Cities: Skylines 2’s Modding Tools Still Remain “A Couple Of Months” Away

Mariina Hallikainen, the CEO of Colossal Order, the studio behind the city-building sim, Cities: Skylines 2 has announced the delay of the game’s official modding support. Although it was revealed beforehand that the game would launch without the modding tools, fans want Collosal Order to quicken the process. However, according to Hallikainen, the support is still a few months away.

In the recent Word Of The Week post, Hallikainen laid out the studio’s plans regarding the addition of mod support and mod tools as an all-in-one Editor to the game. According to the executive, Colossal is currently preparing for the initial release of the Editor. Given that it still lacks some features, it can take a “couple of months” until release.

The CEO also said that the studio wants to release the Editor “as soon as possible.” Hallikainen went on to ensure fans that they will keep updating the mod support throughout the Skylines 2 lifetime.  

The Editor currently includes only maps and support for code modding, and we’re looking forward to getting those ready for an initial release. I’m calling it an initial release as we will be adding to the modding tools throughout the game’s lifetime. We expect it will take a couple of months to get the Editor in a shape where we can release it, but we don’t have a concrete timeline yet as we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep.”

With the CEO’s statement on hand, it sounds unlikely that the Editor will be released by the end of this year. Further in her statement, Hallikainen also talked about the eight free Region Packs, which the studio announced earlier for the game. The Colossal executive says that after they are done bringing the mod support, Paradox mods will be “nicely populated” with the Region pack assets the studio has been working on. 

Moving forward, mod support aside, Skylines 2 has been grappling with its performance issues since day one. The Colossal CEO updated the fans that the studio is now “focusing on LODs and improving GPU performances.” The devs expect a “relevant performance boost,” but she admits that “there is no silver bullet to improve the performance at once.”

Hallikainen goes on further to update the community about the improvement patches coming to the game. The executive says that the studio will drop some smaller patches in the coming days, but after that, it will focus on “bigger fixes that take longer to work on.” 

Moreover, Hallikainen has a good news regarding the Cities: Skylines 2’s console release. The executive announced that the console version will be released with all the mod support and custom assets beforehand, so the players can catch up with their PC player peers in no time. The Editor will be fully operational on PC by then.

The city-building sim was released on October 24, 2023, for PC. A port for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 is scheduled for launch in the spring of next year. In eXputer’s review, Asad rated the title 3.5/5, calling it an unfinished mess marred by optimization pangs and lackluster content.