Cities: Skylines 2’s new developer celebrates the event with a debut patch all about demise, making residents pop their clogs across the clock and eradicating immortality in straightforward mode: ‘Beforehand, about 80% of them by no means died of outdated age’

Cities: Skylines 2 simply obtained its first replace from new developer Iceflake Studios, which changed Colossal Order on the finish of 2025. You would possibly assume this could be a primary alternative to breathe new life into the struggling city-builder. To return out swinging with some huge new options. To make the flowers bloom, the birds sing, the infants gurgle in a approach that makes you assume “Are they glad or about to barf?”

Nope! As an alternative, Iceflake’s debut patch is completely obsessive about demise. Seems your fool residents have been croaking in utterly the mistaken methods in Cities: Skylines 2, so Iceflake has donned its black gown and sharpened its scythe to type issues out.

Dubbed First Frost (although actually it must be Final Rites) the replace makes quite a few tweaks to methods that govern the lights going out, the buckets being kicked, the farms being purchased, and so on. Mainly, it fixes a bug that prevented time of day being taken under consideration when figuring out residents’ demises, which meant everybody was popping their clogs between midnight and 6 o’clock. It additionally quadruples the variety of occasions the sport calculates deaths from 4 to sixteen, as a way to “additional scale back the variety of residents dying on the identical time”.

Associated articles

As well as, the patch fixes an particularly peculiar bug that made most of your residents immortal when taking part in in straightforward mode. “Beforehand, about 80% of them by no means died of outdated age,” Iceflake writes in a Steam put up. An ageing inhabitants is troublesome sufficient for contemporary governments to cope with, so I can think about how difficult an immortal one could be. Shuffle off, grandad! How else am I to get a home on this financial system?

Not every part in First Frost is about departures from the mortal realm. The patch additionally reduces journeys made on the bicycles launched by Colossal Order earlier than it moved on to pastures new, by 80%. Briefly, your residents are spending much less time biking and extra time dying, which I suppose is how train works in actual life too.

Elsewhere, the patch introduces a bunch of recent UI icons for roundabouts, cul-de-sacs, highway upkeep depots, air pollution sorts, and extra. It updates the onboarding tutorial for brand new gamers, makes terraforming instruments much less aggressive (in any other case referred to as a terrorforming instrument), and makes a bunch of graphical enhancements like improved shadow rendering, snow help for decal-based tons, and fog that adjusts in line with climate situations.

Oh, and the replace lastly switches autosave on by default, which is sweet, but additionally kinda wild that it is solely occurring now. It took two years, 4 months, and a change in developer, however Cities: Skylines 2 will now save routinely with out participant intervention.

Whereas not bristling with new options, Iceflake’s first patch nonetheless appears to have improved the sequel’s quick fortunes. Latest Steam evaluations stand at 67% constructive on the time of writing, in comparison with 54% constructive total. Let’s hope this proves a brand new basis for a brighter future for the sequel.