Welcome back to the weekly update on what’s happening at Colossal Order and what to expect for Cities: Skylines II. Last week we had in-depth conversations with our publisher Paradox Interactive on the priorities and goals for Cities: Skylines II for 2024. There’s really nothing new when it comes to the previous statements: Modding support, console versions, and the Expansion Pass content are to be worked on and released during the year. From the great discussions emerged an important decision however: the modding support will roll out gradually as the features enter beta and we won’t wait for all of them to be fully completed before setting them live.

What this means in practice is that we’ll start giving the mod creators early access to the modding tools as soon as the code modding and Paradox Mods are ready for testing. If everything goes as planned a Public Beta version of the code modding and Paradox Mods will be available a couple of weeks after that. We’ll continue to work on the Map and Asset editing as they require a bit more attention still. Map editing is expected to be available sooner than the Asset editing, but at this time it comes down to iteration time and the feedback we’re getting on the usability of the tool. Asset editing is unfortunately suffering from technical issues and as long as players are unable to save and share the assets there’s no point publicly releasing the tools. We do have a plan for the fixes, but it might take months in the worst case I’m afraid.

To summarize on the priorities of the modding support:
[olist]
[*] Public beta version of Code modding and Paradox Mods will be available in the live build by the end of March
[*] Public beta version of Map editing available in the live build together with code modding or soon after
[*] Public beta version of Asset editing to be announced, only after the technical issues are sorted can we roll out the tool
[*] Continue to work on the modding support and get out of the Beta stage during the Finnish fall.
[/olist]
We’ll keep resources on the modding support throughout the entire lifecycle of Cities: Skylines II as we know there are many improvements and feature requests we can work on to help the modders achieve their goals even after the initial Beta release.

The work on the console versions is ongoing and while gated by the modding support we’re making progress. We’re not committing to any timelines as there are too many unknowns at this time, but we’ll keep you updated and will communicate the moment we have something to share. For the Expansion Pass, the artists have the Beach Properties content almost ready and we’re on track for its release.

Before those bigger releases, we’ll have one more patch coming out. After this, we’ll include the bug fixes and performance improvements in the releases to reduce the amount of individual patches. Patch 1.0.19 is going through its first round in QA at the moment and will be released after it passes the checks. Full patch notes will be released on the day the patch goes live, but you can expect fixes for stuck maintenance vehicles and an additional fix for abandoned dogs, who will now be returned to their homes. While the work still continues on the land value, we have an improvement so pollution properly affects the value. And last, but definitely not least, we’re currently testing a fix for the tax bug with crazy high or negative numbers.

Keep following our social channels for news about the patch release and hope you enjoy the game in the meantime. Have a lovely week!

Sincerely,
Mariina