The first Cities: Skylines II update since the developer swap is here, kicking off IceFlake’s journey with the city builder.
Since its shaky launch back in 2023, Cities: Skylines II developer Colossal Order has been attempting to fix up the experience and add more content. However, late last year, the studio suddenly parted ways with publisher Paradox Interactive and the city-building franchise, handing off the reins to Iceflake Studios. Today, the new developer released its first update to Cities: Skylines II. While it’s a small drop, there are some important simulation changes and a UI revamp.
Starting with the gameplay changes, the Iceflake has pulled back on the number of bicycle trips that citizens take by 80%, which should fix the mass migration of road-blocking cycles that players were seeing before. The time of day that citizens decide to die in the game has also been changed. Previously, everyone had decided to go out almost at the same time each day, making for an unnatural hearse demand.
“In addition, the citizens in easy mode were breaking records in lifespan and almost refusing to die of old age,” added the studio. “As much as we love our elderly inhabitants, we have now fixed this in a way that older citizens will eventually pass away and give way for the next generation to move into your city.”
The UI has received a polishing pass with the update too. This includes putting a bigger focus on the Demand Bars of the city, fresh new icons for info view and road services, a tree age preservation toggle for better asset placement, and more. Keep in mind that the legacy UI can still be accessed with a toggle in the options menu.
A whole lot of options for players that like to hand-place visual elements and beautify their cities are here as well. Asset color schemes can now be changed with hex codes manually, while trees and other line-placed objects can now be placed closer together. Fixes for shadows flickering, new night sky textures, automatically enabled autosaves, better fog placement based on weather conditions, and many more changes have landed with this update.
The Cities: Skylines II update 1.54f1, dubbed First Frost, from Iceflake Studios is now rolling out to all PC players. Thanks to early testing with the community, the studio says it should have minimal impact with mods and older save games. It added that more substantial updates with changes to the simulation are slated to arrive in the future.
