City Corner #5 - Spring Cleaning

Now that the snow has finally melted from Tampere, Finland, it is officially time to introduce you to our next patch, Spring Cleaning! This upcoming patch includes some new content, as well as adjustments to the gameplay, UI, and visuals. Of course, as the title suggests, we have also fixed some of the reported bugs, which we will briefly touch upon at the end of this City Corner.

So, get your dusters ready, and let’s get into the Spring Cleaning!

New Additions

Sometimes there are moments when you’d just want to keep your city and buildings looking a certain way, without upgrades changing the aesthetic of your houses. Luckily, with our next patch, there is now a solution for this; we have added a Historical Building option, which prevents selected buildings from leveling up or being abandoned! This means that if you want to stop the progression of your building at level two and keep that specific look, you can choose to do so!

The Historical -option can be found below the visual customisation.

Another addition coming in our third patch is the Universal Mod -button. This is an option that can be used by the modders to add a separate button to your UI that puts all of the mods using this option in one place for easier use. This means that when turned on, you should no longer have issues with icons and buttons going on top of each other, even when using the new UI!

Universal Mod -button is accessible from the right side of the UI.

Speaking of the new UI, we have also added an option to adjust the toolbar size, as well as the transparency of the UI. The adjustments made for the size of the toolbar will also scale the buttons and some other elements, while the transparency option affects the toolbar and the panel background transparencies.

You can set the User Interface transparency to any percentage between 0 and 100%. Here, the transparency is set to 100%.

Benchmark Tool

As mentioned in City Corner #4, we have now added a Benchmark tool into the game as a first step towards improving the performance. This is an in-game testing tool, which allows you to check your performance between patches and how the updates affect the performance on your computer. The tool also helps us in gathering data for the future, and lets us know which areas we need to put more focus on. The benchmark tool is accessible through the Main Menu options, or by adding a new launch parameter -benchmark.

Gameplay Adjustments

In this patch, we have made some bigger and some smaller changes to the simulation mechanics.

For example, we have adjusted the education system in a way that better aligns with the elementary and high school demand. Previously, you might have noticed that elementary schools were filled with students, while higher education remained empty. This was caused by elementary school education lasting 7 times longer per student than high school. We have now balanced these demands, which means that you should see more students attending high schools as well! In addition, there was a secondary bug where the students used to participate in leisure activities only during study time, which we have now fixed in this patch.

The office buildings and their demand have received a fix in this patch as well. Previously, due to a bug, the office demand mostly depended on company demand for office products, almost completely ignoring citizen