Welcome back to the monthly State of the Game megathread for September!
It has been a few months since our last State of the Game thread, so this one is going up a little early and includes a recap of everything important that has happened with Cities: Skylines II since June.
Quite a bit has changed over the summer — new simulation improvements, terrain tools, continued work on the Asset Editor, more modding improvements, and another update currently on the way.
Think of this as our overdue road maintenance. We ignored it for three months, traffic backed up, and now we're fixing everything at once.
For background on why we're doing these threads, see the highlighted thread in regards to State of the Game.
June 2026 Updates
June brought two updates, including the largest update since our previous State of the Game thread.
🔧 Hotfix (v1.5.10f1) — June 1
Following reports of players being unable to save games or custom maps after the previous update, Iceflake released a targeted hotfix.
- Save Game Fixes — Addressed issues preventing existing saves from being saved properly.
- Custom Map Saving — Fixed similar saving issues affecting custom maps.
Iceflake determined that the underlying problem appeared to originate from changes associated with the Asset Editor, although the issue had remained hidden until later updates exposed it.
☀️ Summer Solstice Update (v1.6.0f1) — June 22
Summer Solstice was a much larger free update focused on citizen behavior, pathfinding, terrain rendering, performance, and detailing tools.
🚶 Citizen & Pathfinding Improvements
- Citizens now use different reasonable travel limits depending on whether they're traveling for work, school, shopping, or leisure.
- Citizens should be far less likely to cross half the map just to purchase something because one particular store happens to have more stock.
- Tourists, commuters, and vacationers should spend less time casually hiking down highway shoulders.
- Households now reconsider moving less frequently, reducing unnecessary simulation calculations and improving performance in larger cities.
- Citizens unable to complete certain journeys now respond differently depending on the situation, rather than repeatedly attempting extremely long routes.
There is still at least one known pathfinding issue where students may occasionally travel farther than intended. Cims apparently remain willing to cross several counties for an education.
🏞️ Terrain Overhaul & Terrain Painting
This update also significantly reworked terrain rendering.
- Terrain Painting Tools were added to both the game and Map Editor, allowing players to directly paint terrain textures.
- Grass, dirt, rock, cliffs, and texture blending received substantial visual improvements.
- Terrain normals were corrected, giving hills and mountains significantly more visible depth.
- Texture rendering on cliffs was improved to prevent textures from appearing excessively stretched.
- Several maps received additional hand-painted terrain improvements, including Archipelago Haven, Great Highlands, Twin Mountain, River Delta, and Mountain Village.
- Shoreline rendering was improved.
- Lower texture-quality settings now reduce terrain VRAM usage, helping GPU performance on lower-end systems.
So yes, beaches can finally look like beaches instead of carefully arranged concrete surfaces pretending to be sand.
🎨 Additional Improvements
- Added a toggle for contour lines.
- Added an option to hide snow visually without changing the underlying simulation.
- Improved shadow rendering.
- Fixed several issues involving mods failing to load or download.
- Improved Paradox Mods playset functionality.
- Fixed save loading when missing modded or custom content was referenced.
Summer Solstice remains the current live PC version, v1.6.0f1, as of this post.
July 2026 Update
July did not bring another major game patch, but Iceflake published City Corner #9: Happy Six Months, looking back at its first six months managing development of Cities: Skylines II.
Since taking over development at the beginning of 2026, Iceflake reported:
- 200+ bugs fixed
- 40+ new features and improvements
- Continued work across gameplay, simulation, UI, visuals, performance, mods, and the Editor.
Among the larger additions during Iceflake's first six months were the Historic Building option, Benchmark Tool, Encyclopedia, zoning controls, terrain painting, simulation adjustments, traffic improvements, and continued performance optimization.
Iceflake also confirmed that development has started on its first DLC for Cities: Skylines II.
There is currently no announced name, content list, release date, or release window for that DLC.
We're going to resist zoning our own release date this time.
August 2026 Updates
August has focused primarily on development previews for the next update rather than another released patch.
🛠️ Asset Editor & Modding Improvements
In City Corner #10, Iceflake detailed a number of improvements currently being developed for the Asset Editor and Paradox Mods ecosystem.
Asset Editor improvements include:
- A new
-startEditor launch option allowing creators to launch directly into the Asset Editor.
- New controls for expanding and collapsing Inspector components.
- Simplified Inspector layouts requiring fewer menus and containers to be opened.
- Search functionality for props and other asset elements.
- Improved Element ID visibility.
- Improved localization tools, including the ability to add translation fields for all supported languages at once.
- Localization data can now be copied between assets.
- New prop placement overrides for Parent Mesh, Group Index, and spawn Probability.
These changes are aimed primarily at making asset creation less tedious and reducing repetitive work for creators.
🧩 Launcher Mod Management
Iceflake and the Paradox Mods team are also working on expanded mod management directly through the Paradox Launcher.
Planned functionality includes:
- Selecting your active playset before launching the game.
- Warnings when a playset appears corrupted or outdated.
- Automatic attempts to download or update missing mods.
- Creating, editing, and removing playsets directly through the launcher.
- The ability to keep unused playsets while storing their mods off-disk, freeing storage without deleting the playset itself.
Iceflake has also discussed future options for choosing where downloaded mods are stored or potentially spreading mods across multiple storage locations.
These mod-management features are still in development and do not currently have a confirmed release date.
🍂 Upcoming Update — Autumn Breeze
On August 20, Iceflake previewed the next Cities: Skylines II update in City Corner #11: Autumn Breeze.
This update has NOT released as of this post.
The upcoming patch focuses primarily on simulation logic, city management, and additional visual improvements.
🗑️ Garbage Collection Improvements
Garbage trucks are being adjusted so they reserve enough capacity for the building they're actually trying to service.
Currently, trucks can collect smaller amounts of garbage along their route and become full before reaching the building that actually needs them.
With the update, trucks should better prioritize buildings with larger amounts of garbage.
In other words, the garbage truck may finally remember why it left the depot.
🏭 Company & Resource Improvements
Companies will be prioritized based on which resources the city actually needs.
This should:
- Increase the variety of businesses appearing in commercial and industrial areas.
- Better match companies with actual city demand.
- Improve how demand bars respond to available businesses and resources.
Iceflake says this will also provide groundwork for future improvements to the resource economy.
🏠 Residential Demand
Residential demand calculations are being adjusted for extremely large cities.
Previously, very large populations could cause residential demand to collapse incorrectly.
The new calculation will better account for:
- City population.
- Available empty residential properties.
- Overall housing availability.
💰 Citizen Finances
Citizen decisions involving shopping, leisure, and happiness will now rely more heavily on income rather than accumulated wealth.
This should provide a more realistic representation of whether households can actually afford their lifestyles.
🌳 Upcoming Visual Improvements
Autumn Breeze will also continue the terrain and visual improvements introduced with Summer Solstice.
- Waterway Pass and Lakeland are receiving the new hand-painted terrain treatment.
- Tree LODs are being improved to reduce missing branches and floating-looking leaves at distance.
- Surfaces will inherit the normal information of the terrain beneath them, allowing light and shadows to better follow hills and slopes.
- Support is being developed for frosted and opaque windows on future, re-imported, and modded assets.
- Windows configured to remain permanently lit or unlit will behave correctly.
- Rendering large numbers of building windows may receive some small performance improvements as a result of the changes.
Iceflake has not yet announced the exact release date or version number for Autumn Breeze.
👀 Looking Ahead
Development continues on several fronts.
- Autumn Breeze is the next planned game update.
- More improvements are planned for the Asset Editor and modding tools.
- Iceflake continues to work on simulation, performance, terrain, and resource-economy improvements.
- The studio's first Cities: Skylines II DLC is currently in development.
- More information regarding future updates and DLC is expected over the coming months.
There is currently no confirmed release date for the upcoming DLC.
Console Update
There is still no confirmed release date for Cities: Skylines II on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S.
Development of the console edition remains ongoing, with performance and stability continuing to be the primary focus.
The official console page has not provided a new release window, and Paradox has stated that it does not want to provide another estimate until the console version is closer to being launch-ready.
Any confirmed console news will be added here when it is announced.
Yes, console players are still waiting at the bus stop. Unfortunately, the route apparently has Cities: Skylines traffic AI.
Current State
As of August 27, 2026:
- Current PC Version: v1.6.0f1 — Summer Solstice
- Next Update: Autumn Breeze — Upcoming
- First Iceflake DLC: In Development
- Asset Editor Improvements: In Development
- Expanded Launcher Mod Management: In Development
- Console Version: In Development — No Release Date
Guidelines
- Ask questions about the current state of the game, performance, bugs, recent updates, or upcoming features here.
- Share your experiences with Summer Solstice, terrain painting, pathfinding, mods, and large-city performance.
- If you're experiencing bugs, let others know whether you're playing vanilla or modded, and include your game version whenever possible.
- Posts asking "is the game worth it now?", "has the game improved?", or "what's the current state of the game?" outside this thread may be removed and redirected here.
This thread is normally posted on the 1st of each month. September's thread has been posted early to catch up on developments since our previous State of the Game thread.
Last updated by mods: August 27, 2026.
