Hello Mayors!

Patch 1.5.7f1 is now live, and we’re excited to get your feedback. As always, if you have anything that you would want to report after playing 1.5.7f1, then you can submit a bug report over on our forum!Big changes are also coming to Paradox Mods! Previously, all actions in the in-game Paradox Mods required the mod downloads to be completed before moving on to the next step, like browsing and adding more mods. In this patch, this behaviour is changed so that actions and mod downloads are no longer dependent on each other. The tracking of mod downloads has also been made more precise and consistent, with the addition of parallel downloads and a queueing process. You can read more about the changes for Paradox Mods from the Dev Diary - Updates for Paradox Mods that we posted last week.

With this update to the SDK, script-mod creators will have to recompile their mods so that they can be compatible. So, if you use mods, please give your favorite mod creators time to update their mods so that you don’t experience glitches/unintended bugs.

New features:

• Historic Building-option

  • When enabled, selected buildings will be prevented from leveling up or being abandoned.

• In-game performance testing tool, accessible from the main menu options tab called “Benchmark”.

  • New launch parameter -benchmark to start benchmarking directly on startup.

• Encyclopedia

  • New chapters have been added: Building Customization, Road Zones.

• UI toolbar scaling and opacity setting.

• Universal mod-button added to the main UI where mod creators can choose to place their mods into a unified menu.

Gameplay:

• Stopped citizens from moving in and out with taxis to reduce the move-in traffic.

• Reduced the overall dog population by adjusting household pet limits and spawn probabilities. No dogs were harmed in this process. Affects new households (including in existing saves).

• The Education system has been balanced to better align elementary and high school demand, reducing extreme imbalance with elementary schools while high schools remained underused.

• Reduced cases where citizens get stuck during robberies.

• The “Urban Cycling Initiative” policy now increases bicycle usage from 20% to 50%.

• Fixed mixed housing causing commercial and medium-density residential demand to permanently stay low.

• Fixed signature offices being incorrectly treated as available for sale, causing office demand to drop even while occupied.

• Fixed office demand using wrong data for citizens and removing a multiplier workaround, which was causing too many Software companies to spawn. City production statistics are now sampled over a longer time period, reducing fluctuations caused by time of day.

• Fixed an issue where a handful of commercial buildings received no customers, killing demand. Commercial demand is now based on how well-stocked your shops are on average.

• Fixed outside connections not working with non-highway roads.

• Fixed an issue where students could only participate in leisure activities during study time.

• Fixed an issue where buses and trams could get stuck in a permanent boarding state at busy stops, preventing departure and causing vehicle queues and despawning.

• Fixed an issue where building upgrades could stall and not progress when resource delivery processing was skipped during certain update frames, causing the level indicator to become stuck.

• Fixed port mail transfer pathfinding.

• Fixed an issue where some offices could stop producing or trading in certain situations.

UI:

• Added option to adjust toolbar size

  • Buttons and some other elements will scale with the toolbar.

• Added option to adjust UI transparency

  • Affects toolbar and panel background transparency.

• Added tooltips to the Encyclopedia.

• Fixed an issue in Photo Mode where visual settings did not match the game rendering, causing unexpected changes in visual appearance.

• Updated base game and B&P achievement icons.

• Fixed game crashing when typing CJK characters in the Encyclopedia search field.

• Fixed an issue where the Upgrades section in service building panels was not interactable when using a controller, preventing the selection of individual upgrades.

• Fixed a UI crash in the Editor when the Move Selected key was unbound.

• Fixed demand bars not being able to visually fill up.

Visual:

• Improved wind transitions for vegetation LOD changes, making tree movement smoother when switching between detail levels.

• Disabled moon light and shadow casting during the day and daylight and shadow casting during the night to improve performance.

• Iceflake Arena

  • Added additional parking slots. The fix only applies to Iceflake Arenas built after the update, so you will have to rebuild it if you have already placed it.

  • Adjusted LOD transition distance on Low and Medium settings to prevent premature visual downgrade.

Misc:

• Main menu FPS limited to 120 to reduce GPU stress.

• Database corruption error messages are now more descriptive.

• Added missing localized text to the encyclopedia.

• Fixed small text errors in the encyclopedia.

Bridges & Ports:

• Fixed an issue where commercial and industrial buildings did not use B&P DLC ports for importing goods, instead relying on outside connection routes even when goods were available at the port.

• Updated base game and B&P achievement icons.

Paradox Mods:

• Updated Paradox SDK to version 2.1.2. and ModsUI to 2.0.4 version with parallel downloading.

  • Add version support when duplicating a playset.

  • Add version support when editing playset metadata.

  • Disabled "Make public button" for playsets in offline mode.

  • Fix crash in offline mode when visiting owned playset.

  • Fix a migration issue from SDK 1.31.x that caused mods folders to be copied unnecessarily.

• Removed the "Beta" label from Paradox Mods.

• Enabled mod playset sharing.

• Added a thumbnail field to the asset upload panel. A thumbnail is now required for publishing a mod.

• Combined the mod download and install notifications into a single notification showing total progress.

• Fixed the map upload preview image not displaying the correct thumbnail.

Known Issues:

• The update download size for this patch is larger than it would otherwise need to be, due to internal build system changes. This is a one-time issue only.

• The Microsoft Store build is missing the taskbar icon.

• Rarely, robbers and the arresting police can still get permanently stuck during robberies; we will keep working on this.

• Shadow cascade calculations cause incorrect shadow drawing. This is especially visible when looking at big objects from a low point of view (close to the ground).