• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Hello there, city-builders! As usual with a great new expansion comes also some sweet, sweet free content. We've got libraries, bus line customization, citizen job titles and a new policy to help with cities that are highly educated but still love to have that good old industry around!

Library
Libraries are fun! They are useful for many purposes. Some go there to read the newspapers while others search source books and instructions for their school work and hobbies. Of course, there is also the music department for those who just want to relax with some new and old tracks. Many libraries also carry a wide selection of comics from near and far and sometimes you'll find titles there you can't find in a store due to unavailability! The Public Library is a new city service. It provides both entertainment for its neighborhood and a small chance for children, teens, young adults and adults to be educated further. When a young adult or adult enters the Public Library, there is a chance that they'll gain an education level when they leave. The chance is quite small so the Public Library is not able to cover the entire education needs of a city, or even a fledgling town for that matter. And the chance gets smaller the higher in education level is in question. But still, building Public Libraries is useful since they will compensate with entertainment what they lack in pure education power!

dev_diary_06_public_library.png

A Public Library.

Academic Library
Academic Library is a new unique building. It is a grand building and its architectural style has been influenced by the French neoclassicism with Gothic and Renaissance elements for good measure. Its collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundaries and it includes research materials from all parts of the world and in hundreds of languages. The Academic Library serves all walks of life, from members of the local government to the members of the public.

dev_diary_06_academic_library.png

The Academic Library.

Bus line customization
As a new feature we have added the possibility for you to customize the vehicles used by the bus lines. Now you have a chance to have full control over what kinds of vehicles travel the bus routes in your city! And it's quite easy to use. Just open up the Public Transport - Lines Overview panel, check the line you want to customize and then click the button under the title "Model". Here you can scroll through the available models and select the one you want to operate on that specific bus line. Also, you can choose to have random bus models to operate on the line instead of a specific one (also, "Random" is the default setting).

dev_diary_06_bus_line_customization.png

Bus line customization, now with the ability to select which type of bus model is used on the line. Each line can have a different bus model.

School Bus
As part of the free content we present the classic yellow American-style school bus. The School Bus becomes part of the bus model collection and with the new bus line customization option, it can be used on any bus line in place of the game's original bus model.

dev_diary_06_school_bus_v2.png

The iconic American-style school bus.

Citizen employment details
Citizens now have job titles! That's great! You can see their job titles by clicking the citizen and opening up the citizen panel. Next to the workplace reads their current job title. We have provided a selection of job titles that suit most of the different businesses in the game, from burger joints to office buildings.

dev_diary_06_job_titles.png

Citizens now have a job title next to their workplace.

However, there's more! The job titles are moddable in the Asset Editor. Job titles are tied to the workplace buildings. For example, when you go to the Asset Editor and open a City Service or other building type placed by the player (this does not work for zoned building), you are able to write job titles in the "Workers" section found in the Properties panel. Here you can specify job titles not only by education level but also by gender (this is especially helpful for languages where the male and female forms of the words are different, such as actor and actress, for example). After you've added the new job titles for the building, you can save it the same way you'd save any custom asset and use it in the game. And the citizens who go to work in said building, would adopt the job titles written in the properties.

incinerationplantjobs.png

You can now modify buildings in the Asset Editor by adding new job titles for the people working there.

Industry 4.0
The future of industry is automation. The new revolutionary technologies alter the nature of the workforce in production facilities, shifting the need from common factory workers towards highly educated specialists. Factories are overhauled with the latest technology, robots and other machinery that performs the manual labor previously done by humans. And now, the need for highly educated maintenance crews, machine specialists and robotics technicians rises drastically. Industry 4.0 is a new, free policy. It has been designed to help with cities that have a highly educated population but still want to take advantage of normal, zoned industry. After all, industry is one of the driving forces what comes to the city earning its taxes.

Education system update
In addition to the new Industry 4.0 policy, part of the free update is the education system update. Previously education was more, let's say "flexible", where citizens were able to gain education levels they required regardless of what school was in question as long as they met the school's age requirements. If the citizen was an uneducated adult, they could gain an (elementary school) education level by going to the university. They would also be counted as graduated from the university even though their education level was just "Educated" and not "Highly educated". The same system also applied to teens and young adults where they would gain the first education level in high school. This resulted in discrepancy of education information displayed to the player. For example, the game would state incorrectly the amount of actual university students studying in universities as well as how many actual university students were graduated because it counted also the young adult/adult citizens studying in the university for the first or second education level as being university students and graduates.

The education system "flexibility" also created what is known as the "Over-Education Problem" where uneducated adult citizens were able to freely gain "Educated" or "Well educated" levels of education from high school and university which eventually led to the declining of uneducated workforce. This in turn resulted in workplaces with large numbers of low-skilled jobs to shut down and become abandoned because the workforce was almost entirely at the very least on the level of "Educated" or more.

Now, with the new changes the citizens attend the correct school type at the correct age, to gain education levels. This means that teens who have not attended elementary school are not eligible for high school and young adults/adults who have not attended high school are not eligible for university. Teens can no longer gain elementary education in high school and young adults/adults can no longer gain elementary and/or high school education in university. This ensures a more balanced distribution of educational levels in the adult population and also gives greater control to the player how they want to educate their citizens. It also means that there are more citizens to fill the different education level positions in the various businesses in the city.

Fire behavior update
In the free update we also provide the players the possibility to turn off the spreading of fire. This applies to all kinds of fires from forest fire to building fire. When this option is turned on, it prevents large scale forest fires by not allowing fire to spread from one tree to another. It also prevents fire from spreading from trees to buildings and from buildings to buildings and so on. However, if the player turns on random disasters, this option is disabled. Also, setting random disaster probability to more than zero or playing a scenario turns the option off.

The fire behavior update also brings change to how fire behaves with Parklife and Campus buildings placed on paths. Normally these buildings can catch on fire only if they are placed on roadside. However, buildings placed alongside paths can also catch fire if the player has Natural Disasters installed and has unlocked helicopters and has turned random disasters on or is playing a scenario.

So, here we are, at the end of this one road. We've talked about campus areas, the academic year, faculties and varsity sports. We've taken a look at the new maps coming with the expansion and checked through the policies, too, without missing all the cool free content. So, what do you guys think? Are you excited for Cities: Skylines - Campus? It's going to be out soon so get those city-builder hats ready and be prepared to start building!

EDIT: Job titles modding works only with buildings that are placed by the player, not with zoned buildings as it was originally said in the dev diary.
 
Last edited:
As it stands now, the housing level dictates the education level of an incoming adult. Level 1 buildings attract the uneducated; level 3 mostly attracts well-educated; level 5 mostly attracts highly educated.

I did not know this, and its really useful info. I was operating under the assumption that the new influx adults were uneducated and it was my city kids growing up and moving in to their own places that were the educated cims in upgraded buildings. That makes me less concerned about the impact of death waves. Thanks.
 
i hope i don't have to get yellow school buses as i'm not american ... these campuses are really american-style , but the rest of the city could not be
 
@garfield007 We cannot have a DLC without a patch. If that happened, then we would need several versions of mods for every DLC combination. The free patch is also to keep us all using the same version of the game, which makes support and mod usage less of a mess. Yes, that means some mods break, but that's exactly why you have that warning pop up the first time you add mods. Modding changes how things work and that can break things. That's the risk of modding and CO can't do anything about that. We're the ones that choose to add mods to our games and that comes with a risk. Most of the time everything is just fine as long as you're patient, but yeah - your save can break. If you can't live with the risk, don't use mods.
There's actually a lot they can do about that, and that they choose not to do:
  • Do like Paradox Game Studios (or the authors of Kerbal Space Program, or ...) and provide rollback betas so people that depend on a lot of mods can keep playing old versions, at least to finish with their current city.
  • Provide an actual modding API and keep adding to it so less and less modding is based on brittle reverse-engineering that's excruciatingly hard to update.
  • Publish the source for a part of the game, just like the Civilization series. Again, less painful reverse-engineering, and allows community-contributed patches to strenghten the modding base overtime. Only this kind of source disclosure can allow mods on a mind-boggling scale like Fall from Heaven II.
With the current situation, the truth we need to tell people is that if they use a lot of mods, or any non-mainstream one, their city is good for the trash every update. So far everytime I've installed mods that sounded interesting from non-star modders, at least one of those mods was never updated after the next DLC came out. Sometimes an incompatible equivalent was developed, but my save was hopelessly buggy and I had to restart from scratch again. This is especially frustrating if you decide to get back into the game, spend several evenings setting up your mods and then start your city, only for the next DLC to come a few weeks later and trash your city. This is supposed to be an offline game you can play on your own terms, yet as soon as you install mods you're forced into the company's update schedule - it doesn't make any sense.
 
With the current situation, the truth we need to tell people is that if they use a lot of mods, or any non-mainstream one, their city is good for the trash every update. So far everytime I've installed mods that sounded interesting from non-star modders, at least one of those mods was never updated after the next DLC came out. Sometimes an incompatible equivalent was developed, but my save was hopelessly buggy and I had to restart from scratch again. This is especially frustrating if you decide to get back into the game, spend several evenings setting up your mods and then start your city, only for the next DLC to come a few weeks later and trash your city. This is supposed to be an offline game you can play on your own terms, yet as soon as you install mods you're forced into the company's update schedule - it doesn't make any sense.

That's absolute garbage advice. I'm sorry you have had troubles with your saves, but the wast majority of players do not have to scrap their save every patch despite using tons of mods. I run with just around 100 mods, many from "non-star" modders and have no problems. I help out a lot of people every patch with all sorts of mods, who just need to remove broken mods to get going again. The wast majority of mods can be removed from a save without any problems. I can't tell you why you're having problems without knowing which mods you're using, but your experience is far from representative of everyone's. And spreading this nonsense that patches break saves is why I spend patch day helping people understand what's actually happening and not to panic. It sucks you have problems and if you have the patience to look into it, I'd be happy to help you try and figure it out.
 
Bus line customization
As a new feature we have added the possibility for you to customize the vehicles used by the bus lines. Now you have a chance to have full control over what kinds of vehicles travel the bus routes in your city! And it's quite easy to use. Just open up the Public Transport - Lines Overview panel, check the line you want to customize and then click the button under the title "Model". Here you can scroll through the available models and select the one you want to operate on that specific bus line. Also, you can choose to have random bus models to operate on the line instead of a specific one (also, "Random" is the default setting).

I really like this added feature, although I would like to see it expanded to all types of transportation, as well as an option to select which ones you want (not just pick one or have random from all).
(Really want larger accordion buses! Might have to go back to the workshop.)

Anyway, that aside, I have a question.

If I have a Bus Depot and a Biofuel Bus depot, I have the choice between the regular bus, biofuel bus, and school bus.

What does the School Bus behave as? Is it noisy like the regular bus? Or quieter like the biofuel bus? Does it matter which type of depot?
 
I really like this added feature, although I would like to see it expanded to all types of transportation, as well as an option to select which ones you want (not just pick one or have random from all).
(Really want larger accordion buses! Might have to go back to the workshop.)

Anyway, that aside, I have a question.

If I have a Bus Depot and a Biofuel Bus depot, I have the choice between the regular bus, biofuel bus, and school bus.

What does the School Bus behave as? Is it noisy like the regular bus? Or quieter like the biofuel bus? Does it matter which type of depot?

We've gotten bunch of positive feedback about this so we are looking into expanding it to other transportation types :) No promises or eta at this point though!

School bus has same stats as the normal bus and it does not matter from which depot it comes from.
 
That's absolute garbage advice. I'm sorry you have had troubles with your saves, but the wast majority of players do not have to scrap their save every patch despite using tons of mods. I run with just around 100 mods, many from "non-star" modders and have no problems. I help out a lot of people every patch with all sorts of mods, who just need to remove broken mods to get going again. The wast majority of mods can be removed from a save without any problems. I can't tell you why you're having problems without knowing which mods you're using, but your experience is far from representative of everyone's. And spreading this nonsense that patches break saves is why I spend patch day helping people understand what's actually happening and not to panic. It sucks you have problems and if you have the patience to look into it, I'd be happy to help you try and figure it out.
Whatever. Even if after some hours of troubleshooting, you managed to help me identify and remove all mods that became broken or incompatible with each other because of the patch and subsequent mod updates, I'd still be left with one or two mods that I considered essential to my playthrough and that won't be updated until weeks later, or not at all. Happened to me enough times after spending a lot of time on my mod setup and even delving into their source code that I lost patience and I don't bother anymore.

And it's your claim about the "vast majority of players" which is garbage and nonsense. First of all, the vast majority of players don't use mods at all, unless you consider downloading a house model a "mod". Then, the vast majority of users that use actual mods just install random stuff that sounds awesome from the workshop and don't have the inclination to spend hours troubleshooting, because they want to spend their free time *gaming*. Later they just open their city without even being aware at first that there was an update, and find that everything is broken. Then they ragepost somewhere and move on to some other game... perhaps reinstall and come back a few months later. Your view is skewed by the minority you deal with on the forums.
 
Whatever. Even if after some hours of troubleshooting, you managed to help me identify and remove all mods that became broken or incompatible with each other because of the patch and subsequent mod updates, I'd still be left with one or two mods that I considered essential to my playthrough and that won't be updated until weeks later, or not at all. Happened to me enough times after spending a lot of time on my mod setup and even delving into their source code that I lost patience and I don't bother anymore.

And it's your claim about the "vast majority of players" which is garbage and nonsense. First of all, the vast majority of players don't use mods at all, unless you consider downloading a house model a "mod". Then, the vast majority of users that use actual mods just install random stuff that sounds awesome from the workshop and don't have the inclination to spend hours troubleshooting, because they want to spend their free time *gaming*. Later they just open their city without even being aware at first that there was an update, and find that everything is broken. Then they ragepost somewhere and move on to some other game... perhaps reinstall and come back a few months later. Your view is skewed by the minority you deal with on the forums.

Sure, if I was ONLY on the forums you might have an arguement, but I'm not. I'm also on reddit, twitter, facebook, steam discussions and discord daily - and I've been so for years and through many patches. So yeah, I think I have a fairly sized sample of players and their problems to have a good idea of how many are affected by a patch and how. But feel free to dismiss my experience and help, I'm not really bothered. Luckily something isn't true just because you believe it to be so, and I'll continue doing what I do to help people understand the actual consequences of a patch, so they don't throw away a save they could still continue if they'd want to.

P.S. Since you were talking about and to people who use a lot of mods, I figured it wasn't needed to specify that I was also talking about the same people, but I guess I should have added "who use mods" since you now brought up all those who play without mods. But I guess you forgot that since it was some days ago you wrote that. :)
 
I will say that this DLC day has been excellent too. No broken mods, just the standard LSM takedown which was back within 6 hours.
I would agree here. TMPE, as an example, is a super-sensitive mod that always get broken each update or patch, yet it didn't for Campus (yay). It was all working fine according to the mod authors.

It shows that mod support from the Devs has improved, since there are only few mods that got broke unlike previous patches. Great job Colossal Order, Paradox Interactive, and the Cities: Skylines modding community for all of your hard work!

That's absolute garbage advice. I'm sorry you have had troubles with your saves, but the wast majority of players do not have to scrap their save every patch despite using tons of mods. I run with just around 100 mods, many from "non-star" modders and have no problems. I help out a lot of people every patch with all sorts of mods, who just need to remove broken mods to get going again. The wast majority of mods can be removed from a save without any problems. I can't tell you why you're having problems without knowing which mods you're using, but your experience is far from representative of everyone's. And spreading this nonsense that patches break saves is why I spend patch day helping people understand what's actually happening and not to panic. It sucks you have problems and if you have the patience to look into it, I'd be happy to help you try and figure it out.
And I agree with @Avanya also. I have been building cities with over 100 mods since 2016 yet I didn't lose any of them because of broken mods on patch day. I just wait for the mods to get updated before I can resume building the cities again.

I disagree with @metatoaster's post. It's not the mod's fault when you lose cities, it's the user's fault, since you open the city then save it while ignoring the broken mods. Just don't open them every patch day. That's it, problem solved. Wait for the mods to get updated before resuming your unfinished work.
 
Sure, if I was ONLY on the forums you might have an arguement, but I'm not. I'm also on reddit, twitter, facebook, steam discussions and discord daily - and I've been so for years and through many patches. So yeah, I think I have a fairly sized sample of players and their problems to have a good idea of how many are affected by a patch and how. But feel free to dismiss my experience and help, I'm not really bothered. Luckily something isn't true just because you believe it to be so, and I'll continue doing what I do to help people understand the actual consequences of a patch, so they don't throw away a save they could still continue if they'd want to.
I include all those means of internet communication under the vague term of "forums". Because most people that play games don't go online to discuss those games, only a small portion of hardcore fans. Similarly, most people who use mods won't spend hours in forums and other means of internet communication trying to find solutions when they're broken. So instead of repeating ad nauseam that everything is fine with the current system and that they just have to go ask you for help, an easily accessible system to let those people play their current city and update on their own terms (as is par for the course with GOG games now) would help that silent majority.

BTW I appreciate that you're helping people and volunteering a lot of your time. But you're dismissing my own experience as well.

I disagree with @metatoaster's post. It's not the mod's fault when you lose cities, it's the user's fault, since you open the city then save it while ignoring the broken mods. Just don't open them every patch day. That's it, problem solved. Wait for the mods to get updated before resuming your unfinished work.
It's neither the user nor the mod(der)'s fault. It's Paradox and Colossal Order who force updates, while they could provide means to delay updates like a lot of mod-heavy games do these days. I simply think players should have the choice to update on their terms.

The current system is exclusively geared toward hardcore users.
 
Last edited:
I include all those means of internet communication under the vague term of "forums". Because most people that play games don't go online to discuss those games, only a small portion of hardcore fans. Similarly, most people who use mods won't spend hours in forums and other means of internet communication trying to find solutions when they're broken. So instead of repeating ad nauseam that everything is fine with the current system and that they just have to go ask you for help, an easily accessible system to let those people play their current city and update on their own terms (as is par for the course with GOG games now) would help that silent majority.

BTW I appreciate that you're helping people and volunteering a lot of your time. But you're dismissing my own experience as well.


It's neither the user nor the mod(der)'s fault. It's Paradox and Colossal Order who force updates, while they could provide means to delay updates like a lot of mod-heavy games do these days. I simply think players should have the choice to update on their terms.

The current system is exclusively geared toward hardcore users.

You keep moving the goal posts here. First we were talking about players who mod, then all players. Then we talk about where they go to rage when they discover things are broken and now we're talking about the silent majority. I've never claimed to know what players who never mod or post anywhere experience. ;) And I'm not dismissing your experience. I am however dismissing your statement that "the truth we need to tell people is that if they use a lot of mods, or any non-mainstream one, their city is good for the trash every update" because that is not consistent with what I see and I'm just not okay with giving that advice to people, who could easily recover their save. If they don't want to and would prefer to move on like you seem to do, then that's fine. But don't tell them there's nothing to do and they should just scrap it, when there's absolutely a lot of saves that are fine to play after removing broken mods (or like this time around without doing nothing at all).
 
We've gotten bunch of positive feedback about this so we are looking into expanding it to other transportation types :) No promises or eta at this point though!

Hopefully it works out.

The ferry needs a second model. The existing one looks good, but is huge. Lots of places could use a smaller lower one.