In Part 1 of this diary, I named a citizen Santa and set up a town around him, with the plan of trying to protect the jolly old elf from Cities: Skylines' Natural Disasters DLC. Also in Part 1, that town got wiped out by a meteor strike.

When I say wiped out, I mean it. It's almost entirely gone. Huge swaths of commercial and residential areas are now piles of rubble. My hulking Disaster Response Unit located just a block from Santa's house? It's been obliterated by the disaster. That means there's no one left alive to look for anyone left alive, and the people who are supposed to clean up the rubble are all buried under rubble. As mayor of Santa City, I can officially state that Christmas is cancelled.

But Santa did survive—somehow. His house sits on the very, very edge of the meteor's blast radius. I'm both happy and amazed that Santa's house is still standing, but there are two little problems. First, the house is on fire, and second, Santa is still inside. Despite the emergency shelter next door and the evacuation buses circling the block, Santa hasn't escaped to safety.

While I watch, waiting for fire trucks that never come, I notice Santa suddenly vanishes from the house. It's not elven magic or flying reindeer, he's simply moved out and into another house, on the other side of the city (I can keep tabs on him thanks to the handy Favorite Cims mod). Just in the St. Nick of time, too: his original house continues to burn a few moments longer, then collapses.

The aftermath of the meteor: 109 buildings destroyed, 449 citizens dead. What's left of the city is in major trouble. I have to clear ruined buildings and roads manually, and rebuild all my services, like police, fire, and schools. Not for the whole city, of course, just for the area surrounding Santa's new home. I also plop down a new Disaster Response Unit, right across the street from his new pad, which I name North Pole West.

While I'm slowly cleaning up, another meteor arrives. Thankfully, this one strikes the coast, where it only takes out some water lines and a wind turbine. Now I have two massive craters and a chasm from the earthquake. The map is covered with scars.

What's worse is that having rebuilt so many services to protect Santa, I'm now out of money, and I'm operating at a loss. I'm slashing budgets left and right, meaning that half my city is in a blackout from the disaster and the other half is in a blackout from a poorly funded power department. The problem is mostly utilities. All those water lines that aren't serving citizens anymore (because the citizens are dead) still require upkeep in the budget. To save the city I'm going to have to rip it apart, delete almost everything that costs me money, and start rebuilding slowly and efficiently. 

I bulldoze, well, just about everything except a small sliver of residences and industrial areas. Every unneeded inch of water pipe is removed. As I cut off citizens from power and services, things get bad. Toilets overflow. Trucks can't make deliveries. Crime goes through the roof. Some asshole even commits a crime at the snow dump, which is a dump for snow. It's literally just a big box of snow! I could understand someone committing crime at a garbage dump (and someone is committing crime at the garbage dump, now that I look) because even garbage has a little bit of value. But a snow dump? That's desperation. Yet, my box of snow has attracted snow crimes.

Santa abruptly moves from his current house (which has no electricity and is overflowing with sewage and garbage) into a new one in the very small section of town that's still functioning properly. I name his house North Pole: New Beginnings, adding a smiley face because I'm feeling the need for optimism. Santa is 83 now, by the way, and I fear not long for this world.

It seems like the game won't throw disasters at you if you have a low population, which is good. It'll give me some time to rebuild. And I'm going to need that time. My population has plummeted to 113 people, meaning the corpses of the meteor strike now outnumber the living.

Thankfully, there's a Christmas miracle. I'm offered a bailout after going bankrupt. A cool $50,000 to rebuild the smoking crater of death that is Santa City.  With this bit of cash, I slowly and carefully begin rebuilding. I'm not sure I can call it progress: the population remains at only a few hundred citizens, my budget is still shoestring, and the most activity I see on my chilly streets is a single donut truck making the rounds.

And, in sadder news, my original Santa has died at the age of 95. I watch as he's picked up and deposited in the cemetery, pour some eggnog on his grave, check to see his heir in is place, and get back to work.

Tomorrow, in Part 3: Can the town, and my new Santa, be saved?

When trying to come up with a game to play for a holiday feature, Cities: Skylines seemed a natural choice. With February's Snowfall DLC, my city can be blanketed with frost and dusted by blizzards. With a few custom assets, some of my city's houses will have Christmas lights. There's a player-created map called Christmas Island and a theme called The North Pole.

Best of all, since Skylines let you rename things, I can pick a citizen, rename him Santa, rename his house The North Pole, and rename his workplace Santa's Workshop. And, with the Natural Disasters DLC installed and cranked as high as it will go, I can see if I can protect my new Santa from dying as the result of earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and meteor strikes! It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, provided Christmas explodes a lot.

My rules are to only use a single square of map: it would be easy to mitigate disaster by buying additional map tiles and leaving them empty, increasing the chances of disasters hitting unpopulated areas. I'm not using any money cheats, and I'll play until my city reaches a population of 20,000 residents, otherwise known as a Capital City, or until Santa is killed in a natural disaster. (If Santa dies of natural causes, I'll replace him with an heir.) 

I begin my game. Before long, houses begin springing up, and before longer, I spot one of the modded homes with holiday decorations. Living within are a family of five, so I name one adult Santa Claus and one Mrs. Claus, before noticing both of the adults are men. So, I change Mrs. Claus to Mr. Claus.

My chosen Santa is 33, uneducated, and works at a factory called Garments Unlimited, which I quickly rename to Santa's Workshop. I watch him drive to and from work in a red sports car—I guess Santa is doing OK for himself—then set about my task: protecting him from natural disasters at all costs. I build an emergency shelter right next door to his house, and lay out an evacuation route that will ensure a bus will pick him and his family up (at the expense of everyone else in the city) and bring him to the nearby shelter when disaster strikes. 

Roughly fifteen seconds after I've got the shelter in place, the town's first disaster occurs. I'm notified that a sinkhole is "about to happen." It's alarming, really. I'd been thinking about fires and storms and earthquakes, but a sinkhole? That could swallow up Santa, his family, and his house in one gulp.

Thankfully, it only swallows up some commercial properties about eight blocks away. Three buildings succumb, and 22 people are killed. None of them are magical toy-delivering elves, however, just non-enchanted normals. Whew!

As I continue building my city, I check in on Santa periodically, at one point finding him sitting outside a convenience store looking at his phone. See, Santa is just like us.

Sadly, I've paid so much attention to Santa's happiness and preservation by building parks, a doctor's office, a fire station, and police station all within a block of him, that his home levels up. That means it no longer has Christmas lights all over it, which feels quite a bit less festive. On the plus side, I build the massive Disaster Response Unit right behind his house. I also make a tiny district just for Santa's home, so I can assign it—and thus him—rescue chopper priority. With all these protective services surrounding St. Nick, I feel confident that I'm poised to whisk him to safety when something goes wrong.

There's one thing I can't protect against, however: Santa is getting older due to the curse of time. Years have passed while I've been growing my city, and he's already 65 and retired from the Workshop. I choose Piper, his eldest child, to serve as Santa Jr.

Another disaster strikes. This time it's an earthquake. Again, it's a good distance away from Santa's house, but it causes several fires throughout the city, a few buildings collapse, and a great chasm scars the earth. A few minutes later, observant mayor that I am, I notice that every single house in town has raw sewage backing up into it: the quake broke the pipes leading to the river where I festively dump the town's collective poop water. It's a quick fix. The earthquake, by the way, destroyed 12 buildings and killed 35 people.

Just as I've got everyone's toilets working properly again, a house catches fire. It's right outside the Disaster Response Unit building, directly across the street from Santa's house. The fire department is still putting out fires from the earthquake, and I don't want to take chances, so I activate the emergency shelter. Santa himself is visiting a convenience store at the time so he misses the bus, but at least this gives me a chance to see how his children react in a crisis.

Piper, Santa's heir, reacts by moving completely out of town. I quickly assign Santa's son Charles as the new heir by changing his name to Santa Jr. 2, but I notice he stays home during the emergency, rather than walking thirty feet to the shelter. That won't do. I rename him Idiot Santa Failure Jr., and instead tap Santa's other son, 20-year-old Raymond, the duties of heir, since he is wise enough to head to the shelter. 

So far, I'm feeling pretty confident. Santa is aging, but safe, and I've got a backup with a good head on his shoulders. My town is steadily growing and I'm doing well with my buget. I feel like I've reached 'not a creature is stirring' levels of comfort in my city.

That's when the meteor hits.

Ho-ho-oh-no. Tomorrow, in Part 2, we'll dig through the rubble to see just how bad things suddenly got for Santa City.

Norra Djurgårdstaden is an area in central Stockholm that’s currently undergoing substantial urban redevelopment. The Swedish Building Service, Svensk Byggtjänst, has partnered with city officials and, with a focus on long-term sustainability, the on-going initiative plans to add 12,000 new homes and 35,000 workspaces to the region in a bid to offset its ever-increasing population. How does this relate to the world of videogames? City-building simulator Cities: Skylinesis at the forefront of the project. 

By simulating real-life environments and scenarios in-game, Paradox and Colossal Order’s city-builder is being used by real-world city planners to explore ways to support the needs of the new district’s residents. “Norra Djurgårdstaden is seeking new ways of engaging people that are normally not involved in the discussions of the future of our city, and how to plan for its desired direction,” says project director Staffan Lorentz. “Games can be an entry port for a new group having a real say and having new ways of looking at things.”

That’s where Cities: Skylines comes in. By way of three weekend-long workshops, Stockholm city officials have joined Swedish Building Service representatives, Paradox and Colossal Order developers, and members of the public to discuss how the proposed district will look and function once development is complete. Special considerations such as environmental schemes to reduce fossil fuel consumption and the installation of surplus cycle lanes and public transport routes have been flagged as top priority, thus these scenarios have been applied and tested in-game to see how they might play out in reality.

As such, the district in its entirety has been mapped out both via a scaled physical model and within Cities: Skylines—with city planners applying and reapplying digital iterations of the area following visits to and from the real-world building site itself. Without prior training, technical blueprints mean very little to the average citizen. Therefore the point of the coinciding workshops is to showcase the scheme in earnest—fully realised in three dimensions against relatable surroundings—which in turn serves to help the learning process.

“I think the most exciting part about all of this is that it isn’t just a PR stunt,” says Paradox’s COO Susana Meza. “Actually, people are genuinely wanting to solve some of the problems and issues that might arise when city planning in this day and age, but also innovate around it. The fact they have the people who’re are actually making the decisions, sitting on the budget, involved in this and using a new medium I think is extremely cool—but also brave.” 

Using games as a public consultation tool is something the Swedish Building Service is already familiar with, having collaborated with Mojang and the United Nations in 2012. Named Block By Block, this project was a similar city-building scheme that used Minecraft to encourage fresh perspectives and helped citizens have a say in the reconstruction process of their own neighbourhoods. The Norra Djurgårdstaden project, on the other hand, operates on a grander scale and therefore marks a more sophisticated collaboration between city development and videogames. 

Yet Cities: Skylines in its vanilla state isn’t without its limitations, and to this end renowned Cities modder Alexander Oberroither was flown in from Austria to attend the last workshop. Here, he explained how the game might better portray reality with the use of additional user-made mods beyond the base game. “I see potential in Cities: Skylines being used for a lot of different things in real life, and this workshop fulfilled its purpose in allowing us to find out which direction the project is going,” says Oberroither. “I really enjoyed my three days [taking part]. I learned a lot and I hope that I can make use of it when I start studying spatial planning at the university in October.”

In light of the most recent workshop, the Swedish Building Service plans to review its findings and decide how Cities: Skylines can best be used in pushing the project forward. When the time comes, no matter how close the game’s interpretation is to the project’s final incarnation, the ways in which Cities: Skylines has been used to help visualise proposals, discuss city functions, and, ultimately, design buildings is quite remarkable and is something which could pave the way for similar ventures down the line. 

“I think that today most people have an association with games, be that yourself or your kids playing with them, most people are exposed to games in one way or another,” adds Meza. “As such, it’s a super powerful medium to do something more beyond providing entertainment. I think we’ve just scraped the surface. Games are something everyone is talking about now—we have every possibility to make an impact.”

In the case of Norra Djurgårdstaden, its residents are the ones who’ll be impacted the most. “Engaging citizens is part of the future,” says Norra Djurgårdstaden local Ann Edberg. “It’s fantastic to be able to participate in the creation of a new part of Stockholm during its development process, rather than just experience it once it’s done.”

Photos for this feature by Pelle Jansson/Cowmob Photography.

You might be surprised to learn that being a good mayor is not entirely compatible with being a wrathful supreme deity. Case in point: The Cities: Skylines Natural Disasters DLC that went live today, adding "new systems for disaster alerts and responses," and of course the disasters themselves, including earthquakes, tornadoes, forest fires, and, somehow, worse. Disasters can strike through simple bad luck, or they can come about for more sinister reasons. 

"More sinister reasons" of course means you, because if there's one thing more fun than building up a thriving, modern metropolis, it's calling forth great burning balls of rock from the sky to smash it all to pieces. But whether it happens through vengeful whim or the vagaries of fate, once the carnage has begun you can choose to stand back and watch, or help with the effort to keep the lights on and the traffic moving. 

The Natural Disasters expansion includes five pre-made scenarios with custom game objectives, an emergency broadcast network to help spread the bad news, and new hats for Chirper, the in-game social media mascot. There's also a Natural Disasters Scenario expansion to the regular scenario editor, which is free for everyone. 

Naturally, no disaster is complete without Chris Livingston, and he's been playing with the expansion over the past few days. Find out what he thinks about it here. 

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The Cities: Skylines community has been clamoring for disasters since day one, and this week they're finally getting their wish in the form of tornadoes, tsunamis, sinkholes, earthquakes, meteor strikes, and more. But the Natural Disasters expansion doesn't just give you fun ways to lay waste to your cities, it also provides the tools to save your residents with early warning systems, emergency shelters, and disaster response teams. I've been playing with the expansion the past few days, and both the disasters and the tools you're given to deal with them are good fun.

First, though: senseless destruction! There are a few different ways to play with disasters, but the easiest is by firing them off manually. Simply pick one from the new menu, target a section of your city, click, and wait a couple in-game days. Or, pick a bunch of them and blanket your city in impending doom. You can also enable them to strike randomly while you play, and there's a slider to adjust the frequency of the disasters.

The disasters are all nicely rendered and fun to watch in a horrifying sort of way. Tornadoes will weave a path from one side of the map to the other, pulling apart houses, yanking vehicles and pedestrians into the air, and leaving behind a trail of wreckage. Meteors create a huge blast, fling debris into the sky, and leave behind a charred impact crater. Tsunamis will slosh around in the ocean for a while, then slowly but brutally creep ashore, submerging everything in their path. Earthquakes and sinkholes will cause buildings to collapse, and there's even a disaster that will simply make a building collapse on its own.

Some disasters cause others. An earthquake will do damage, but if it's near water it may also cause a tsunami. Meteors and lightning strikes will cause fires. If your power plant or water systems are destroyed or damaged, you'll have to contend with blackouts and sewage problems as well as the event that caused them. If you like destroying the things you build, these disasters can lay waste to your creations quickly and efficiently while you watch in either horror or happiness.

If you're not content simply blowing things up and killing people, there are measures you can put in place to mitigate the disaster. To protect your city from tsunamis, you can build sea walls. Add a deep space radar dish to look for approaching asteroids, weather detection equipment to warn you of lightning storms, buoys to detect tsunamis, and radio towers to make sure your citizens can be alerted in time. And for all disasters, you can build a huge emergency response team headquarters, which will dispatch choppers to search for survivors and turn rubble into buildable areas so you don't have to spend days clicking ruins with your bulldozer tools before rebuilding. Thank god.

You'll also want to set up emergency shelters for your citizens to flee to (if you like your citizens, that is). These buildings can protect your population, but they still need management: make sure they're in an area accessible by industrial zones to keep them stocked with food and goods, because even after the disaster residents may need to remain there if their homes have been destroyed. You can even create evacuation routes in your neighborhoods in a similar fashion to how you draw bus lines. It's an enjoyable extra layer of management when it could have easily just been a building you drop into place and forget about, and it's fun to see how well you've planned ahead when a disaster finally lands on your city.

Even if you don't buy Natural Disasters, there's a nice free goodie for the base game: the scenario editor. You can set conditions for a city, and trigger an effect when those conditions are met, like a cash reward for hitting a certain population count or a fine if your citizens aren't healthy enough. If you've bought the Disasters expansion, you can make baffling scenarios as well, like triggering an earthquake once 10,000 citizens have ridden the bus or unleashing a tsunami if you take out too many loans (or, even more confusingly, if you haven't taken out enough loans). I've only been tinkering with it, but I already can sense some fun to be had there, since you can share these scenarios with your friends.

Disasters have been greatly missed from Colossal Order's city-building sim, and I'm happy they've finally arrived even such a long time after the base game was released. Whether you're simply into senseless destruction or an additional management challenge, I think it's a nice addition. Best of all, now we get to see what modders will do with the new material. I'm hoping Godzilla, The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, or giant Zoidberg will join the collection of city-smashing disasters.