give the happiness indicator a clearer connection to a household’s actual financial situation.
Waterway Pass and Lakeland will receive terrain updates
Two maps, Waterway Pass and Lakeland, have finished receiving the painted terrain texture work discussed by the development team. The visual updates will be available as soon as the patch goes live.
Tree level-of-detail models are being improved as well. At greater distances, older versions could appear to lose branches or leave foliage looking detached from the trunk. The new versions are intended to keep branches and leaves connected more naturally, giving distant tree groups a fuller appearance.
Terrain lighting will follow hills and slopes
Surface rendering is getting a technical adjustment involving terrain normals. Previously, surfaces used upward-facing normals, so lighting behaved as if the ground beneath them were flat. Hills, dips, and slopes were not reflected clearly in the way light reached those surfaces.
After the patch, surfaces will inherit the normals of the terrain underneath them. Light and shadows can then follow the actual shape of the land, making changes in elevation easier to see and giving uneven ground more visual depth.
New window types are ready for future assets
Building windows are receiving support for frosted and opaque variations, although the updated windows are not currently used on any existing assets. The options will be available for future assets, re-imported assets, and creations made by modders. The work fits with the broader creator-tool development that recently included Asset Editor improvements.
Assets with windows designed to remain permanently lit or unlit will also represent that setting correctly throughout the day. Rendering large numbers of building windows at once could see small performance gains from the same work.
The developers said work on Cities: Skylines II will continue, with more updates, new content, and DLC to be discussed over the coming months. Tell us what you think in the comments, and follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, Telegram.
Cities: Skylines II
Developed by Colossal Order
Create and manage your own city without restrictions. Offering a deep simulation and a living economy, Cities: Skylines II will challenge your decision-making skills and allow you to build the cities of your dreams. Get ready for a new epic scale in the most realistic city builder - ever.
- Genre Simulator, Strategy
- Platforms Xbox Series X|S, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 5
- Perspective Bird view / Isometric
- Modes Single player
- Release October 24, 2023
- Publisher Paradox Interactive
-
Age Rating
