Cities: Skylines' long-awaited Natural Disasters DLC now has a release date.

As of November 29 you'll be able to raise your own custom-crafted cities from the ground up, before razing them from the sky down by way of eight distinct disaster options. That's tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, forest fires, sinkholes, thunder and lightning storms, tornadoes, and, as you might've spotted throughout the forthcoming add-on's marketing campaign, meteor showers.

The Natural Disasters expansion costs 10.99/$14.99, however a coinciding update provides all players with a Steam Workshop-based scenario editor that lets players create and share bespoke set pieces with one another. This feature also ties into the Natural Disasters expansion.

"Previously we have had just a sandbox mode, but the scenario editor makes it so the players can create scenarios that have actual goals they have winning conditions, losing conditions," explains the dev diary above. "Natural Disasters is aimed at the people who need more challenge."

Cities: Skylines Natural Disasters is due November 29. Until then, Chris' reflections on his own failed city building skills are sure to raise a smile. "To all my tiny, unhappy citizens: I am deeply sorry", reads the article's strapline setting a pretty explicit tone from thereon.

Cities: Skylines mods let us do amazing things. We've customized our cities with pieces from the 17,000+ props and 20,000+ maps on the Steam Workshop. We've driven around on street level and walked the sidewalks in first person. We've celebrated some of the most inspiring mods and creations the community has to offer.

But out of those thousands and thousands of mods, there have to be some that just aren't quite amazing, right? Some mods that make you tilt your head and wrinkle up your nose and go, "Huh." We decided to go on a hunt for these unsung props and maps, and this is what we found: 11 Cities: Skylines mods that you absolutely don't need, and will probably never, ever install.

Why would you click this download link

Yellow Curve 1 was a good curve, and it was yellow. But was it yellow enough, and curve enough? It seems not. It seems we needed another curve to fill that role. Thus Yellow Curve 2 was born, just as yellow, and yet even more curve. But still, modder Beardmonkey was not satisfied. And lo: Yellow Curve 3, the most yellow curve of them all.

Why would click this download link

Jumbo ice cream cones? Wanna eat 'em up. Giant doughnuts? Delightful! Clown heads? Whoa whoa whoa. Hold the damn phone. Not in this city, pal. Unlike more general prop remover mods, this one has a singular and pure vendetta against red-nosed busts. If you really hate clowns, even tiny ones scattered around a digital city have to go.

Why would you click this download link

No one really likes to parallel park, but this seems a bit extreme.

Why would you click this download link

Hm, what would make Chirpy less annoying? How about making it post messages from Japan's 2ch message board? Yeah, that'll definitely solve the problem.

Why would you click this download link

Trees in Cities: Skylines just have this yucky natural thing to them. There's, like, dirt and stuff when you place them, as if to show that they grow out of the soil. This mod is having none of that, and removes any sign of dirt for pristine ground across your entire city. Another mod goes even farther, removing dirt from around picnic benches and other objects, too. Begone, foul peat.

Why would you click this download link

Fuck birds.

Why would you click this download link

Listen, I want to add some more music to Cities: Skylines, but I don't want it to be music you've ever heard of. I've never even heard of it. I found them by typing random letters into Soundcloud URLs and throwing out any album results that didn't sound like a brand of organic air freshener. Install this mod, and you are now cool.

Why would you click this download link

This is either a damning commentary on the sameness of urban housing, or modder Jimbobbedyjobob is obsessed with populating a Skylines city with almost-but-not-quite identical houses. 45 variations, to be exact. If you need 45 copies of a small brick house with different colored windows, you've come to the right place. Var212a or bust!

Why would you click this download link

"What does this mod?" asks DaHamper97. What does this mod indeed, DaHamper97. The world may never know.

Why would you click this download link

For when a water tower without an advertisement just looks fake. As if any easily visible surface could possibly be left free of branding! With this mod, our suspension of disbelief in Cities: Skylines remains intact.

Why would you click this download link

"It's a unuseful theme! I hope you'll have fun. Or not." writes modder 1schiffer4. This feels like a trick. This mod has only had 2 unique visitors on its page, ever, and I'm pretty sure they're both from me on different computers.

Dubbed by Paradox as the the feature fans have been asking for since launch, we learned in August that Cities: Skylines is set to welcome natural disasters to its city-building bounds. By way of the aptly named Natural Disasters expansion that's due at some point this winter the developer has now teased a sliver of in-game footage.

Which means tornadoes, forest fires, hurricanes, tsunamis, and, evidently, meteorite showers which impact the city shown here to devastating effect.

"Natural Disasters will add a series of city-destroying emergencies to Cities: Skylines, which can occur unexpectedly during the game or be manually triggered by mayors seeking a challenge or who just really dislike their citizens," reads a blog post on the Paradox blog.

When Chris went street-level in Cities: Skylines recently, his disasters were of a more existential nature. The next expansion's catastrophes, on the other hand, are very much literal occurrences.

"Buildings and infrastructure will suffer untold destruction unless cities include the right emergency countermeasures, and players will have to act fast to keep things running as fire and flood sweep through town," continues the post. "In addition, a new Scenario Mode allows for custom challenges to be designed and shared through Steam Workshop."

That last part sounds particularly exciting given what we've seen from the game's keen community by way of official updates, and to-scale interpretations of real life cities. As was featured on Reddit yesterday, user radiativeDoctor spent 200-250 hours recreating San Francisco with the help of 60 mods and around 1,000 assets from the Cities Steam Workshop page. More interesting still, radiativeDoctor is French and has only ever visited the city in real life once while on business.

Anyway, no launch date for Cities: Skylines' Natural Disasters expansion just yet, beyond "this winter" as stated on the game's blog.

What with my occasional fascination with the tiny little people living in the simulation games I play, I thought it might be nice to spend some time as one of them. There are a few mods for Cities: Skylines that allow players to explore their cities from street-level, and what better way to judge my own city-building skills than through the eyes of an average citizen? Hit the shrink-ray: I'm going in.

First step: pick a house for myself. I find an attractive little home in a cul-de-sac (okay, technically it's a dead-end, but I always envied the families who lived in cul-de-sacs because their kids could play catch in the street without having to stop for cars, plus the word cul-de-sac just sounds so peaceful). I name the house 'Livingston Residence' just as I notice it is currently being burglarized. Oops. Well, it's nice to have company over, and if my simulated citizen is anything like the real me, he doesn't have anything worth stealing.

Next, I need a job. I pick a random business on the other side of my city, name it PC Gamer, and decide to recreate my editor's terrible mistake of hiring me. Again, I notice something a little too late: the sign on the front of the building reads "Trash News."

Oops, again. I assure you, that was a complete accident. PC Gamer's news is top quality, provided I'm not the one writing it.

I decide to wait until the early morning to begin my commute, so I spend the evening looking around my neighborhood. The police drive by and put a stop to the crime taking place in my home, though several nearby houses are also being burgled, not to mention a house down the street which, the icons tell me, is both filled with uncollected garbage and at least one corpse. I haven't even gotten off my block but I'm starting to doubt my little city has been designed and managed by a genius.

When the sun comes up, it's time to commute. Using a mod that lets you drive cars around, with the catchy and memorable name of [1.4.0 compatible!]Operatelt [pre-alpha/stilling testing!], I climb into the little station wagon parked outside my house and drive off. Driving is simple: using the arrows keys (though I remapped them to WASD) you can drive around in first- or third-person view, or top-down. The makers of [1.4.0 compatible!]Operatelt [pre-alpha/stilling testing!] have thought of everything.

Driving actually makes me a little queasy. There's collision enabled, so other cars can ram into me, and they do, more or less constantly. Sometimes I'm knocked off the road, sometimes I'm lifted into the air, sometimes I'm just wobbled around a little. That, along with the constant blaring sirens from police cars and ambulances that seem to surround me at all times starts to give me a genuine headache after just a couple of minutes. I consider lowering the game's SFX volume, but that seems like cheating. My little citizens have to put up with this city I built, and so I'm going to force myself to do the same.

I switch to top-down view, and while that doesn't make me feel sick it's still difficult, due to the tank controls and the fact that the ramming from other vehicles never seems to stop, except when a hot dog truck drives right over me.

Finally I pull into a quiet alley just to collect my thoughts for a bit, and decide that the surface streets just aren't viable. The city noise is making me absolutely nuts, so I begin creeping over lawns and through plazas, anywhere I can escape from other vehicles. Finally, I find a nice big stretch of grass leading to what looks like a suspiciously abandoned road.

I find out why the road has no traffic a moment later, but it still beats trying to drive through midtown.

I knew traffic in my city wasn't great, but to experience it firsthand is pretty illuminating, and I finally begin to understand why so many residences and businesses are clogged with trash and dead bodies. I turn down a two-way street and pass a one-lane traffic jam about a quarter of a mile long entirely made up of ambulances, hearses, and garbage trucks.

That's great. People are sick, then die waiting for the ambulances to pick them up, then lie there dead because the hearses can't reach them because of all the garbage trucks.

This isn't a city, it's a post-apocalypse of my own making. I should go to prison. Well, I should build a prison (knowing me, probably smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood), then go to it, if the prison truck could actually reach it, which it couldn't. I should serve a life sentence in a prison truck, then.

My commute to work lasts long into the night, as I become lost repeatedly (it's hard to tell where I am with no godlike map view) and get rammed so many times I'm starting to grind my teeth. Finally, I give up on the car and decide to proceed on foot.

For this I use the First-person Auto-walking mod. It's much easier walking through the city than driving, thanks to the lack of collisions. The noise, though. The noise is incessant. I stop to rest in a park I thoughtfully built next to another park, but it provides no relief from the constantly blaring sirens of emergency vehicles stuck in traffic. I've only made it about halfway across the city to PC Gamer's News Trash office, and the sun is already setting again.

I still feel like turning down the SFX volume is cheating, but I have a splitting headache so I decide to use a simple trick to making the noise stop: I delete every single hospital and police station from the map. That feels completely fair.

I know, I know, everyone in the entire city seems unhappy to lose all medical and police services, but noise is down, traffic is smoother, and it's not like ambulances were actually reaching anyone. Besides, I left all the morgues, so when my citizens expire amid mounds of trash in this lawless city of doom, at least they'll be properly buried.

Without the noise, the city is much more bearable, and I finally make my walk all the front door of good old PC Gamer, home of Trash News. I'm two days late for work, but I've definitely got some news: my city is a damn nightmare and I should never be allowed to build again.

Following in the footsteps of Capcom and Stardock s recent Publisher Weekends on Steam, Paradox Interactive is offering deals on a selection of its back catalogue over the next few days.

City-builder Cities: Skylines is likely the pick of the bunch, selling at 75 percent off its normal price for just 5.74/$7.49. Since its release last year, the SimCity-a-like (although distinctly better than Maxis 2013 iteration) and PC Gamer Community Champion 2015 has enjoyed a host of nifty expansions, intuitive mods, and is even being used by real life Swedish city planners to develop a new city district.

The space-set grand strategy-meets-4X Stellaris has a 20 percent discount, selling at 27.99/$31.99, while the publisher s latest slant on the Second World War Hearts of Iron 4 is going for 31.49/$35.99. The latter s forerunner, although now slightly dated, is just 1.99/$2.49 over the weekend, as is the original Magika. Fan Favourite Crusader Kings 2 receives a 75 percent cut and costs 7.49/$9.99.

The list of deals in its entirety can be viewed over here, however my own star pick from that lot is the wonderful Pillars of Eternity which, at 60 percent off, is going for 13.99/$17.99.

The Paradox Publisher Weekend Steam sale runs from right now until Monday, September 5 at 10am PT/6pm BST and everything else in between.

Behind Cities: Skylines sophisticated updates and real-world projects lies a dedicated community of modders. From the sublime to the ridiculous, it s an ever-burgeoning group who never seems short of ideas something Colossal Order and Paradox appear to have taken note of in the game s latest DLC.

The Content Creator Pack: Art Deco is the city-builder's next incoming expansion and is a collection of modder Matt Shroomblaze Crux s work. Paradox will publish the add-on at 3.99/$4.99 and will share the benefits from the pack s sales with the content creator, as well as offering an initial payment to cover the cost of production.

As the title suggests, Crux s original creations (some of which are featured below) include a range of Deco-inspired buildings, however future Content Creator packs will highlight the work and different styles of other intuitive modders.

After over 3,400 hours in Cities: Skylines, it s wonderful to have my own buildings become part of the game s landscape, says Crux himself. Because the Art Deco era is so highly regarded as one of the best building styles of history, I think it needs to be represented as such.

"I made the suggestion to Paradox Interactive and they allowed me to come up with the buildings of my choice. I m eager to see what the rest of the community thinks of them.

Intuitive Cities: Skylines players have recreated real life locations within the city-builder in the past, however the Swedish Building Service Svensk Byggtj nst is now using the game to plan the development of a new city district.

Alongside Paradox and officials from the city of Stockholm, a workshop is set to run on September 3 and 4 to explore possible methods for this district to become sustainable, and versatile enough to support the needs of its residents, according to a statement.

Norra Djurg rdstaden will add 12,000 new homes and 35,000 workspaces to help combat accommodation shortages in the area, and the idea is to simulate the district in-game to test different scenarios.

In addition to professional city builders and planners, Cities: Skylines players are also involved in the project, offering ideas and modifications in-line with the workshop s goals. Skylines Modder Alexander Oberroither will be flown in from Austria to take part in the workshop in person.

A citizen dialogue that functions well is key for urban city planning, now and in the future, says head of communications at the Swedish Building Services Erik Kalmaru. Computer games have shown to be a very effective tool to build engagement and generate ideas, but also to visualise the process. We undertook a previous project with Minecraft and Mojang which developed into a project spanning the world, and we look forward to seeing what using Cities: Skylines as a tool will generate.

For me, one of the most enjoyable things about classic city-builder Simcity 2000 was raising a bustling town from scratch and then razing it to the ground by way of self-imposed natural disasters a feature sorely missed from modern day genre champion Cities: Skylines. According to publisher Paradox Interactive, the latter is the feature fans have been asking for since launch, which is probably why the game s latest expansion adds exactly that.

Cities: Skylines Natural Disasters is due this winter, featuring a catalog of catastrophes to challenge mayor-players everywhere." This includes combating fires, earthquakes, and meteor strikes, among other doomsday scenarios, in order to keep your populace alive. Look, see:

Buildings and infrastructure will be destroyed, fire can spread across locations, and countless lives may be lost unless players implement the right emergency plans and responses and keep an ear on the new radio alert system, reads a statement from Paradox and developer Colossal Order. Fans of Cities: Skylines will have the chance to overcome everything from massive fires to meteor strikes, and allow their friends to do the same with a new Scenario Mode, where custom challenges can be designed and shared through Steam Workshop.

Besides Scenario Mode, Natural Disasters brings with it a new broadcast network which lets players spread emergency alerts and evacuation warnings, not to mention kick back and enjoy a host of new in-game music stations.

All told, the overarching idea of the incoming add-on is to plan, respond to, and counter the burgeoning devastation that relentlessly unfolds around you. But there s also scope to instigate the end of the world by your own hand you know, on the off-chance you re as twisted as me.

Cities: Skylines Natural Disasters is without a concrete launch date, but is due at some point this winter.

Paradox Interactive has released a new bit of free Cities: Skylines DLC called Match Day that enables digital mayors to build a football stadium in their cities, attract a team, and then deal with the consequences: The ticket income is sweet, but traffic on game day can be a real headache. The DLC also adds new stadium-related policies, and there's a new hat (and new chirps) for Chirper, too.

The DLC comes alongside a small update that makes a handful of relatively minor fixes and tweaks to the game lowering the amount of power that Solar Plants produce during the night, for instance, and setting snowplow blades to face in the proper direction when using left-hand traffic and also adds five in-game items that had previously been available only to those who had preordered the game: the Carousel, Dog Park, Bouncy Castle, Basketball Court, and Botanical Garden.

The Match Day DLC is live now on Steam, and you can see the full patch notes on the Paradox forums. You can also, since you're here, feast your eyes on a stunning, 50,000-building Cities: Skylines recreation of the city of Seattle, or if you're in the mood for something different, watch 200,000 innocent people get swept away in a deluge of liquid poop.

The PC Gaming Show returns to E3 on Monday June 13, featuring game announcements, updates to existing favourites, and conversation with top developers. You can find out what to expect here, and also book free tickets to attend in person at pcgamingshow.com. The PC Gaming Show will be broadcast live through twitch.tv/pcgamer from 11:30 am PT/2:30 pm ET/6:30 pm GMT, but be sure to tune in beforehand to check out The Steam Speedrun, in which one lucky winner will buy as many games as they can in three minutes.

Intrepid Cities: Skylines player inthoughtwelive has recreated downtown Seattle using 49,152 buildings, at which point the building limit put an end to his architectural dreams. I haven't been to Seattle this could be a replica Mombasa for all I know but Google Maps seems to corroborate things.

Starting with a template by Tanis_2589, inthoughtwelive "redid all the highways, and then eyeballed the rest using Google Earth as a reference". Traffic lights had to be forcibly disabled so as to avoid a traffic jam of apocalyptic proportions.

Seattle residents can attempt to spot their house in the full gallery here.