Your 1.x cities open in 2.0. The first time you load one, we save a copy of the original in the backups folder, then upgrade it to named streets and the finer 10 m grid. Roads that don’t connect to Main Street at City Hall are removed, and a “Street network updated” window says what changed: metres of road removed, buildings that lost road access (their residents stay), road objects and bus stops removed, and bus lines that need attention. An upgraded city no longer opens in 1.x
If an old city needs work after the move, it opens paused and Michael Stapler Jr. walks you through it: which roads are gone, how many transmission towers your homes and shops now need, and how many water towers your farms need. If you can’t afford them, he tops up the treasury. Press Resume in the Menu when you’re ready
Old cities keep their map size, flat ground, groundwater limit, farm sizes, town house looks and full-grown trees. A few things update to their 2.0 versions: each Residential Complex becomes two new complexes that share its residents, the Museum of Crime moves into its smaller building on the corner of its old lot, playgrounds split into their four pieces, sakura trees become the sakura look of the regular tree, campus zones turn into lawn, and factories that ran without electricity now need power
A city whose roads can’t be converted (for example, one without a City Hall) still plays, but its roads can’t be edited
Your saves stay where they were, Steam Cloud keeps syncing them and your achievements carry over. Because 2.0 is a new app, graphics, sound, language, UI scale and key bindings go back to their defaults once on first launch, and tutorial hints you’ve already seen may show up again
Want to finish a city in 1.x? The last 1.x version stays on Steam: right-click Microlandia > Properties > Betas > version-1
Removed the automatic backup every time you opened a city, and the automatic repair of damaged saves that relied on it. Backups are now only made when a 1.x city is upgraded
Streets and roads
Roads are now streets. Each street has one name along its whole length, up to 1,024 per city. A road that carries on past the end of a street makes it longer, and one that branches off is a new street with its own name. A drag lays a straight street or an L with one corner instead of a staircase of road squares
Every city starts with Main Street: your first road takes the name, and the building and zoning tools stay greyed out (“Build a road first”) until you draw it
Addresses now name the street a building actually faces, in the building window, at bus stops and in the newspaper, instead of a name picked from its row or column on the map
Hold Shift in any map view to see street names written along the streets, like a paper map. Longer streets win where names overlap, and shorter ones appear as you zoom in. The map legend reminds you of the key
New roads have to connect to your streets: start the drag on a street, or run it into or across one (neighbourhood drags too). Streets can’t overlap, and junctions, corners and dead ends need 20 m between them
Road edits and bulldozing are refused, with the reason, when they would cut off streets or part of the city from the rest, or break Main Street in two
You can’t bulldoze the street a building faces while the building stands, even if another road still reaches it (1.x only protected a building’s last road). The cursor says “This would cut a building off from the street”: bulldoze the building first
While you draw or bulldoze, the cursor says what happens to each street by name and what it costs (“Extends Main Street”, “Creates…”, “Shortens…”, “Splits … in two”, “Removes…”). A see-through preview of the finished street, junctions and ramps included, follows the cursor and drapes over hillsides. You’re warned before you let go if the road can’t be built, and a refused road just plays the “no” sound instead of also popping up a warning
Streets can sit at any 10 m position instead of only on the 20 m grid. Bridges still line up with the 20 m grid, and the road tool snaps them there for you
Streets can climb hills: drag one straight up or down a gentle slope to make a ramp to raised ground, dug ground or a river bank, and cars tilt as they drive up it. Streets can’t run along a hillside, start, end or turn on a slope, climb a slope that’s too steep, crest inside a block, or run down into the water. Promenades can’t climb at all, and a bridge deck can’t cross raised ground. The cursor tells you which rule a slope breaks. Bridges can also span dry ravines you dig
Roads and parking lots can be drawn straight over lawns and concrete plazas, and roads over parking lots, replacing what they cover. Buildings, trees, flower beds and ponds still block them
Redrew the road markings: kerbs, lane lines and crossings line up cleanly at every corner, junction and dead end, and the centre line turns neatly round bends
Fixed streetlights on bridges lighting a glowing strip down the middle of the road instead of the deck under each lamp
Hills, water and nature
New cities have real hills and valleys: an off-centre hill on Alborina, an open valley on Campara, a river valley with bluffs on Velaria, and a ridge, a narrow strait and two bay islands on Salina. Hills rise in long terraces. Buildings and ponds need level ground, while lawns, flower beds and concrete parks drape over slopes. Cities founded in 1.x keep their ground as it was
New Groundworks drawer: Raise and Lower Terrain move a 20 m block of ground up or down a step, and Level Terrain flattens a dragged rectangle (up to 320 m a side) to the height of the block you start on. They cost $1,500 per corner per step, shown on the cursor, and work with a controller. You can’t dig below sea level or right up to the water, move the map edge, or move ground with something built on it. Any flat ground can be built on at any height. Demolish now lives in this drawer (its shortcut still works)
New cities get maps twice as wide and twice as long: Alborina is 2.56 km across (6.55 km²), Campara and Velaria 5.12 km (26.21 km²), Salina 10.24 km (104.86 km²). Your existing cities keep their size
New region: Salina, a coastal peninsula with twice the tourists and twice the crime, open from your very first city
New park tool: Pond. Paint water in any shape on level ground from Parks & Recreation for $2,500 per 20 m block. Each pond sits in its own basin lined with sand and shore stones, with calmer, greener water than the sea, and nothing can be built on it
New park amenity: the Pond Bridge ($80,000, $200 a month), a red wooden bridge or a stone arch across a 10 m stretch of pond with dry ground at both ends
New park type: Concrete Park, a paved plaza. It costs $12,000 per 20 m block against $8,612 for a lawn, but only $250 a month to keep up instead of $600. The catch: it soaks up the day’s heat and keeps the neighbourhood warmer at night
Trees grow. A new tree starts as a sprout and grows through sapling, young and mature stages over 900 days (about a quarter of an hour at normal speed), and its info panel shows the stage and day (“Day 121 of 900 · Sapling”). A growing tree costs no upkeep and doesn’t cool its neighbourhood until it’s grown, and the saplings that fill in a grove wait for the trees around them. Trees in 1.x cities stay full-grown
Trees take a single 10 m tile, a quarter of the ground they used to, so woods can be much denser (still $3,300 a tree), and you can pick a species or keep the random mix. Dragging a rectangle with the tree tool plants a natural-looking forest with clumps and clearings over about half the area, and lays grass in between (included in the price). Hold Shift for tidy orchard rows
Daily weather: every day has its own high and low, following the seasons of a Mediterranean coast, shown in the top bar
Urban heat: streets and roofs keep your nights up to about 3.5 °C warmer than the countryside, while trees cool afternoons by up to 2.5 °C (lawns and water a bit less, and wind blows the heat away). Nights above 20 °C make residents ill more often, up to 35% more at 26 °C. The top-bar tooltip says how much warmer your nights run, and Stats has Night Heat Added, Warm Nights and Hot Days charts
Air pollution: factories, paper mills, petrochemical plants, coal plants and (mildly) warehouse trucks dirty the air in proportion to how hard they work, and an idle plant emits nothing. Coarse PM10 settles within a few blocks, fine PM2.5 drifts across the city, wind thins it, trees filter up to 12%, and residents in the dirtiest air get ill up to 45% more often. A plant’s panel shows when it’s polluting, the top-bar weather tooltip shows the air where people live, and Stats has an Air Pollution chart. The smoke is what makes people sick now, so transmission towers, coal plants, paper mills and petrochemical plants no longer cancel out the health bonus of parks around them
New Environment View map layer, with Pollution and Heat. Pollution shows where factory and plant smoke settles in a standard breeze (so the map holds still while the weather changes), colours each home Clear, Elevated or High, and counts the residents in High. Heat shows the night heat your city adds. While you place a factory or any other polluter, the cursor says how many more residents it would push into High air pollution, and you can still build it anywhere
Heatwaves now push days and nights 7 °C above normal, and the warm nights make people sick. Their description now says fires are 5x more likely to start and spread, as they are (it said 10x)
Power
Every building needs electricity now, not just factories. A home draws 30 kWh a day, each job 20, a hospital bed 200, a school place 5 and a prison place 15, so a new city stays dark until you build or import power. Only City Hall, Transitional Housing and park amenities run without it
When power runs short, public buildings are served first, then homes, then shops and offices, then factories. Factories slow down, no new shops open and the newest homes go dark first. Nobody moves into a dark home, and its residents move to a lit one or leave the city (“Left in the dark” in the census)
New Energy drawer with every power source. The Transmission Tower and Nuclear Power Plant move there from Services, joined by three new plants. Your own wind, solar and nuclear always run first, and coal and imports cover the rest
New power plant: Solar Farm. $15M for 150,000 kWh a day from an 80×80 m field, 4 months to build and $10,000 a month to run. It’s the only power plant the neighbours don’t mind
New power plant: Wind Farm. $20M for 250,000 kWh a day (40% more on windy Velaria), 6 months to build and $15,000 a month, and the cleanest power in the game. Each tall building within 100 m takes 10% of its output (up to half), and the info window shows the loss. Turbines can stand in a park without paving it, and their blades turn, each out of step with its neighbours
New power plant: Coal Power Plant, the cheap step between importing and nuclear. It makes 2 million kWh a day for $80M, takes 18 months to build and costs $150,000 a month, plus coal on a new Fuel Purchases budget line (about $750,000 a month flat out; an idle plant burns nothing). It smokes, dirties the air, and neighbours within 200 m dislike it
Rebalanced the Nuclear Power Plant: 22 million kWh a day (was 6 million), what a real 1 GW reactor averages once refuelling is counted. Cost, build time and upkeep are unchanged
Reworked transmission towers: each carries 2.4 million kWh a day (was 600,000) for the same $3M, and switches on as soon as you pay instead of taking a year to build. The one-per-map-edge limit is gone, and they can stand up to 200 m from the edge (was 100 m) and on a lawn
Each transmission tower buys from the neighbouring city it faces: Richton to the south (coal, cheapest), San Gigante to the east (solar), Rivalton to the west (wind) or Micropolis to the north (nuclear, dearest). The cursor shows the city, its power source, how clean it is (g CO₂e per kWh) and its price, points to the nearest border, and at a corner you rotate the tower to pick. A finished tower shows which city it’s connected to
Imported power is billed by the kWh on a new Energy Imports budget line, on top of each tower’s $50,000 upkeep, priced every day at the rate of the neighbour that sold it: $0.06 for the first 15% of your supply, $0.10 up to 30% and $0.16 beyond (the first 30,000 kWh a day always at the lowest rate), times your neighbour’s rate (Richton x0.75, San Gigante x1, Rivalton x1.25, Micropolis x1.6)
Spare wind, solar and nuclear power is sold to the neighbours through your towers, on a new Power Exports income line: $0.045 per kWh for the first 500,000 kWh a day, then $0.03, then $0.018. Your plants keep a 15% reserve first, coal is never sold, nothing is sold on a day anyone went short, and the region buys at most 1.5 million kWh a day, 5% less every January
Electricity demand follows the seasons: 10% higher in January, 8% higher in August, with smaller bumps in December, February, July and September. The swings start after your first September
New: the Energy Efficiency Programme cuts civic buildings’ power use by 25%, homes’ by 10% and shops’ and offices’ by 8% (factories and other industry are left out). It costs $90 per kWh a day it saves, then 1% of that a year on a new Energy Efficiency budget line. New buildings join as they open at the same rate, shown on their toolbox card, and once adopted it can’t be undone
Two grid settings you set once: Sell surplus, and Backup order, which picks whether coal and imports cover the rest cheapest first (the default) or cleanest first. Backup order only shows up once you have two or more backup sources, with each order’s monthly cost and emissions at a January peak
New Energy View map layer: gold buildings make power, green have it, amber have no headroom left for new businesses, and red are dark. Its panel has three pages. Today: the share of power delivered, spare power in January, homes without power, a ring chart of where today’s power came from (imports get their own slice) and how clean it is (Clean up to 50 g CO₂e per kWh, like France; Mixed under 400, like the US; Dirty from 400, like Poland). Plan: every way to build, buy or save power, each with its cost, output, emissions, when it’s ready, spare power in January afterwards and the change to your monthly bill, and a Place key that picks the tool for you. Year: the awards, last month in five lines, a 12-month carbon chart and imports by neighbour. It replaces the GridWorks window
New awards: Clean Current, for a year of reliable power (99% delivered) at 50 g CO₂e per kWh or less, and Room to Breathe, for a year with 9 in 10 residents out of High air pollution. Both need a city averaging 10,000 residents over the last 12 complete months, and once earned they’re yours for good. The newspaper announces the review when you reach 5,000 residents, earning one sets off fireworks over City Hall, and the Energy map’s Year page tells you what’s holding each one back
Shortages are shared evenly: when power (or water) runs short, every factory (or farm) gets the same share and produces and hires in proportion (a farm on 70% of its water grows 70% of a crop). A new one only opens where its whole need is spare, so it never takes from the ones already working. Buildings show “Low power” or “Low water” with the exact figures, empty ones say “Vacant · Needs power” or “Needs water” with the numbers, the Company window adds a “Power for industry” bar next to the farms’ water bar, and companies that are short get a warning stamp
Water and garbage
New water building: the Wellfield Plant pumps 5 million L a day (ten water towers’ worth) on a 100×100 m site. It costs $22M, takes two years to build, costs $250,000 a month, uses 3,000 kWh a day and counts against the groundwater limit
New water building: the Water Treatment Plant reclaims 300,000 L a day of irrigation water from wastewater without touching the groundwater, so farms can keep growing once the aquifer is tapped out. $6M, 15 months to build, $60,000 a month, 450 kWh a day
Rebalanced farm water: farmland needs 500 L a day per 10×10 m of field, only while it’s being worked. A farm the size of the old one uses 12,000 L a day instead of 80,000, and a vineyard 72,000 instead of 100,000, so one water tower now waters about 40 farms instead of 6
Water towers can’t catch fire any more (nor can the new water plants), they draw 250 kWh a day for their pumps, and they always stand the way they were designed (rotating no longer turns them)
The groundwater limit for new cities counts only land, so lakes, rivers and sea no longer add to it; existing cities keep theirs. The Groundwater Utilization chart now reads Supplying agriculture, Unconsumed tower allocation and Unallocated yield. A refused water tower or wellfield says how much it needs and how much groundwater is still unclaimed, and suggests a treatment plant
The water warning when placing a farm or vineyard is now yellow and tells you to build a water tower or treatment plant first
New: Landfill, painted from the Services drawer like a park, buries your garbage at $62 a ton instead of exporting it. It costs $1.125M plus $3,750 a month per 20×20 m block, which holds 6,400 tons, and a bigger site takes more garbage a day. It only takes garbage where it touches a road connected to City Hall. A mound fills it as you use it, homes around it lose approval over a radius that grows with its size, and painting grass over it caps it into a park and ends the complaints
Garbage bills are split in two. Waste Management charges $436 for each ton your crews actually collect, and a new Waste Disposal line pays for where it goes: $62 a ton in your landfill, or from $130 a ton to the Regional Waste Compact, so the first bill matches the old flat $566. The Compact gets 4% dearer every January (8% while it takes over 75% of your garbage, up to 3x) and 2% cheaper while it takes under 10% (never below $130). Surges above 125% of your usual tonnage pay 2.5x, and a city exporting over half its garbage can be hit by a regional landfill closure that adds 40% for two years
When sanitation is understaffed, garbage now piles up as litter you can see on the streets, instead of being billed as if it had been collected. The pile tops out at about a month’s worth, and full crews clear it in about four days
Fixed sanitation hiring ignoring that homeless residents make twice the garbage, and City Hall showing about a fifth fewer sanitation workers than the city needed. Existing cities will need a few more sanitation staff
Buildings
Your city now earns its skyline. From day one you can build houses, town houses, shophouses, farms, vineyards, the Roadside Motel and small shops and venues (retail stores, diners, markets, cinemas, bowling). Apartment and mixed-use buildings, residential complexes, premium condos, studio apartments, offices, strip centers, supermarkets, malls, factories and industry, film studios, casinos, the Boutique Hotel and the Horse Racetrack and Cat Casino gifts unlock at 1,000 residents; Plattenbau slabs, residential towers, corporate and high-rise towers, skyscrapers and the Hotel at 10,000. City services are never locked, and the Residential and Commercial drawers are sorted from low to high density
New building: the Skyscraper, a 40-storey office tower with 1,200 jobs on a 40×40 m lot. Its seven designs are built in turn, so your skyline shows every silhouette before one repeats. Needs 10,000 residents
Three new Art Deco looks for the High-Rise Tower: a silver stepped spire, a pale fluted tower and a dark twin-tower silhouette
New building: the Shophouse, a narrow 20×10 m terrace with a shop or café downstairs (2 jobs) and a home for up to four people upstairs. It’s the one mixed-use building a village can build from day one, it drags out in rows, and it comes in four looks
New industry in the Commercial drawer, from 1,000 residents. The Warehouse is a cheap 60×80 m depot with 60 low-skill jobs that goes up in 150 days and barely pollutes, in two looks. The Paper Mill has 200 jobs on 80×120 m, uses a lot of power and pollutes within 160 m. The Petrochemical Plant has 150 jobs on a huge 100×120 m site, takes two years to build, comes in two layouts (a tank farm with gas spheres and a flare stack, or a forest of columns under overhead pipes) and pollutes within 180 m. All three need a street cars can use, their neighbours dislike them, and they bring new jobs such as warehouse manager, forklift operator and paper machine operator
Pick a style before placing some homes, remembered across all your cities (LB/RB on a controller). Apartment Buildings come as Edwardian (red brick, plus a new London mansion block with copper-green domed turrets), Palazzina (Italian blocks, two of them new) or Moderne (white streamline). Mixed-use Buildings come as Altbau or the new Eixample (three Barcelona corner blocks in rose, white and cream), and Town Houses as Hipster brownstones or Frisco painted ladies. Trees, the Sanctuary and the Pond Bridge get look pickers too, with big square keys, and the one you’ve chosen stays pressed in
The Town House Block is now just the Town House: the same 12 homes on half the ground (20×10 m), built in 100 days instead of 180, as Hipster brownstones (classic, bay-fronted or with a fire escape, in six shades) or Frisco painted ladies in about twenty colours. Town houses already in your city keep their look and lot
The Residential Complex has a new look (camel or quartz) on a slimmer 40×20 m lot (was 40×40 m), with the same 24 homes and price
The Museum of Crime has a new, more compact building on a 20×20 m lot (was 40×40 m)
Garden-city housing: the Residential Complex, Residential Tower, Plattenbau and Sanctuary can stand in a park or on open ground up to 40 m back from the street they face. They keep the lawn under them, lay one on bare ground, and leave it behind if demolished
University faculties no longer need a campus: build them anywhere, or inside a park with the lawn kept under them, up to 40 m back from a street. Removed the Campus Zone tool; existing campus ground turns into lawn
Farms are now Farmland you draw: drag a field from 40 m to 200 m a side, and its jobs, water and price scale with its area (a 40×60 m field still has 30 jobs, and developers pay half as much). Each farm is a corn field planted in rows or a fenced sheep pasture with a farmhouse by the road, shows bare ground when nothing grows, and the cursor shows size, jobs and water use as you drag. Sheep farms get ranch names (… Ranch, … Pastures, … Sheep Station). Farms in existing cities keep their size
Vineyards are drawn too: drag an estate from 60 m to 240 m a side and get a winery facing the road amid rows of vines (a 120×120 m vineyard still has 20 jobs)
Playgrounds now come as four single-tile pieces (sandbox, slide, climbing arches and basketball hoop), each at a quarter of the old price and upkeep ($8,750 and $62.50 a month). A new one can’t go right beside a street with car traffic. Picnic tables fit a single 10×10 m spot (they took 20×20 m) for the same price
The Dragon Gate can stand over a street like a real gateway: it turns itself to span the street, traffic and buses drive underneath, and cars don’t park under it
You can build more than one prison, and their capacity adds up
Renamed the Small Hospital to Small Clinic, the Town House Block to Town House, and the Temple to Garden Pavilion
Removed the Two-Story House as its own building: the House now comes in bungalow and two-storey looks and holds up to 5 people (the Two-Story House held 7). Two-storey houses already in your city keep their size, and some houses may now show the two-storey look
Small touch-ups: the Roadside Motel sits on a plain grey lot, and one of the Boutique Hotel’s looks has a darker paint job
Building tools
The building grid is finer: tiles are 10 m instead of 20 m, so buildings, parks, trees and lots line up in half-size steps. Streets still run on 20 m blocks, painted ground costs the same per square metre, effect ranges in panels and tooltips are given in metres (“for buildings within 100 m”) instead of tiles, and 1.x cities keep their exact layout
Nothing can be built on a slope: buildings need level ground
Factories can be dragged in a row along a street, with a 20 m staff parking lot laid automatically between each pair, in the preview and on the bill
Placing an Old Town, Atomic or Zeus square beside a street builds the missing streets around it in the same click, on one bill
A neighbourhood drag has to reach your existing streets
Parking lots look like real lots: rows of bays facing a drive aisle, alternating neatly across the lot. You paint them one 10 m square at a time, and extending a lot carries its stripes on without a seam
The build cursor explains every refusal (no level ground, a pond underneath, no street within 40 m, too close to traffic, too far from the map edge, only a promenade where the building needs a car street, and more), and its colour always matches what a click will do. A spot that’s simply taken just turns red, and a drag over several blocked lots no longer fires a toast and a buzzer for each one
The build cursor shows what you can do, with key icons that follow your bindings: “Click to build”, “Drag a rectangle to build a neighborhood”, “Drag along a street to place a row”, “Drag a rectangle to draw the farm”, “Drag a rectangle to plant a forest”, “Hold [Shift] to plant in rows”, “Press [Q] [E] to rotate”. Controllers get matching prompts, including raising, lowering, levelling and bulldozing
Greyed-out tools say why in their tooltip: how many residents a denser building still needs (“Needs a city of 1,000 residents. 412 to go.”), that Main Street has to come first, or your demand points against what the building needs
Fixed a neighbourhood row drag paving a useless street that fronts nothing (and costs you a house) when a street already ran along its far side, a refused row always blaming the road instead of the water or buildings in the way, and the messages saying “1 buildings” and “1 planned pieces”
Fixed dragging a line of larger buildings leftward or upward placing the first one away from where you started and where the preview showed it
Economy and budget
Rebalanced how businesses open: a founder needs enough capital to run the place for three months at its break-even size (owner’s pay, rent and the staff it needs) plus the business licence. A corner shop costs about what it did, a paper mill about $360k and a petrochemical plant about $1M. A building where no business could ever break even stays vacant
Companies post every job they plan to fill at once, as far as their cash flow allows, instead of one hire a week, so a new plant staffs up in one push. A hire that last month’s revenue already pays for no longer needs months of payroll in the bank
Reworked how owners manage staff: once a month they keep the workers their customers and their building’s power and water can use, and let the newest hires go past that, instead of laying people off whenever cash dropped below a few months of payroll. They close only when failure is obvious (no staffing level that makes a profit, three losing months in a row and under six months of cash), and running out of cash is still bankruptcy
Private employers always offer at least what a jobseeker will accept after income tax (a take-home of half the city’s cost of living), so farms and shops can still hire in an expensive city or during an oil crisis, and unfilled jobs are re-offered each week at the going wage. A high income tax now pushes private wages up
Businesses in the same trade share customers in proportion to what they make, instead of the oldest being served first and newcomers selling nothing (a better-run business wins up to 10% more). New businesses keep opening into a busy trade unless it’s selling less than 75% of what it makes (was 90%)
“Waiting for customers” on a vacant building means the businesses in that trade have goods they can’t sell
Demand points refill only once there’s something to fill: residential points once your city has homes, commercial points once it has business premises. A new city keeps its starting 300 until you build
The top bar’s Residential and Commercial Demand Points tooltip is now an occupancy meter and what the last monthly refill brought (“85% – 3 points”) instead of a paragraph of thresholds
New budget lines: Energy Imports, Fuel Purchases, Energy Efficiency and Waste Disposal, and Power Exports on the income side (see Power and Water and garbage)
Removed the “Public Zone Construction” line from the Budget Report: streets, parks and earthworks are paid for when you build them, not shown as a monthly cost
Fixed businesses hiring private security guards far too easily: they now weigh last month’s thefts against a guard’s monthly wage, not up to a year of thefts
Fixed parks being charged lawn upkeep for ground covered by buildings, which lowers the parks bill in older cities, and the Park Index counting a tile twice when something stood on it, like a tree or a fountain
Fixed new homes and business premises opening at the city’s average rent and jumping to their real rent a month later
Fixed loading a city posting job openings for workers who had already left
Fixed the university faculties’ toolbox card listing about $135,800 a month in per-student costs the city is never charged
Citizens and schools
School grades: every school year children earn a grade from 1 to 10, and university places go to students averaging 9 or 10 (about the top fifth), best grades first when seats are short. It used to be a 63% chance a month for every jobless 18-to-21-year-old. Children who never had a school place can’t apply, and the newspaper notices when nobody made the grade
The Library (+3), Planetarium (+2) and City Museum (+1) raise students’ grades across the whole city: each point moves 1% of students up a grade. All three together lift the share who qualify for university from about a fifth to about a quarter
Who can move away: low-income households and anyone without a home can’t afford to leave over rent, blackouts, crime, hospital waits or driving fees, so they stay and keep paying. Middle- and upper-income households can leave over any of them (leaving over rent used to need a working-age family member with a degree)
On weekends citizens pick a whole park to visit, favouring big, leafy parks with a variety of amenities close to home, instead of heading for one particular tree. This also ends the weekend slowdown in cities with big planted parks
Fixed several school bugs: a full school turned away five-year-olds (sometimes sending their families out of the city) in the same month it graduated a class, and full faculties did the same to applicants; university faculties counted as free school places for new arrivals; bulldozing a faculty took away its students’ high-school diplomas; and university students counted as idle in the approval rating
Transport
Cars and buses drive smooth curves through intersections instead of snapping round the corner, buses make a proper U-turn at the end of their line, and vehicles follow the road over hills, ramps and bridges, tilting on slopes
Click a bus stop in normal build mode to inspect it, not only in the Public Transport view. Stops on no bus line, or whose lines have no buses, show a blinking red bus icon and a warning on their card, with an “Open Public Transport” button (Y on a controller) to go and fix it
Fixed the traffic map showing homes as fine when their residents’ cars had nowhere to park overnight (the newspaper already said so). Those homes now show “No parking”
Fires
Fires only break out in real buildings: trees, fountains and park furniture burn only when a fire next door reaches them. A spreading fire no longer lights every neighbour at once; each one rolls its own chance, and trees catch 20 times as easily as buildings, so a fire that reaches a park or a wood can sweep through it, especially in a heatwave or on windy Velaria
Fire engines reach every fire whether or not a road leads to it, so a building without road access no longer burns unchecked. The fire station’s “Inaccessible” warning and the “fire trucks won’t reach it” placement hint are gone
Gifts, policies and achievements
New gift: the Sanctuary (rare), a 60×60 m landmark in its own grounds, facing a street up to 40 m away, in one of six styles you pick: Twin Spires (a Gothic cathedral), Jade Courtyard, Azure Domes, Mosaic Hall, Golden Summit or Hall of Harmony. It adds prestige nearby and draws tourists, takes a year to build and costs $2,400 a month. It replaces the Temple gift: Temples you’ve built and unopened Temple boxes are kept, now called the Garden Pavilion
New gift: the Pagoda (rare), a three-storey park pagoda with sweeping tiled roofs and lanterns that draws tourists. $1,200 a month
New gift: Palm Tree. Once opened, palms are a tree species you can plant as often as you like. Palms no longer turn up in the random tree mix
The Sakura Tree gift now unlocks cherry blossoms as a species in the regular Tree tool: plant as many as you like at the normal tree price ($3,300, $10 a month, no tourism bonus) instead of one special tree at $600 a month. The tree picker shows locked species with a padlock and the gift that unlocks them. Sakura already in your city stay, and the unlock is kept
Every gift is now one per city, including the ones that used to repeat (Monolith, Phone Box, Dragon Gate, Techno Club, World Class Restaurant, Chess Corner, Hot Dog Statue, Cowboy Panda and the Michelet Blimp), and the Gift Shop shows the ones you have as sold out. A gift box that lands on a gift you already have pays you its sell-back price as a grant instead ($10M common, $100M rare, $1B legendary), and a gift you sold back can turn up again
Newspaper
Redesigned the newspaper: it opens in its own window instead of covering the whole screen, with a broadsheet front page (a boxed motto, “Late City Edition”, a nameplate that shrinks to fit long city names, and a line with volume, issue, date and cover price), a slim header with the date and a back button inside each story, and smaller headlines that no longer crowd the page
New power stories: breaking news when homes lose power (“Lights out on the newest blocks”, with how many households are dark and why the newest go first), a once-a-winter story about the first cold night the newest blocks go dark, the utility’s January forecast every September, and a celebration the month your electricity averages 50 g CO₂e per kWh or less, clean imports included
New business-page story the first month you import, when imports start being billed by the kWh
New award stories: the Regional Environment Bureau opens its review of your city at 5,000 residents, and breaking news when you earn Clean Current or Room to Breathe
New garbage stories: an exposé the first time your trash is shipped out of town, countdowns when your landfill has 36 and 12 months of room left, and breaking news the day it fills up
New education story: the university has seats to spare but not one local applicant made the grade
New opinion column: once the electricity your city uses puts more than a million tonnes of CO2 a year into the sky, an outraged environment columnist lays into the mayor with the total and demands wind and solar farms
Rewrote the factory power shortage story: it runs only when working factories are actually rationed, and explains the grid’s queue (hospitals and schools first, then homes, shops and offices, factories last) instead of just telling you to build towers or a nuclear plant
Removed about 30 stories that gave you nothing to act on, so the ones that need you stay on the front page: the opening pieces for City Hall, schools, hospitals, fire stations, factories, the Library, Planetarium, Stock Exchange, Temple, casinos, Techno Club, Haunted House, World Class Restaurant, Museum of Crime and Military Compound, and for the Dragon Gate, Chess Corner, Lucky Cat and Pixiu Statue gifts, plus the budget surplus, falling unemployment, hospital readmissions, couples leaving town to have their baby, bridge opening, new bus fleet and naan-in-the-pothole stories
Interface
Brand-new look for the whole interface: every window, menu, dialog and panel is redrawn in one retro-computer style built from the same 32 colours as the city, replacing the old Windows 95 look, and everything on the map (toolbox, top bar, map legend, map panels, corner buttons) wears a matching dark style. Buttons are bigger and easier to hit, and dropdowns became pop-up buttons
The computer’s windows (Budget Report, Fiscal Policy, Bank, Census, Survey, Job Market, Human Resources, Gift Shop, the newspaper and more) share the same title bar, tabs, tables and meters. Tabs switch with the arrow keys, and tooltips sit beside the control you point at and also show for keyboard and controller focus. The Bank toolbar and Fiscal Policy cards use pixel-art icons instead of emoji. The Budget Report opens in a regular window with a title bar and close button
Redrew over a hundred toolbox icons in one cleaner style, with new ones for the new buildings and tools. The Gift Shop and Gifts window use the same hand-drawn icons instead of 3D renders
New app icon: the same two houses, redrawn more cleanly; on Mac and iPad they sit on a purple tile
Redesigned title screen: the logo over a column of big keys (Start new city, Load city, Settings, Achievements, Credits), each opening its own window. Settings and Achievements are reachable before you load a city, so you can rebind keys or pick a controller first, and the region picker stops at the first and last region instead of wrapping around. Updated the credits, with a new name in Special Thanks
Improved the Load City window: each city shows when you last played it, and the last one you played is already selected. A click picks a city and a second click (or the Load key) opens it, and Delete sits in the footer instead of on every row
Settings, Graphics and Controls are one Settings window with General, Graphics and Controls tabs, so the in-game menu is down to Pause, Stats, Settings, Achievements and Exit. The Graphics tab shows a badge while you have unapplied changes, and the music player’s keys are drawn instead of emoji
The loading screen reports each step as it happens (terrain, ground, sea and ponds, buildings, graphics), so it never sits silent on a big city
Improved the Stats window: the Category, Statistic and Time range pickers sit in a toolbar, and charts have gridlines at round numbers, a key and the stat’s explanation inside the chart. Stats that aren’t measured yet say so inside the empty chart, and the Company window’s revenue and profit chart, which had no scale, gets the same look
New Environment category in Stats with eight charts: Electricity Emissions, Grid Carbon Intensity (Clean, Mixed or Dirty), Energy Mix, Where the garbage goes (buried, handed to the Compact or left on the street), Air Pollution, Night Heat Added, Warm Nights and Hot Days
New “All time” option for Settings > City History, next to 10, 50 and 100 years. The Stats window’s longest range follows that setting and takes its name, and charts reaching back more than a century read a decade at a time, with a note saying so
New weather readout in the top bar with today’s high and low; its tooltip says how much warmer your nights run than the countryside and how much air pollution reaches where people live
Pause and 2x speed no longer stack: pausing drops back to normal speed and fast-forward unpauses. While paused, the speed button shows the pause bars, and one press (or X on a controller) resumes at normal speed
Wrapped gifts wait in the toolbox’s Gifts drawer, which shows a badge, gives a little shake every 30 seconds and has an Open Gift key, instead of behind their own button in the bottom-right corner. The Gifts window is wider and shows each gift with its toolbox icon
Improved the Gift Shop: an account panel shows your city funds with an Open delivery key, and checkout happens on the page, showing your funds before and after and any error, with a “Place order” button
Reorganised the toolbox: new Energy and Groundworks drawers (Demolish moved into Groundworks), Services gains the wellfield, treatment plant and landfill, and the two-storey house is now one of the House’s looks. Hovering a window in the Computer drawer adds a line saying what it’s for (“See who lives in the city and how they are doing”)
New blinking pixel-art icons over buildings in trouble: a yellow lightning bolt over homes, factories and public buildings with no power, a blue drop over farms short of water (including farms still being built if the water on its way won’t cover them), and a red bus over stops no bus serves. They’re hidden in map views
The building panel explains water and power with numbers, wind turbines warn about the wind shadow of nearby tall buildings, busy factories and coal plants say “Polluting the air” with how hard they’re running, and a power plant’s usage bar marks where January’s peak will land. Power plants’ toolbox cards show their output (kWh a day and about how many homes) and their emissions
Improved the Civic Development list in Fiscal Policy: a table with a progress meter for the policy you’re developing, Active, Repealed or Paused stamps, and locked policies that name what they require instead of just “Locked”
Money cells in Fiscal Policy and salaries in Human Resources show a $ sign, and whole-dollar fees bring up a number pad on touch screens
Shorter, clearer text all over: toolbox and building descriptions, stat and incident descriptions, tooltips and placement warnings. Residential now reads “Homes for your citizens. More residents, more tax.”, demand shortfalls read “Not enough residential demand points (3/5).”, and bus stop errors no longer quote map coordinates
Fixed long-range Stats charts showing an average month for stats that count things: with one point per year, GDP, tourists, bus rides, taxes and companies opened and closed now show that year’s total, and a note says whether you’re looking at a total or an average
Fixed gift names showing as internal codes (like HOT_DOG_STATUE or SAKURA_TREE) in warnings, and a few warnings always showing in English, such as not having money to clear rubble or bulldozing a park with something still on it
Fixed the “Press Esc/Start to return to the main screen” hint never appearing after a city failed to load, in languages other than English
Fixed tax rates in the Fiscal Policy tax sheet that couldn’t be picked by double-clicking, and the Human Resources menu turning white on white when opened with the keyboard or a controller
Tutorial
Reworked the start: your first road is Main Street, and the Road tool stays in hand so you can keep extending it before placing City Hall beside it. Michael’s lines are shorter throughout
New step: after the Farmers Market, Michael has you build a transmission tower near the edge of the map, because homes and shops now need power. It switches on as soon as you pay, and the “no power” placement warnings stay hidden until this step
Michael has new tips the first time you open the Energy and Environment views: what their colours and pages mean, and what each award asks for
Map views stay locked until the building steps are done, and breaking-news pop-ups wait until the tutorial is over (the stories still land in the newspaper)
The Skip tutorial button moved out of Michael’s speech bubble to its own key under the top bar. Click it, or hold Escape (B on a controller) for two seconds, up from one, while it fills up
Fixed the tutorial asking you to build a house you had already placed while Michael was still explaining demand points: it now skips any build step you’ve already done
Fixed clicking (or pressing X) to finish Michael’s typing making the text jump back and keep typing
Fixed the tutorial sometimes starting behind the loading screen on a slow load, so you missed Michael’s first lines
Controls and camera
Touch controls on touchscreen PCs: tap to select or build, drag one finger to draw roads, zones and districts, drag two fingers to pan and pinch to zoom, and swipe a notification up to dismiss it.
Improved the controller cursor: it stays on the map instead of drifting into the sky, slides along the map’s edge, pans the camera when pushed against the screen edge and no longer disappears after a pan. In select mode it wears a blinking yellow frame, and every tool’s cursor outline blinks in steps instead of fading and swelling
Improved controllers in windows: LB/RB flip the tabs in every tabbed window, with the bumper glyphs on the tabs, the right stick scrolls wide tables sideways, A opens fold-out sections and picks option buttons, and the focused button gets a thick double outline. Holding left or right on a slider speeds up after a moment (the Bank’s loan amount crosses its range in about two seconds instead of nine), and the map view’s layer buttons show their tooltips when you reach them with the D-pad
Improved the Bank with a controller: LB always goes to Summary and RB to Apply, even from a slider, and Apply opens on the loan amount slider. Focus no longer wanders behind the Bank’s pop-ups, and B dismisses Michael’s speech bubble instead of closing the whole Bank
With a keyboard, Esc on a confirmation box closes just that box, not the window behind it, and closing a window puts focus back where you were
Cities open with the camera pulled about 1.6 times further back, centred on the map whatever its size
Fixed pressing Esc (or B) during a drag still placing a stray building, or bulldozing a tile, when you let go of the button
Fixed panning the camera in the middle of a road or zone drag (keyboard, controller or mouse at the screen edge) hiding or freezing the preview, so what you placed on release was something you never saw. The preview now keeps stretching as the view moves
Fixed clicking the upper floors or roof of a tall building selecting or bulldozing whatever stood behind it
Fixed the bus fare, street parking fee and tourism fee dropping the cents with a controller: they now step by the cent
Graphics
At night skyscrapers put on animated LED light shows, each tower with its own pattern, and every minute or so the whole skyline joins one sweep of colour. Turn off “Skyscraper light shows” in Graphics settings if moving lights bother you
Factory, paper mill, petrochemical plant and coal plant chimneys smoke only while the plant is working: an idle, unpowered, unfinished or burned-out plant has cold stacks
Spinning parts cast shadows that move with them: wind turbine blades and the ferris wheel, which used to cast no shadow at all. The new “Moving shadows” option is on by default; turn it off for a still shadow
New graphics option: Tilt-shift, a depth of field that gives your city a miniature look. The centre of the screen stays sharp while nearer and farther parts soften, and the effect fades as you zoom out. Off by default; needs the WebGPU renderer
New graphics option: Ambient Occlusion (Off, Low, Medium, High) adds soft shading in corners, crevices and window recesses on WebGPU, replacing the old checkbox. The soft shading where buildings meet the ground is now always on, reaches every building (many homes and shops were missing it) and no longer dims sunlit walls
New Frame Rate Limit option (Unlimited, 60 or 30 FPS). It’s 60 by default, where the game used to draw as many frames as your screen allowed, which saves battery and keeps laptops cooler
Shadow Quality is now Standard or Ultra instead of Low, Medium and High. Standard, the default, gives everyone the sharp shadows that follow the camera (they used to need High), so construction sites cast shadows too, and Ultra draws the finest shadows of all. WebGL2 keeps its simpler whole-map shadows
Distant parts of the city fade into a light haze, warm by day and deep blue at night, while the middle of the screen stays clear. Map view stays crisp
Improved lighting: streets hemmed in by tall buildings sit in soft shade while open squares and parks stay brighter, roofs, walls and metal parts each catch the light their own way, and sky reflections on buildings are toned down
Trees have a new look, canopies of chunky square leaves over a pixel-art trunk, and the wild scenery on empty land (bushes, rocks, cacti) matches. They’re also much lighter to draw
Chimney smoke, cooling-tower steam, construction dust and fire smoke are crisp pixel-art puffs that crumble away pixel by pixel and drift with a gentle breeze, instead of soft see-through ones
Fires got a makeover: pixel-art flames stand on the building’s real roofs, burst from its walls and bend with the wind, farms and vineyards burn across the whole field, and a darker, thicker column of smoke rises above. Fire engines park where you can see them, even deep inside a dense block, and spray arcs of water at the nearest flames
Water keeps its speckled blue but catches a soft glint of sunlight on gentle ripples, and zoomed far out it settles into a calm, even colour instead of flickering bands
The build grid fades away when you zoom far out
Cleaner picture: anti-aliasing smooths edges in shadow as well as in bright light, and there’s less grain in dark areas and less banding in bright skies and fog, most noticeably on high-resolution screens
Graphics settings tell you when WebGPU isn’t available and the game is running on WebGL2, and options that need WebGPU are greyed out with a note saying why
Fixed speckled, flickering grass and dark streaks around buildings on park land in some older cities (around City Hall, for example), and rotated university buildings clearing the lawn beside them instead of under them
Removed the Winter option from the Atmosphere setting, and its Shift+W shortcut: you pick Day (the old Summer) or Night, and N still toggles night. A saved Summer or Winter choice opens as Day
Sound and music
New music: one more track by Pablo Rubio joins the soundtrack, which now has 11 songs
New interface sounds: opening a window, selecting a building or picking a tool plays an “open” sound, opening the top-right menu or a toolbox group plays a chime, and the regular button click sounds different
Starting a drag makes a sound the moment you press, with mouse or controller, so you hear where it’s anchored: roads, zones, rows, districts, trees, the bulldozer and levelling
Fixed choppy, stuttering music on Bluetooth headphones such as AirPods
Fixed the sound effects volume only affecting new sounds: it now changes sounds already playing, and switching sound effects off silences everything at once, loops included
Fixed the “can’t do that” buzzer sounding for moves the cursor already shows in red, like a blocked lot or a misplaced bus stop; it now only sounds with a warning you can see
Removed the sound test buttons (Build, Bulldoze, Jackhammer, Nail) and the audio status line from the sound settings
Platforms and performance
New simulation engine: the city simulation was rebuilt as native code inside the game. In our tests on the same cities each simulated day runs 1.7 to 3.7 times faster, cities load faster, and a 54,000-citizen city takes under 80 MB of memory to simulate instead of about 1.4 GB
Microlandia is now a native app on Windows, macOS and Linux, with the simulation built into the game instead of running as a separate background program
Mac: the game now also runs on Intel Macs (1.x needed Apple Silicon), and needs macOS 12 or later
Windows: the game uses the WebView2 runtime that comes with Windows 10 and 11 instead of bundling its own copy of Chromium, so the install is much smaller. If WebView2 is missing, the game tells you where to get it
Linux: the game runs on the WebGPU renderer when your drivers support it (Vulkan, on X11), which unlocks the sharper shadows, ambient occlusion and tilt-shift. WebGL2 stays as the fallback, and –force-wayland still works but stays on WebGL2
Launch options on Windows and Linux: –webgl, –webgpu, –disable-gamepad and (on Linux) –force-wayland still work. The old –use-gl-angle, –opengl, –no-use-gl-angle and –disable-vsync workarounds no longer do anything, and –experimental-hid, the fallback for controllers the game couldn’t detect, is gone
Much smaller download: we no longer ship hundreds of megabytes of 3D model files the game never uses, and the soundtrack takes about half the space
Smaller saves: a big city’s save no longer keeps ended relationships and dating profiles, which took about a fifth of the file
Much less stutter: no more freezes of up to 0.7 seconds the first time you hover a build tool, drag a road or park, open a map view or pan onto unseen ground, and switching between day and night no longer freezes for about half a second
Big cities are much lighter to draw, especially zoomed out: buildings, trees, scenery and construction sites are drawn far more efficiently, trees use about 80% less geometry, and the ground, sea, parked cars, trees and crops are drawn only where the camera is looking
Smoother frame rates, especially on laptops, integrated graphics and high-resolution screens: ground, ambient occlusion, bloom, anti-aliasing and shadows cost less, ambient occlusion only updates when the view changes, and hidden panels and map overlays refresh less in the background
Big cities with lots of parks, campuses and parking lots load much faster
Dragging out districts, zones and buildings is smoother, most of all with a controller
Fixed a small hitch about once a second when moving the camera over a city with traffic, and the memory used by cars is now freed when you leave a city
Fixed the loading screen sometimes lifting before the ground was ready, leaving the city floating over the sky for a moment
Fixed “This city is already open in another instance of the game” appearing after a crash or forced quit
Fixed pressing Alt on Windows and Linux popping up a menu bar over the game
