Hello Mayors!

Our first patch, First Frost, has landed with the full release notes! This patch has minimal impacts on mods, and loading of old savegames is supported. Simulation changes will be applied over time in old savegames.

More details about the visual changes in this patch can be found in our City Corner #1, and details about some of the other changes can be found in our City Corner #2.

Gameplay:

• Reduced bicycle trips by 80%.

• Fixed time of day not taken into account when determining death in updates, causing most citizens to die between 0 and 6 o'clock.

• Calculate deaths 16 times per citizen per day instead of 4 to further reduce the number of citizens dying at the same time.

• Changed it so that in Easy Mode, citizens can actually pass away. Previously, about 80% of them never died of old age.

UI:

• New design for the main HUD with more focus on demand bars.

• Some updates to UI icon visuals:

  • New icons for roundabouts.

  • New icons for cul-de-sacs.

  • Replaced some of the road services icons.

    • New 2D icon for Road Maintenance Depot.

    • Trees/Grass icons with more natural colours.

  • Replaced some of the info view icons.

    • New icons for pollution types.

    • New icons for building level, land value, household wealth & company profitability.

  • New icon for toolbar city demand.

  • New icons for citizen happiness emojis.

• Updated onboarding tutorial.

• Tree age preservation toggle that gives the player the ability to place and preserve specific tree asset visuals.

• Terraforming:

  • More precise and less aggressive elevation tool default presets.

  • Mode-specific brush presets and adjustment values.

• Fixed a typo in the Urban Cycling Initiative policy.

Visual:

• Shadow rendering/flicker improvement for high-quality settings.

• Added a coloring option that gives manual control via hex codes to manage asset color schemes.

• Tree collider adjustments that enable visually tighter and more flexible tree placement.

• Line tool spacing has been adjusted, allowing trees and other line-placed objects to be placed closer together.

• Added snow support for decal-based lot surfaces.

• Temporarily removed snow rendering from vehicles.

• Fix terrain material discontinuity between the playable area and the surrounding terrain, allowing for a smoother blend across surfaces.

• Disable global illumination post-processing effect by default.

• Added the ability to limit the sun's maximum height per map.

• Fog is now controlled by weather/cloudiness (stormy/extra cloudy weather has dense fog, etc.).

• Changes to different season post-processing values (tropical/temperate/boreal).

• Balanced the amount of clouds, so that clear skies are not shown too often.

• Brightened nighttime lighting to improve usability.

• Updated night sky texture.

• Water settings improved in tropical maps.

Misc:

• When starting the game for the first time, the default graphics quality settings have been optimized.

• Enabled autosaves by default.

• New camera limits added.

• Added an option to enable the legacy camera.

• Added an option to enable the legacy UI.

Known Issues:

• Trees propped on newly placed or zoned buildings appear as saplings and do not age.