Revamped Updates for Cities: Skylines 2 Simplify Monitoring of Homelessness and Introduce Enhanced Difficulty Settings

Cities: Skylines 2 has a new patch that makes a raft of changes to the Paradox city builder’s UI and systems such as traffic and garbage, while adding two new Easy and Normal difficulty modes and ten ‘birthday parks’ to celebrate the first game’s 10 year anniversary.

The developers have also made some “quality-of-life improvements related to homelessness”. That’s “quality-of-life” in the vacuum-sealed software development sense of the simulation being nicer to operate, rather than quality of life in the sense of having a roof over your head. I would probably have gone with some slightly less dystopian phrasing, Colossal Order.

Cities: Skylines 2 patch 1.2.5f1 adds a homelessness stat to the population info view, and makes homeless ‘households’ visible and selectable in park Selected Info Panels. “These changes make it easier to track homelessness, find homeless populations in your city, and check the situation for individual homeless citizens,” the changelog explains.

They’ve also tinkered with the game’s systems to reduce homelessness in general. As of this new patch, “if the homeless in your city are generally employed, they simply need affordable housing,” the changelog continues. “If they are also unemployed, they will need jobs suitable for their education level before they can leave the homeless status behind.”

Colossal Order have also changed the logic for newly adult citizens leaving their childhood homes. Rather than leaving as soon as they reached adulthood, and becoming homeless if there were no affordable new homes to be had, they’ll stay until certain conditions are met.

Firstly, they’ll need a job before moving out. Secondly, households will provide kids flying the roost with some starting funds for a new house: if there isn’t enough cash to spare, the younger generation will stick around and contribute their incomes to the household. Thirdly, they’ll now check for available homes before moving out. If there aren’t any to be had, they’ll leave the city and become commuters. That’s to say, their housing needs will become another city’s problem.

Going by the most recent Steam reviews, the big story with Skylines 2 is still the game’s technical state at launch and its shortage of features versus its much-updated predecessor, but there have also been some headline-worthy twiddles for the economic and social systems. Last June, Colossal Order solved the problem of soaring rents by deleting landlords, a crowd-pleasing “quality-of-life” adjustment if ever there was one.