Hello Cities Mayors,

We are thrilled to announce that we have brand-new content for Cities: Skylines, developed by two amazing Content Creators, all implemented by our talented partners at Tantalus! This content has been in the works for some time as we know many of you still love building and expanding your cities in the original Cities: Skylines. Whether you’re a long-time fan or just discovering the game, these new additions help expand the range of your cities, with a Mountain Village Pack and Map Pack 3 with new maps that focus on mountain peaks and alpine terrain. Plus, for those who love the sounds of trees whispering in the wind, the Radio Station Alpine Tunes can accompany you on your next trip to the mountaintop.

These new additions to Cities: Skylines will release to you tomorrow, Thursday, October 24th.

We also want to reassure those of you that play Cities: Skylines II, that the development of this new content for Cities: Skylines is an entirely separate effort. The content you’ll find in this release for Cities: Skylines has been implemented by Tantalus, the studio who managed the console ports for Cities: Skylines. No resources were diverted from Cities: Skylines II for this - our friends at Colossal Order remain fully focused on developing and improving Cities: Skylines II. This approach allows us to release some updates without compromising on either game.


So, for those excited for news around Cities: Skylines II — if you missed the earlier entry about the roadmap for the first region packs, we are almost done with the implementation of the first pack and it will be out next week!
Join us on our trip around the world here on https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines-ii/modding/cities-skylines-ii-region-packs - and look forward to great experiences for many years to come with Cities: Skylines II.

Thank you for being such a vital part of this journey, whether you’re playing Cities: Skylines, Cities: Skylines II, or both! We look forward to seeing what incredible new mountain villages you bring to life with this release!

If you want to watch the trailers for the new Content Creator Packs, you can find them here:

Mountain Village:https://youtu.be/xnRAABxg0QU
Map Pack 3: https://youtu.be/WEzJ2wmUPYQ

Happy city-building!

Hi all! We have a small patch today with the fixes listed below.

• Fixed: Nullreference error when selecting an airport without owning Airports
  
• Fixed: Line of flying cargo trucks toward cargo stations/harbors/airports
  This fix only affects newly spawned vehicles, all vehicles spawned before will have the unintended behavior until they eventually despawn. It may take around 15 min before all trucks are gone.
  
• Fixed: Industries trucks do not enter/exit cargo stations correctly
  
• Fixed: Trucks getting stuck in a loop at cargo stations
  
• Fixed: Articulated Biofuel Bus trailer requires Natural Disasters not Green Cities
  
• Fixed: New commercial buildings satisfying too much commercial demand
  
• Fixed: Industry buildings unable to get rid of their goods

We have a patch for you today with a lot of bug fixes as well as a few new items to celebrate Cities: Skylines II.

• Hidden treasure and clues - happy hunting!
  
• Countdown Clock
  
• Plaza of the Future
  
• Plaza of Transference
  
• The Creator's Library
  
• 3 New Commercial Buildings
  
• New Chirps

• Added tourist capacity texts to Hotel chain panel
  
• Nature Tourists visit parks and park areas in addition to unique buildings
  
• Implemented tooltips to Hotel chain panel
  
• Fixed: Multiple untranslated object's names and descriptions are displayed in the 'Build Menu'
  
• Fixed: The "Lines Overview" button overlaps the "Open the Budget Panel" button in ES, RU
  
• Fixed: Asset names shortened for no reason in Polish
  
• Fixed: Epic Games Windows Shortcut icon missing
  
• Fixed: There are children and teenagers in prisons
  
• Fixed: High amount of PathUnits resulting in broken public transport routes
  
• Fixed: Update button is missing from the content manager
  
• Fixed: Industrial buildings add incoming transfer offers twice
  
• Fixed: NullRef exception when bulldozing buildings placed in the map editor
  
• Fixed: Roads that require two or more DLCs cannot be selected in the asset editor
  
• Fixed: Six-lane one-way roads runnel has a solid line instead of a dashed line
  
• Fixed: Passengers are stuck at public transport stops
  
• Fixed: UI remains open after loading scenario with the same theme as previously loaded map
  
• Fixed: Untranslated text in Build menu
  
• Fixed: Windows Shortcut icon missing on Epic
  
• Fixed: Problems unlocking the Steam achievement Creator
  
• Fixed: Cargo trucks get stuck at cargo terminal
  
• Fixed: Toggle zoning tool cannot upgrade roads with full zoning
  
• Fixed: Zoning toggle has left/right swapped on maps with left-hand traffic
  
• Fixed: Bus selection is unavailable when only Green Cities DLC is enabled

Industries bug fixes

• Fixed: Forestry has the option "Conifer" but conifer trees are not available in all biomes
  
• Fixed: Warehouse set to Empty does not receive any deliveries

Sunset Harbor bug fixes

• Fixed: Fish trucks do not use the truck spawn/despawn points in Cargo Harbor, Cargo Hub, and Cargo Terminal
  
• Fixed: Helicopter stop has a beam in the middle of a parking spot

Airports bug fixes

• Fixed: Cargo Aircraft Stands receive aircraft after removing the terminal
  
• Fixed: Rebalance crime for airport areas
  
• Fixed: Aircraft Stand animations are missing
  
• Fixed: Small Decorative Airport Apron is available without the 'Airports' DLC

Plazas & Promenades bug fixes

• Fixed: Error when making a very small Pedestrian Area
  
• Fixed: Transport Info View can show Bus Lines inaccurately using regular Pedestrian Streets
  
• Fixed: Bus routes display on pedestrian streets despite being unable to use them
  
• Fixed: Some Buildings do not have the notification "Not in Pedestrian Zone!" when placed on pedestrian street without a pedestrian zone
  
• Fixed: Compact Bus Station is translated incorrectly in German

Roads & Vehicles bug fixes

• Fixed: Bus Capacity 30 has misaligned headlights

Hubs & Transport bug fixes

• Fixed: Harbor-Bus-Monorail Hub cannot be placed on quays
  
• Fixed: Bus stations placed on pedestrian bus streets cannot find a path
  
• Fixed: Harbor-Bus-Monorail Hub bus stops do not work correctly
  
• Fixed: It's impossible to complete a bus line at the Harbor-Bus-Monorail Hub if there are empty stops
  
• Fixed: There is no Black Taxi Cab on the winter theme map
  
• Fixed: Issues with faces on cars on Multistory Decorative Parking Lot
  
• Fixed: Trolleybus roads do not show up when the public transport road filter is selected
  
• Fixed: Monorail tracks are not connected to Monorail-Tram Hub with Road

Content Creator Pack bug fixes

• Fixed: Modder tab is missing from the education menu when only basegame and the CCP are enabled
  
• Fixed: Brooklyn & Queens buildings have holes in the mesh
  
• Fixed: Landscaping modderpack tab has the wrong name

Hotels & Retreats bug fixes

• Limited hotel attractiveness value which can be set for custom hotels from 0 to 100
  
• Made value field red in editor if user enter value out of allowed limits (fix for hotel attractiveness value)
  
• Fixed: Variations of Tiny Playground have the same thumbnails in the dropdown selector
  
• Fixed: HotelNotUsed Tutorial points to Parks & Plazas menu
  
• Fixed: Visible string ID's in Content Manager
  
• Fixed: Buses do not use bus bays on the asymmetrical 5-lane road

The Hotels & Retreats bundle includes a mini-expansion for Cities: Skylines, alongside a selection of content and music to keep your cities thriving for a long time. Get the new Hotels & Retreats expansion and boost your hospitality features, and enjoy buildings and music inspired by cities the world over!

Spruce up your City with the finest hôtellerie with “Hotels & Retreats”! With everything from conference hotels for your business travelers, to mountain hotels for nature lovers. Start with a small hotel chain and unlock more luxurious options as you make your way to a successful hotel business- with a significant tourism boost for your city.

Cities are ever-changing, and this Pack from Content Creator “Prosper” explores the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. “Brooklyn & Queens” is a set of medium-rise high-density residential buildings and props for decorating the facade and rooftops.

Discover Japan by train thanks to “Railroads of Japan” from Content Creator Ryuichi Kaminogi. This Content Creator Pack adds authentic Japanese railroad scenery to Cities: Skylines with stations, trains, buses, and more!

Walk the path of history with “Industrial Evolution”, from Community Creator Samantha “Avanya” Woods. This Content Creator Pack includes a new set of growable buildings that span different eras of industrial building styles, from red brick walls to modern, sleek industrial complexes.

“Piano Tunes” is the perfect Radio Station for those of you who love classical, whimsical, elegant piano music. With 16 songs and approximately one hour of music, your city will rise flawlessly from your fingertips!

90’s lovers out there, this Radio Station is for you! With “90’s Pop” you'll fall in love with this incredible music once again: enjoy 16 new tracks and almost one hour of music.

Hello again everyone! As is tradition by now we have a free patch to compliment the release of Hotels & Retreats coming on the 23rd of May and that’s what this dev diary is all about. We have some new goodies for the base game, we have some updates to existing content, and we have new content for existing expansions adding more cross-DLC content. This update brings new additions to the base game, Green Cities, Parklife, Industries, Sunset Harbor, Airports, and Plazas & Promenades - and yes, it has new trolleybus options and roads!

Let’s start with a look at the new vehicles in this update. Everyone who owns the base game will be able to enjoy 6 new industry vehicles and the new cargo train engine. The industry vehicles come in a variety of shapes and sizes from the extravagant pie van delivering goods to heavy trucks hauling raw materials. Like the new cargo train engine they are automatically added to the selection of vehicles that can appear in your city adding more variation to it.

Watch your cargo get delivered by the new vans, trucks, and the train engine

With Green Cities, we introduced the biofuel bus depot and its buses, and with this update, we’re expanding the fleet with two new biofuel buses. The new biofuel bus has a slightly higher capacity than the original and can carry 40 passengers, while the articulated biofuel bus can transport up to 75 passengers making it ideal for those busy lines. Like the existing biofuel bus, they are quieter and produce less noise pollution.

Go green with one of the new biofuel bus options

While we’re on the subject of buses, let’s take a look at the new options available if you own Sunset Harbor. We have a total of 8 new buses for you to choose from with two new trolleybuses, 5 articulated trolleybuses, and a new doubledecker intercity bus to bring in more tourists! The new trolleybuses range in capacity from 26 to 90 significantly increasing the options for your lines. Additionally, we have rebalanced trolleybuses which includes making them quieter than regular buses, but more on that later in this dev diary!

The new buses are ready to service your city

Before we move on from vehicles and look at what else this update includes, there is one more vehicle we need to show you: The Park Maintenance Vehicle. This vehicle is added to the game if you own Parklife and will service your parks giving them a boost to their entertainment. Who doesn’t enjoy a clean and well-kept park? You can select this new version, the existing vehicle, or let the game randomly pick between the two by using the vehicle selector on the Park Maintenance Building.

The new park maintenance vehicle headed out to main the city’s parks

Next in line, we have a bunch of new roads starting with 3 new industrial roads added to Industries. They all generate more noise pollution than regular roads but in turn, they’re cheaper to build and cost your city less upkeep. The Small Four-Lane Industry Road brings those extra lanes to tight industrial areas teaming with traffic. But sometimes 4 lanes just aren’t enough and that’s where the Large Industry Road comes in handy with its 6 lanes. Last, but not least, we have the Industry Highway offering 3 lanes in one direction as a cheaper alternative to the base game highway.

Industry roads are ideal for areas like industry districts where noise pollution is always high

And of course, Sunset Harbor gets new roads to compliment the buses and bring you more flexibility in building your trolleybus lines. If you own just Sunset Harbor you will get access to 4 new roads, in the medium roads category you will find the Four-Lane Road with Trolleybus Wires and Trees, while the large roads category includes the Six-Lane Road with Median and Trolleybus Wires, which also comes with a grass median and trees.

Expand your trolleybus network with the 4 new roads

Adding bicycle lanes to the mix we get 3 more roads available if you own both Sunset Harbor and After Dark. You don’t have to sacrifice your dedicated bicycle lanes when adding trolleybuses to the roads, whether it’s small neighborhood roads or large main roads, there’s an option for you to use. Both the medium and large roads have medians, with the Six-Lane Road with Median Trees, Trolleybus Wires and Bicycle Lanes adding a green touch to the road.

Combine trolleybuses and bicycle lanes to provide more green transport options in your city

If you’re looking to integrate trolleybuses into your pedestrian areas, we have you covered. When you have both Sunset Harbor and Plazas & Promenades installed, you get access to these 6 new pedestrian streets with trolleybus wires. They include both sides and all three styles you have come to know, and the bus lanes allow both regular buses and trolleybuses to use them. Trolleybus roads have also been improved to be able to intersect with roads with tram wires, making it easy to include both tram and trolleybuses in your pedestrian areas without needing elaborate intersections where they cross paths.

No need to choose between trolleybuses or trams as the pedestrian streets can intersect

This update isn’t all roads and vehicles though - we already did that one - it includes a selection of new buildings and decorations for you to enjoy. As part of the base game, we have 3 new trees: Silver Birch, Norway Spruce, and Large Scrub. If you spend time in the asset editor you may also enjoy the two new hedge props available to decorate any buildings.

Bring nature into your city with the new trees and hedge props

Green Cities gets a new power plant, the Advanced Coal Power Plant, which is available from the start offering a less polluting alternative to the existing Coal Power Plant. While this plant doesn’t provide clean energy and comes at a higher cost, it produces more energy than the regular Coal Power Plant making it a great option to reduce pollution while still being able to supply a starting city.

The Advanced Coal Power Plant offers a less polluting alternative to coal power

For Parklife, we have 3 new buildings, one for amusement parks, one for zoos, and one for nature reserves. Give your citizens a new thrill with the Log Ride, educate your citizens about tarsiers with your city zoo’s new Tarsier House, or preserve the local cultural history with the Nature Reserve Museum. Each park building adds to the entertainment of the park area they’re used in or they can be used as standalone parks placed alongside a road.

The Tarsier House (left), Log Ride (middle), and Nature Reserve Museum (right) are sure to be a hit with tourists

If you have Industries you will notice a new warehouse in your menu, the Warehouse with Railway Connection. It functions like a regular warehouse but is able to ship and receive goods directly via your city’s rail network, making it ideal for areas needing to import or export industrial or commercial goods. Its capacity sits between the Medium Warehouse and the Large Warehouse with 600 tons of storage space.

Storage and a rail connection combined to save space and truck traffic

If you have both Industries and Sunset Harbor you will find a new unique factory, the Seafood Factory, combining fish and plastics to provide your citizens with delicious fermented fish in easy-to-open plastic containers. Additionally, your warehouses are now able to store fish making the production of fish-related products more convenient.

Combine fish and plastic to produce seafood goods for your city

Airports gets two new decorative concrete aprons, a large and a small one, which can be placed almost anywhere! They snap to networks and block zoning tiles, but they can overlap with both networks and most buildings, making them perfect for filling in spaces between your aircraft stands, hangars, parked planes - or anywhere in your city you want a paved area. We have made these as flexible as possible and we look forward to seeing the uses you come up with!

Add paved areas to your airports or anywhere in the city

Lastly, we have two new variations for the Small Fountain Plaza and the Flower Plaza from Plazas & Promenades. Where they previously only had one type of stone available, they now come in sandstone, bluestone, and cobblestone matching your pedestrian streets and the Large Fountain Plaza for even more variation when decorating your city. When placed they select a random variation, but you can change it to your favorite using the submesh variation selector on the building info panel.

Which type of stone is your favorite?

We’re nearing the end of this dev diary, but before we get there we have a few improvements to go through. Last update we rebalanced the cost of transport vehicles to benefit from the variations in capacity, and for this update, we wanted to address your feedback on trolleybuses and improve their viability as a transportation option. This resulted in the following changes:

• Reduced the noise pollution of trolleybuses
  
• Reduced the cost per vehicle for trolleybuses
  
• Reduced the cost and upkeep of roads with trolleybus wires slightly

We hope these changes and the additional trolleybus vehicles and roads will make them more useful in your cities!

But trolleybuses aren’t the only transport vehicles getting an update. Following Hubs & Transports, we’ve taken a look at the capacity of ferries and agree they should be able to transport more passengers, so all ferries have their capacity increased by 30, meaning they now range from 40 to 80 passengers.

Last on our list of balance changes are parks. While Hotels & Retreats add new tourism buildings to benefit your hotels, we wanted to make sure the original base game parks were still viable choices. Some of them were quite large or costly without providing similarly increased benefits. Those parks have had their cost, upkeep, entertainment, entertainment radius, and amount of visitors adjusted bringing the underperforming parks up to a level with the rest.

For road-building, we have a new quality-of-life tool allowing you to control the zoning grid on roads with zoning. You can cycle through the different options of zoning on both sides, zoning only on the left, zoning only on the right, or no zoning at all, using the new Toggle Zoning button next to the existing road tools. You can select your preferred zoning when first building a road or change the zoning later on using the upgrade tool.

Toggle zoning on both sides, one side, or off

And with that, we have reached the end of the dev diary! This update and Hotels & Retreats will be available on the 23rd of May, and you can find the patch notes listing all the content, improvements, and bug fixes below. As we were not able to include all the bug fixes we planned in this update, we will have another small update fixing some bugs after this, the date of which is still to be determined.

Until then we hope you enjoy this update and look forward to seeing how you use the new additions in your cities!

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Hotels & Retreats paid content

• Hotel Management Feature
  
  • Manage Overnight Fees
    
  • Customize Hotel Chain Name
    
  • Choose From 7 Different Hotel Logos
    
  • Organize Hotel Events
    
  • Hotel locations info view
• New Buildings
  
  • 15 New Hotel Buildings
    
  • 9 New Tourism Buildings
• 5 New Maps
  
  • Coastal Flatland
    
  • Emerald Cliffs
    
  • Maze Valley
    
  • Shifting Sands
    
  • Weaving Waters
• 3 New Achievements
  
• 2 New Chirper Hats
  
• New Chirps

Paid content - Content Creator Pack: Brooklyn & Queens

• New Building Style
  
• 62 New High-Density Residential Buildings
  
• 20 New Props

Paid content - Content Creator Pack: Railroads of Japan

• New Public Transport Buildings
  
  • 4 New Train Stations
    
  • 6 New Metro Stations
    
  • New Bus Depot
• New Public Transport Vehicles
  
  • 2 New Trains
    
  • New Metro
    
  • New Bus
• New Police Building
  
• 2 New Unique Buildings
  
• 5 New Parks
  
• 7 New Props

Paid content - Content Creator Pack: Industrial Evolution

• New Building Style
  
• 70 New Industry Buildings

Paid content - 90s Pop Radio radio station

• 16 New Songs
  
• DJ Content

Paid content - Piano Tunes radio station

• 16 New Songs
  
• DJ Content

Cities: Skylines base game

• New Vehicles
  
  • 6 New Industrial Vehicles
    
  • New Cargo Train Engine
• 3 New Trees
  
• 2 New Hedge Props

Green Cities (added to paid content)

• New Advanced Coal Power Plant
  
  • 2 New Biofuel Buses
    
  • Biofuel Bus - Capacity 40
    
  • Articulated Biofuel Bus - Capacity 75

Parklife (added to paid content)

• 3 New Parklife Buildings
  
• New Park Maintenance Vehicle

Industries (added to paid content)

• 3 New Industrial Roads
  
  • Small Four-Lane Industry Road
    
  • Large Industry Road
    
  • Industry Highway
• Warehouse with railway connection

Industries (added to paid content and unlocks when you also own Sunset Harbor)

• Seafood Factory

Sunset Harbor (added to paid content)

• 8 New Buses
  
  • Articulated Trolleybus - Capacity 50
    
  • Articulated Trolleybus - Capacity 55
    
  • Articulated Trolleybus - Capacity 65
    
  • Articulated Trolleybus - Capacity 75
    
  • Articulated Trolleybus - Capacity 90
    
  • Trolleybus - Capacity 26
    
  • Trolleybus - Capacity 28
    
  • Doubledecker Intercity Bus - Capacity 150
• 4 New Roads
  
  • Four-Lane Road with Trolleybus Wires and Trees
    
  • Six-Lane Road with Median and Trolleybus Wires
    
  • Six-Lane Road with Grass Median and Trolleybus Wires
    
  • Six-Lane Road with Median Trees and Trolleybus Wires

Sunset Harbor (added to paid content and unlocks when you also own After Dark)

• 3 New Roads
  
  • Two-Lane Road with Trolleybus Wires and Bicycle Lanes
    
  • Four-Lane Road with Trolleybus Wires and Bicycle Lanes
    
  • Six-Lane Road with Median Trees, Trolleybus Wires and Bicycle Lanes

Airports (added to paid content)

• Large Decorative Airport Apron
  
• Small Decorative Airport Apron

Plazas & Promenades (added to paid content and unlocks when you also own Sunset Harbor)

• 3 New Small Pedestrian Streets with Trolleybus Wires
  
• 3 New Large Pedestrian Streets with Trolleybus Wires

Improvements & bug fixes

• Improved Africa in Miniature Content Creator Pack
  
• Monument buildings & some growables have been changed to Unique buildings
  
• The growable assets are added to their own style, Africa in Miniature
  
• Added an option to disable zone grid when building roads
  
• Added variations to Small Fountain Plaza and Flower Plaza
  
• Add the ability to store fish in Industries DLC warehouse
  
• Roads with tram tracks and trolleybus wires can now intersect
  
• Trolleybuses are rebalanced to make them a more viable choice of transportation:
  
• Reduced noise pollution
  
• Reduced cost per vehicle
  
• Cost and upkeep of roads with trolleybus wires reduced slightly
  
• Base game parks are rebalanced
  
• All ferries have increased capacities by 30
  
• New UI filters added to all Content Creator Pack tabs
  
• Fixed: Localization issues in multiple languages
  
• Plazas & Promenades assets no longer have an empty space after their names
  
• Text is no longer cut off in various panels in DE, RU, KO
  
• Text is no longer overlapping in various tabs in DE, PT, ES, PL, FR, RU
  
• Asset names no longer overflow in different panels
  
• Fixed: Citizens only travel to next bus stop when using Pedestrian streets with bus-only lanes
  
• Fixed: Large Six-Lane Road with Median and Tram Tracks has the wrong speed limit prop
  
• Fixed: Two models of buses cause flickering of all vehicles visible on a left-handed traffic map
  
• Fixed: Info about lacking DLC concerns incorrect title if game is started from a Pause Menu
  
• Fixed: Ferry03 has misaligned lights
  
• Fixed: Content Creator Pack: Shopping Malls growable variations have no thumbnail
  
• Fixed: Elevation step missing in the asset editor
  
• Fixed: Service vehicles cannot visit a warehouse set to empty
  
• Fixed: Bug in WarehouseAI.ProduceGoods
  
• Fixed: TransferManager uses the IN amount rather than the delta amount
  
• Fixed: Problems unlocking the Steam achievement Creator
  
• Fixed: Monorail trains despawn if Harbor-Bus-Monorail Hub is one of the stops on the line

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s dev diary where we explore the features coming to Cities: Skylines in the mini-expansion Hotels & Retreats! It brings a new customizable hotel chain to the game letting your city capitalize on tourism and organize events at your premium hotels. Hotels & Retreats will be available on PC and console on the 23rd of May. We have lots of new content to cover, so let’s get started!

Hotels unlock when you reach Milestone 3: Tiny Town and can be found in the new Hotels tab under Parks & Plazas. You start out with 3 different 1-star hotels, but as your hotel chain becomes more successful you unlock new hotels with higher ratings all the way up to 5-star luxury hotels, which can host events.

Invite tourists to stay at the Budget Hotel (left), the Mountain Lodge (middle), or the Luxury Hotel (right)

Before placing your first hotel we need to talk about tourists and location. With Hotels & Retreats, tourists fall into one of four categories: Sightseeing Tourists visit the city to see the sights seeking out unique buildings and parks during their stay. Shopping Tourists are here for your city’s shopping opportunities and look for commercial zones to visit. Business Tourists do not visit for pleasure, they’re in your city for work and have business to attend to at offices. And last, but not least we have Nature Tourists who prefer to stay away from the busy city and enjoy the natural scenery your city has to offer.

How much a hotel appeals to each group of tourists depends both on the hotel itself and where in the city it’s placed. The tooltip of a hotel shows how much (if at all) a hotel can appeal to these groups, while the surroundings you place it in will fill up each bar accordingly. The new Hotel Locations Infoviews will help you find the perfect location for your hotel showing a heat map for each of the four categories. When you select a hotel the Infoview is automatically opened showing the hotel’s highest potential category, but for the optimal location, you can cycle through each category and choose a spot with the best overlap. You can also give the overall popularity rating a boost by placing public transport nearby, making sure there is little to no crime in the area, and avoiding areas with heavy pollution.

Find the perfect spot for your new hotels

Once placed you can select the hotel to see how much it appeals to each group of tourists, its overall popularity rating, and how profitable it is. You can also adjust the price per night depending on how well your hotel is doing. Lowering the price will make it more appealing to tourists even if the popularity rating is less than ideal, while you can charge a higher price for very attractive locations. Hotel expenses stay the same regardless of how many guests are staying the night, so the key to a profitable hotel is filling up those rooms!

Improve the surrounding area to increase the hotel’s popularity rating

You’ve found a good location and built your first hotel. Time to turn this into a chain and grow the city’s tourism! The hotel chain is automatically created with a default name and logo, which can be customized in the Hotel Management interface. You can find this through the Manage Hotels button found on all hotel interfaces or through the Hotel Locations Infoview. You can name your hotel chain anything, select one of 7 logos to use, and customize the color of both the logo and your hotels.

The Hotel Management interface also provides an overview of all your hotels, their popularity, amount of guests staying there at the moment, and how profitable they are. You can sort them by popularity to increase the price of your most popular ones or sort them by profit to improve any which are struggling. At the bottom, you will find information about your hotel chain’s overall star rating and the requirements to reach the next level.

Manage and customize your hotel chain through the Hotel Management interface

When your hotel chain reaches 5 stars you unlock 3 different 5-star hotels: the Heritage Hotel, the Deluxe Hotel, and the Design Hotel, which can all host events. Each hotel specializes in different event types with a total of 9 events to choose from across them all. Events are selected and started on the hotel’s interface and have 3 phases. The longest phase is the preparation phase where news of the hotel event is spreading and tourists plan their trip to the event. The active phase lasts a few days to a week as the event is ongoing, and it’s followed by the disorganization phase as things return to business as usual for the hotel.

When selecting an event you will see the cost to host the event, how long the active phase is, and how much it increases tourism. The tourism boost is applied when you start the event so your city benefits from it during the preparation phase as well as the active phase.

Boost your city’s tourism with events at your 5-star hotels

While hotels give tourists a place to stay in your city allowing them to extend their visits, the city itself needs to appeal to tourists for them to visit. The Tourism Infoview shows the City Attractiveness, which is calculated from citizen happiness, land value, and unique buildings in the city. The higher City Attractiveness, the more tourists will visit the city, so if your hotel chain is struggling you can increase the City Attractiveness to encourage more tourists to stay at your hotels.

One way to do this is by raising the land value through more parks and plazas, and Hotels & Retreats includes 8 new parks found in the Tourism & Leisure tab under Parks & Plazas. The Tiny Park or Tiny Playground live up to their names and fit in most places, while the larger Pond Park and Sidewalk Restaurant require more space and provide more entertainment. The new parks can be found easily using the menu filter and can be used to spruce up any part of your city.

Tourists and citizens alike will enjoy the new tourism buildings

As with any expansion we of course have new maps for you to create your dream city. Hotels & Retreats come with 5 new maps featuring a variety of landscapes. Coastal Flatlands lives up to its name as a mostly flat landscape dotted with hills, rivers, and lakes which provide ample opportunities to attract nature tourists. The beautiful coastline makes this map ideal for a waterfront city frequented by cruise ships.

Coastal Flatlands offers plenty of space for your new city

Emerald Cliffs is a European map with a bay stretching far inland and cliffs towering above the landscape and providing incredible scenery for any city. It offers great connections to the sea and lots of fertile land, while the mountainous areas are rich in ore. Will you build a city focused on tourism or take advantage of the natural resources the land has to offer? Either way, Emerald Cliffs has much to offer any city.

What kind of city will you build at Emerald Cliffs?

Next, we have our second European map, Maze Valley, a canyon carved into the landscape through eons. The rivers flowing through the canyon are surrounded by large plains ideal for a new city nestled between the cliffs. But your city doesn’t have to be a gem hidden from the world with a shipping lane running through the rivers and a train line connecting you to other cities, there are many ways to bring goods and tourists to your city.

Build a thriving metropolis in the secluded Maze Valley

Shifting Sands takes us to the tropics at the edge of the desert where the river flows into a large bay. The lush green areas surrounding the water create a stunning contrast to the barren rocky desert and the mountains on the horizon. If you’re looking to build an industry-focused city then Shifting Sands provides plenty of ore and oil to benefit your city while the bay offers great shipping connections. The flat landscape also provides the perfect conditions for a bustling metropolis.

Shifting Sands is the perfect location for your next desert city

We finish our map tour with another European map named Weaving Waters, a map split by a serpentine river and filled with historical sites. The vast forests covering the landscape are ideal for nature retreats or forestry depending on your city. Connect your city to the outside world through the highways or railroad, or take advantage of the flat areas to build an airport. Whether you plan to embrace the landscape or make room for your city, this map has a lot to offer.

Create your dream city along the shores of the river at Weaving Waters

This brings us to the end of this dev diary covering the new content in Hotels & Retreats. Like always we have a free patch coming alongside the mini-expansion, which we will cover in the dev diary Friday at 4:00 PM CEST. What are you most excited about in Hotels & Retreats? Do you have any areas in your city ideal for hotels? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Hotels & Retreats is a mini-expansion that allows players to build luxury accommodations and tourist attractions to boost their city’s economy. The expansion starts players with a small hotel chain before unlocking more specialized accommodations.

Turn your city into a choice destination for tourists, business travelers, and more by adding resorts, hostels, conference hotels, and much more. Get new maps, new tourism buildings, and grow your hotel industry from the ground up!

• Railroads of Japan by Kaminogi
  
• Brooklyn & Queens by Prosper
  
• Industrial Revolution by Avanya

Our first pit stop on the Cities: Skylines World Tour - Last Stops!

3 new Content Creator Packs with 3 new Radio Stations along with the Hubs & Transport free update focused on expanding the existing transport options with new public transport hubs, new public transport vehicles, new roads, and much more!

Ready for more content? Today we have a look at the 2nd half of the free update Hubs & Transports, which will be available tomorrow. Yesterday we covered the new transport options being added to the base game as well as After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, and Mass Transit, but today is all about the base game and Natural Disasters. So let’s start unpacking the gift bag!

For anyone with Natural Disasters, we have a set of higher capacity helicopter depots. Whether you play with random disasters enabled or not helicopter services offer a quick way to reach remote or difficult-to-get-to areas of the city. With Hubs & Transports, you will have access to higher capacity depots for fire, police, and medical services, as well as a new Disaster Response Air Base, all with significantly more helicopters ready to respond to your city’s needs bypassing any terrain obstacles or traffic jams.

The new helicopter depots can be found in their respective service menu.

Next up we have a series of new decorations for your city, which you may have spotted in the screenshots yesterday. Parking lots have been a popular request and we have three decorative parking lots as our gift to you! Both the Small and Large Decorative Parking Lots can be placed side-by-side to create a large area filled with parking spots, or you can save space with the Multistory Decorative Parking Lot which comes in 2 variations. These are all available to everyone who owns the base game and will automatically be added to your game in the patch tomorrow.

Beautify your cities with the new decorative parking lots.

The Landscaping menu has 7 new items which do not require any expansions - as long as you have the base game, you will get these too. The new Suburban Fence offers a decorative option for your neighborhoods or parks, while the new City Quay brings new life to your waterfronts - the trees can of course be replaced with your favorites like on roads. And speaking of trees, MrMaison has done it again and added 5 additional trees to the official collection with several species native to Africa in celebration of the Cities: Skylines World Tour.

Give your cities a unique look with the new decorative options.

And, as the icing on the cake, we have a special plaza to commemorate Cities: Skylines' 8-year anniversary: The Birthday Plaza. This decorative plaza offers a place for your citizens to gather and celebrate Cities: Skylines, providing entertainment to the surrounding area. And it of course has a giant cake so there’s enough for all your citizens to grab a slice.

What better way to celebrate than with a giant cake?

A free patch is a great opportunity for us to add quality-of-life options and improve on existing content, and Hubs & Transport is no different. The first of these improvements is new filters in 3 menus: Roads, Public Transport Hubs, and Content Creator Packs under Unique Buildings. In the Roads menu, you can filter all your roads by one-way or two-way, by decorations, or only display roads including public transport lanes - a great way to find the new roads added by Hubs & Transport! Similarly, Public Transport Hubs have a filter for each transport type, which can be enabled or disabled. Looking for a hub that combines metro and trams? Just select the metro and tram filters and you will see hubs that feature both these options! And last but not least the Content Creator Pack tab under Unique Buildings has filters for each pack, so you can jump directly to the buildings you want to browse.

Filters help narrow down the options when browsing.

However, filters are not the only new option to help you find a specific item, we have also added a search function to all menus. Simply click the magnifying glass to open it and type anything. The search is applied to the entire menu, for example searching ‘bicycle’ in the Roads menu will display all roads with ‘bicycle’ in their name, regardless of how small or large they are. No need to dig through each tab to find the item you’re looking for! Another place you can search is when loading a save, so if you have a LOT of savegames finding the right one is about to get a whole lot easier!

Search for asset names in a category to find what you are looking for.

Roads & Vehicles expanded the options for public transport vehicles quite a bit and with the new vehicles in Hubs & Transport, we take that one step further. As a result, we decided to rebalance the vehicle upkeep costs to account for the new passenger capacity options. Instead of a flat upkeep per vehicle, the cost of a transport vehicle now has a base cost and a multiplier for passenger capacity. This means vehicles carrying only a few passengers are cheaper than ones with higher capacity, and selecting the high-capacity options for busy lines is cheaper than having many more low-capacity vehicles. All in all, this means optimizing transport vehicles for weekly passengers doesn’t just make your lines more efficient, it also makes them cheaper to run.

We also improved the forest fire spread mechanic in Natural Disasters. If you’ve ever had a forest fire spread out of control in your city, these changes will give you a better chance to respond to the fires and limit the spread. The changes include the following improvements:

• Forest fires have a noticeably lower chance of spreading
  
• Forest fires burn with slightly less intensity
  
• Fire helicopters can carry twice as much water
  
• Fire helicopters can put out fires faster

Forest fires can still be devastating to the city if your city lacks fire helicopters.

And now, to the last item in our goodie bag! In 1.16.0 we added the option to select specific submesh variations for most ploppable buildings. With Hubs & Transport, we’re expanding this selection to growable buildings. This option is automatically available on growables that use the random submesh feature, whether they’re official buildings or from the workshop, and lets you choose between the different options. If you have a particular mural from Plazas & Promenades you love, you can now select it for your Wall-to-Wall specialization buildings.

Variations are selectable for growables using the submesh variations system.

That leaves us with just one thing to cover: The patch notes, which can be found here. Thanks to your diligent bug reports we have a long list of over 65 bug fixes along with improvements and, of course, a list of all the new content. We hope you will enjoy these new additions and improvements.