I haven't checked in on any of my Cities: Skylines creations lately, but last time I looked they were suffering from a number of problems, like traffic, lack of educated workers, a slight overabundance of blimps, and the fact that some idiot built a creamatorium and a garbage dump right next to a playground. Pollution, of course, is an ongoing issue in any Skylines city, but some solutions are on the way.

The next Cities: Skylines expansion will address pollution problems by letting you go green. Green Cities "adds 350 new assets to the core game, adding a massive selection of new visual options, complete with eco-friendly buildings, organic shops, electric vehicles, and new services designed to make pollution a quaint notion of the past."

We don't have a release date—the expansion only promises to arrive on the wind "later this year." We don't have a price yet either, but even if you decide not to buy it there will be the usual smattering of freebies, in this case "electric cars, road modding, changes to noise pollution, and more beautification options in the form of parks and trees, among other things." Find out more here.

From Mass Transit to Blimpton, Natural Disasters to Snowfall—Cities: Skylines has impressed with its long-term commitment to playful expansions. The latest is of the 'mini' variety, and lets players plan and promote their own city-wide music festivals. 'Concerts', as it's known, is out now. 

Said to grant players control of "every aspect of making their metropolises more musical", the Concerts add-on sees city builders erecting festival ground buildings, pricing their gigs as they best see fit, and supporting their festivities with new laws, budgets, and crowd monetisation options. 

On the Cities: Skylines modding front, changes are afoot, so say Paradox and Colossal Order: "Alongside the mini-expansion, Paradox and Colossal Order are restructuring the content manager tool as a free update to Cities: Skylines. The content manager now makes it much simpler for players to organize, search for and find their favorite mod-assets, so you can spend less time scrolling and more time building."   

Cities: Skylines Concerts is out now for £4.99/$6.99.

The Mass Transit expansion brought some new public transportation options to Cities: Skylines, but having already reported responsibly about them it's clearly time to throw a hundred blimps into the sky and see what that's like. My goal isn't just to blot out the sun with blimps, but to design a town around them. I want blimps to not only be the chief form of transportation for my citizens, but their only choice. In the new town of Blimpton, it's blimps or GTFO.

My first step is to plan my three zones: residential, commercial, and industrial. I unlock four extra squares of land (I'm playing with unlimited money and all buildings unlocked) so my buildable area looks like a giant plus sign, and I build power stations, water lines, and roads in three prongs of the plus. Not a lot of roads, mind you: I won't be needing them. But the few roads I build are long, winding, and stupid. My hopes are to discourage anyone from climbing into a car and driving: it'll just take too damn long. Want to get somewhere in New Blimpton? Better take a blimp.

A tool for renaming roads has been added to Cities: Skylines with the Mass Transit DLC, so I name my roads things like BLIMPS ARE REALLY COOL, GUYS and NO CARS ALLOWED. I figure it can't hurt. I throw in police stations, fire departments, hospitals, a cemetery, and a few other amenities. No schools, though. I want my citizens to be dumb enough to think that taking a blimp to the grocery store is a sensible idea.

I stare at the map for a bit, feeling like something is missing. Oh, right! I need to put in blimps. Heh. I build two blimp stops in each area, and connect them first with blimp lines (it dictates the path blimps will fly) and then create the blimp lines themselves. One goes from residential to commercial, one from residential to industrial, and one goes from commercial to industrial. I build blimp depots, to supply the lines with airships, crank up the vehicle count modifier to 500% (thus adding way more blimps) and boost the transportation budget to 150%. My three lines will have the maximum number of airships so there will be no excuses from my residents. I've already got 20 blimps in the air by the time the first house is built. People are moving in.

While I watch houses being built, I see a flicker of movement on one of my streets, the street I've named DRIVING IS DUMB, TAKE A BLIMP. It's a car! A car, on my street! I zoom in furiously, ready to expel the offender from my town, feeling the same way God must have felt when he looked down and saw that Adam and Eve had broken his one rule and were driving around the Garden of Eden.

It's a police car. Okay. Okay. Calm down. That's okay. The police are allowed to drive. It's not like they can fly an Anti-Crime Blimp around. Yet. Though frankly, that would be incredible. I also have to prepare myself to see other service vehicles driving on my streets, like garbage trucks, donut wagons, and hearses, because undertakers probably won't haul off the dead in dirigibles, much as I wish they would.

The residential zone quickly fills up with new homes, and I'm pleased to see a total of zero cars on the roads other than the occasional ambulance or garbage truck. My fleet of blimps drifts back and forth between stops, now around ninety airships in all. A bit puzzling, though: there are zero passengers. The people who have moved in are, much to my pleasure, unwilling to drive anywhere. But they also seem unwilling to board one of the many, many blimps that are waiting to shuttle them to the far-flung commercial and industrial zones.

To be fair, nothing has been built in the industrial zone, and while a few stores have appeared in the commercial area, they are all complaining about the lack of workers. Well, yeah, if no one is taking the blimps, no one is getting to work. 

A-ha! Staring at my blimp stats finally pays off, as I eventually see a single passenger using the blimp system! I feel like yelling "We got one!" and slamming my open palm down on the Blimp Alarm Button installed on my desk, like Annie Potts in Ghostbusters, only I don't have a Blimp Alarm Button installed on my desk. Yet.

Ninety blimps, one rider. It's a start. I click from blimp to blimp (to blimp to blimp to blimp), searching for the lone rider. I'd like to see where this brave pioneer is going. Finally, I locate the blimp he's on, which is headed for the empty industrial area. I follow it until it lands, then click on the passenger when he disembarks.

His name is Todd Harvey, an uneducated adult who works at... the blimp stop. The one he just landed at. The only person using the blimp network is a guy who works for the blimp network. It's like opening an expensive new restaurant and your only customer is the waiter. I'm a little disappointed, though Todd seems pretty stoked. As he should be, since he just rode a damn blimp.

Maybe my residents need a bit more encouragement to fly my friendly skies. After all, visiting stores no one works at isn't a draw, and with no industry there are no real jobs to commute to apart from taking tickets at a blimp stop no one visits. Maybe a little excitement is in order? Some razzle-dazzle? I quickly throw together a new district on the far end of the map and tastefully cram every goddamn specialty building the game offers into two square blocks: the giant shopping mall, the sports arena, the aquarium, the massive office towers, and so on. I add another blimp depot and three blimp stops and create new blimp lines between it and the other existing districts. Surely this will get people breathlessly clawing for some blimp rides.

It works! Instead of only Todd Harvey taking a blimp to his blimp-job, there are now a total of nine people in transit. That's a ridership increase of nearly 1000 percent, which would probably look good on a graph or PowerPoint presentation, but in truth it's still only about one rider per twelve blimps. What else could my town use?

Education, I suppose. I'd originally hoped to teach my residents using only the educational messages on the sides of my blimps, but it doesn't work that way. Instead, the blimp messages only boost the speed in which citizens can complete their education at the actual school buildings. So, I suppose I'd better build some real schools. I plop down a cluster of schools in the middle of the map, throw in some more pointlessly winding roads, add yet another blimp line to the residential area, and wait.

That's when disaster strikes.

Not a natural disaster (I've got those disabled) and not a Hindenburg disaster (blimps never explode). A car disaster. I am utterly horrified to suddenly see cars on my roads. Not service vehicles, but citizen-driven cars. They're everywhere. I'm aghast. I whirl my camera around the neighborhood, unable to believe my eyes. My precious blimps still fill the air but have been ignored by the gas-pumping, gear-shifting, double-crossing, four-wheeling heathens. You bastards.

"Fine, you want to drive?" I mutter. "I'll give you all the driving you want." As threats go, it's not a great one, like saying to someone who has asked for a pizza "You want pizza? Here are ten pizzas!" Also, it's worth noting that I'm threatening tiny computer-generated people who can't hear me. But I'm going to make driving, which is already ridiculously time consuming, even more so.

I create even longer, more-winding roads, effectively doubling drive time. It doesn't seem to matter. Driving still seems to be faster than blimping, and I think I know why. I've added so many additional blimps to the city that they're all lined up, forming what is essentially a traffic jam in the sky. Much as I love seeing blimps filling every last inch of airspace, it's just not an efficient mode of transport.

It's with great sadness I crank the vehicle modifier back down to normal levels. The extra blimps begin returning to the depot where they'll be taken into the back alley, deflated, folded up, and stored in boxes marked EXTRA BLIMPS (I'm assuming this is what you do with extra blimps).

It does seem to help a bit: the number of riders rises to almost 200, and I see more citizens queuing up at the blimp stops than ever before. Still, for a town of almost 4,000 residents, most people seem to prefer driving their cars along long, winding roads that are named with blimp-friendly phrases than actually climbing on a majestic airship. As if to signify my failure, one of the blimp depots catches fire and burns down.

My dream of a blimp-only town is dashed. I suppose people simply love their cars too much to give them up. My head was in the clouds, but their wheels are on the ground.

With the Natural Disasters expansion, Colossal Order delivered what fans had been clamoring for since day one: a way to wipe out their beloved Cities: Skylines creations with meteors, tidal waves, and tornadoes. The DLC shipped with preventative measures as well, like emergency shelters and early warning systems, but mainly it was a way for players to deliver wanton destruction upon their gleaming skyscrapers and sleepy neighborhoods (not to mention a great way to terrorize Santa Claus).

Compared to plummeting space rocks, forest fires, and deadly tsunamis, the new Mass Transit expansion initially sounded like it would be rather humdrum. You get a monorail. You get a ferry. You get cable cars and a blimp. The intention is to provide players with new ways to move their citizens around their cities and new systems to alleviate traffic jams.

My first thought was... whoopee? Look, I appreciate any addition to Skylines that gives me more options for building, but I feel like as a player I'm personally more interested in blowing up buildings with meteors than I am in peering closely at snarled intersections and drawing bus lines across the map.

Or so I thought.

Thing is, I'm having more fun with Mass Transit than I did with Natural Disasters (or Snowfall, or After Dark, for that matter). Yes, explosions and fires and smoking craters are cool, but the enjoyment is a bit fleeting and when I'm working on building up a city the last thing I want is to deal with a tornado. (Once I'm done with the city, sure, let's destroy it just for fun).

And it's not even the new transit options themselves that makes the expansion so enjoyable. Having new monorails and commuter blimps and ferries is nice, but the real fun of Mass Transit, I'm finding, is coming from the incredibly useful hub buildings. While you can create simple stops for your new transit vehicles, the satisfaction comes from linking them together at the new and expansive hub terminals. To put it simply: the transit hubs are great. If Natural Disasters inspired you to knock down your city, then Mass Transit will make you want to rebuild it from the ground up around these new hubs.

If you have a ferry shipping commuters across a bay, for example, you can deliver them to a hub where they can climb aboard any number of different bus lines that you've linked to the terminal. The buses can then bring them to another hub where they can climb aboard a monorail. There are hubs that act as exchanges from metro lines to trains and even make connections from buses to blimps.

As someone who has never been interested in seriously delving into traffic problems in Cities: Skylines—typically I just slap some extra roads around, or replace two-lane boulevards with something wider—I'm finally and genuinely enjoying focusing on solving my traffic woes. I can't even say why it's so enjoyable, really, but after adding a ferry to get commuters across the bay, and then dragging all my bus lines into nice orderly stops at the ferry terminal, and then seeing citizens immediately get in line because seriously anything is better than trying to drive through my city—and I should know because I tried it myself once—it's just a remarkably satisfying activity.

With some well-placed interconnected terminals, your citizens will be able to step out of their homes, get on a bus or a metro, and make their way across your entire city without ever getting into their cars or even having to walk far to reach their next connection. I've been busily plopping in hubs, spending lots of time linking them up, and then happily watching the results. 

In fact, I'm so into it that I'm completely razing skyscrapers and deleting parks and wiping out neighborhoods, simply because I want to get all my new hubs up and running. In that respect, I'm almost acting as my own natural disaster, and sure, I see a lot of sad faces when I tear a park down or delete a university, but no one complains when I use the space to build a complex network of public transportation. At least, they don't complain loud enough for me to notice.

There's more to the DLC than just the new hubs and rides, like wider highways, roads with monorail tracks built in, and even roads with asymmetrical lanes: two lanes in one direction, and one lane in the other, useful if you've got a traffic problem heading in one direction but not the other. 

There's a few new policies, too, such as adding educational messages to blimps—as opposed to blinking advertisements—and you can also rename roads by simply clicking on them now, which is an addition based on a popular mod. And, you can zoom down to intersections to add and remove stop signs and traffic signals with a simple click, which lets you tackle traffic issues without doing a whole lot of additional construction.

I'm a little surprised to be quite so taken with what I thought would be a useful addition to Cities: Skylines if not a particularly exciting one. And I definitely wouldn't have expected to enjoy linking bus lines to ferry terminals more than I like calling in meteor strikes on football stadiums. But here we are. I'm genuinely excited about bus lines and blimp stops and ferry terminals. There's a first time for everything.

On May 18 the Cities: Skylines gets more syklines in the Mass Transit expansion. Monorails, cable-cars, ferries and blimps are included in the $12.99 / £9.99 pack, which also adds new types of landmarks, and roads, and massive transport hubs to link all these things together. No mention of an Elon Musk style Hyperloop yet, though.

The update also includes new scenarios that challenge you to solve traffic problems. "Become an expert in traffic flow," says the blurb on the official Mass Transit update page, "use that knowledge to improve your city!" There are also new hats for Chirper the definitely-not-Twitter social media bird.

Cities: Skylines seems to have successfully nicked SimCity's biscuits, selling 3.5 million copies as of March.

Paradox' varied, frequently excellent catalogue of sims and strategy games is on sale on Steam this weekend. 

Highlights include the superb Cities: Skylines, true heir to SimCity's throne, which is 68 percent off. The gorgeous, evolving space 4X Stellaris is 40 percent off. Crusader Kings 2, actually one of the best games in the world, is 75 percent off. Glorious co-op wizard-'em'-up, Magicka, is also 75 percent off.

Also! The huge, excellent ode to cRPGs of old, Pillars of Eternity, is 60 percent off. The moody, challenging rop-down shooter Teleglitch is 80 percent off at £1.79 / $2.59. That's a lot of horror for the price of a coffee.

If you want to dig into Paradox' back catalogue you can grab Hearts of Iron 3 and the complete Crusader Kings 1 pack for cheap too.

Great sale. If you were short of something to sink your teeth into this weekend, any of the above will serve you well.

It seems Cities: Skylines has done rather well for Colossal Order, and for publisher Paradox, shifting over 3.5 million copies to date. It's also the second anniversary of the enormo-city builder's release, so in celebration the developer is putting out some free DLC, which will be "available soon".

Pearls from the East will offer up a bunch of China-themed buildings to all players, with the free download comprising "a Panda Zoo, a Chinese Temple, and the Shanghai Pearl Tower", all of which should add a splash of Asian flair to your metropolises.

That's not the only DLC coming soon to the game, of course, as you'll imminently be able to incorporate the Mass Transit expansion, which whacks in monorails, cable cars, and flying blimps, among other bits and bobs. We can finally recreate the alternate universe from Fringe! Oh, but only if the next expansion contains that weird amber stuff that was being used to close dimensional breaches.

Here, have a read of Chris Livingston's delightfully silly Cities: Skylines Christmas adventures.

Ta, Blue's News.

"It's kind of like getting back to the roots," says Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of Colossal Order, developer of Cities: Skylines. I'm speaking to Hallikainen at a demo of Skylines upcoming Mass Transit DLC, which hearkens back to Cities in Motion, Colossal Order's 2011 public transportation simulator (which was followed by Cities in Motion 2 in 2013).

The Mass Transit DLC will introduce four new transportation options to Cities: Skylines. The expensive yet efficient monorail. Cable cars, good for sending passengers over slopes or uneven landscapes. Ferries for carrying commuters over water. And the best (if not the most realistic) option: blimps. I didn't get to try out the DLC myself, only watch as it was demonstrated for me, which is a shame because I really want to get my hands on those blimps. I'm already dreaming of a city that relies entirely on blimp-based public transport. Blimp City, I'll call it.

Tying these new public transportation options together—along with existing ones like trains and buses—will be mass transit hubs. During the demo we look at one that combines a bus station with the monorail, and Hallikainen says there will be four more types of hubs when the DLC is released, letting your passengers easily switch from rail to bus lines or from trains to monorails. Also planned for the DLC is a tool to help your manage automobile traffic: stop signs you can place to improve the flow at troublesome intersections.

While you won't be able to set ticket prices for your various new forms of mass transit, you'll at least be able to customize them: choose their colors, set their schedules (for instance, if you want them running during the day or at night, or both) and name the individual lines. You'll also be able to see how many passengers are waiting at the various stops, and how long they are having to wait, which will help you gauge demand and efficiency.

As always, Paradox is including some free content along with the paid DLC (neither the price nor the release date for Mass Transit has been announced yet). In the base game, even if they don't buy the DLC, players will be able to name their city's individual roads, an addition which was inspired by a popular Cities: Skylines mod.

For someone like me, who always creates beautiful, picturesque cities but also completely sucks at managing my traffic problems—as evidenced by the time I attempted to actually drive through my city in a modded first-person mode—the mass transit mod looks like an extremely useful addition, providing new ways to cut down on all the cars and trucks endlessly clogging the streets.

Plus, there are blimps, which I have been watching take off and land during the entire demo. Blimps have special landing pads where (patient) passengers can board.  "It's like a bus stop," Hallikainen explains. "For blimps."

Blimp City, I imagine, will have many. As another blimp lands on the screen, I ask if Hallikainen has even been on a blimp. She says she hasn't.

"It's a relatively slow means of transportation," Hallikainen admits. "But it's something that you can avoid the traffic [with], pretty much."

Blimps are also a bit silly to serve as public transportation, but I think that's the point.

"We kind of already got criticized, like 'Who will actually want to use blimps in their city?'" says Hallikainen. "It's a game so we don't always have to be super realistic with it. With this game, we take inspiration from real life and want to make it lifelike, but I think there's room some fun stuff."

"It's insane," says Alexander J. Velicky. "It's difficult to describe what it's like in comparison to what I thought it would be. Imagine if you had never seen or heard of a rollercoaster and someone was trying to describe what it was like to you. You could try to imagine what it would be like, but then when you actually ride on one you'd be completely surprised." 

Arguably the most famous modder-turned-developer of recent times, Velicky is talking about full-time game development. Aged just 19, he spent a year building the sprawling Skyrim mod Falskaar as a means of showcasing his talents, and in turn received a wealth of press coverage. He now works full-time at Bungie after securing a job off the back of his hard work—his resume also includes the ambitious Fallout 3 mod Project Genesis—and is proud of his modest roots. "If one thing is for certain it's that it has given me some incredible perspective when I play and look at other games coming out in the industry."

Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC. While for the majority modding serves as a vehicle to make existing games better, more cases like Velicky's distinguished example are coming to the fore.

For Bryan "Gula" Shannon, modding Cities: Skylines was something he stumbled into. After successfully completing a game design course at Florida's Ringling College of Art and Design, the self-confessed city-builder obsessee interned at Maxis and was thereafter offered his dream job: full-time employment to work on 2013's then unreleased SimCity. The beleaguered city-crafting sim's inauspicious launch however resulted in Shannon parting ways with Maxis shortly after, and, amid the chaos of supporting his girlfriend and her mother following complications with surgery, led to him finding solace in designing Cities: Skylines mods.      

What started out small and working for free would eventually see Shannon establishing a Patreon, where those interested could allocate donations towards each Cities asset Shannon created—something up to this point he was doing for free. "This was before the whole thing began," he says of when he identified a market for making money from modding. Far from reskins, Shannon's work is built from scratch and he was one of the first to upload buildings following the launch of the game's modding tools. 

"My girlfriend was a Twitch streamer for a while when I was working," he continues. "She's actually working at BioWare right now and is doing the same things that I do, creating 3D assets and building worlds and stuff like that. Before that, when she was looking for a job, I'd noticed people were donating money. I'd also noticed other people were making money for creating assets for games and I thought it was a way that I could support this same idea. I was getting like $8 per asset and this was like a free chipotle burrito! I was happy with that. 

"I then made a joke with my girlfriend: wouldn't it be funny if Kotaku reached out to me to do an article, and literally the next morning when I woke up I had an interview request. I did the interview and the very next day I'd jumped to $575 per asset—and this was almost overnight. I thought myself, 'alright, I guess this is a serious thing now.' From there it hardly stopped—I think it peaked at about $875 or $890 or something—and that was life for a short while."

After interviewing with Bungie and then Hi-Rez Studios off the back of his Cities: Skylines input, Shannon landed a job at Arkane and has spent the last year working on the Dishonored 2 developer's incoming sci-fi shooter Prey. "When I first got onto the team it was supposed to be a surprise," says Shannon. "But I'd done a little bit of research and I think in a way if you had dug around in some forums you could sort of see what they were working on. The most astounding thing to me is when I first got there the game felt done."

Prey is due May 5, 2017 and if Phil and James' early impressions are anything to go by, Arkane could be onto something special. Shannon adds: "Our level designers are great. I'm working with people who've worked on Deus Ex and BioShock and things like that. I loved those games and to be able to work and support those guys is brilliant. They come up with an idea and I have to make it look pretty is the path I'm on just now." 

Building new lives

Matt "Shroomblaze" Crux is a household name within the Cities: Skylines mod scene. Having built close to 450 buildings, fixes, and assets his catalogue boasts everything from towering skyscrapers to centimetre-high Boletus mushrooms, and his Steam Workshop follower count exceeds 4,300 people. Raised on consoles such as the NES, its Super successor, the PlayStation 2 and the N64, Crux latterly graduated to PC by way of SimCity 2000, The Sims and The Sims Online. He eventually discovered World of Warcraft—a game he reckons has since stolen ten years of life, and accentuated a five year depression. Cities: Skylines let him break free of a disheartening cycle.  

"Four years prior to discovering Cities my family threw out paintings that I'd been working on, because they're very Christian and they thought I was being evil or demonic. They said I was too new age," Crux tells me. "In turn, for four years I went through an endless circle of depression, watching TV, playing WoW, not doing much in my room. Cities finally let me see my creative side, it let me be more creative again, it let me mod and let me start to get into being an artist again. It let me return to having fun."  

At the time, Crux had no prior 3D modeling or modding experience, but quickly noticed how active the Cities community was in this regard. He decided to teach himself how to craft props and items by virtue of friendly Q&A within the game's forums and a great deal of trial and error. The end products spoke for themselves: pretty in-game effects that other folk could and, crucially, sought to add to their games—in turn giving Crux a distinct sense of purpose.  

"The fact that I could make colourful objects that I can not only use in my game but can also help people have better games really helped lift my depression. I liked the comments, the appreciation for what I was doing, the fact that this gave me worth," he adds. "Before that, I felt like I was worthless, that nobody cared for me. My whole family, I felt, didn't give a shit about me and so it felt like I was doing something worthwhile. I was back doing my art again and I was also aware I was helping other people make their games better. I loved making little things for the city and in turn seeing them come to life, especially vehicles, where I'd make a 3D object and then watch it drive around. Yeah, I loved bringing things to life."

The more Crux produced, the faster his profile grew within the Cities' community, to the point where his inbox was full of player requests for what to craft next. This level of interest did not go unnoticed by developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox, who last year—out of the blue—reached out and asked Crux to work with them as part of a community-sourced project. 

Working from home in Phoenix, Arizona, the result was last year's Art Deco pack—a project which saw Colossal and Paradox covering Crux's production costs, and also splitting sales revenue with the creator once the DLC was released.   

"When I first got the email, I saw it and didn't respond for an entire week," says Crux. "In my state, in my depression, I felt like I had a lot of negative energies in my head. I thought I shouldn't even contact them, but after a week, I thought: let's see what they have to say. When I eventually found out about all the details, I was like, woah, this is great!"

Crux says it'd have been a "travesty" had he decided to ignore the email, not just from a financial perspective, but also because he believes taking on the Art Deco project helped him conquer his depression and rediscover his creative side. While he's since scaled back his Cities modding involvement to focus on his artwork, by crafting miniature versions of his real-life artwork and designing in-game easels Crux has found the perfect way to combine both of his life's passions.  

Shannon's path is perhaps more orthodox, but nevertheless owes much to the Cities: Skylines mod scene. He tells me he can't express how happy he is working at Arkane—something he describes as "a very, very, very positive experience"—and that he wouldn't have landed where he is now without the city-builder. 

As a community, Shannon reckons it's second to none and is brimming with novel anecdotes and warm stories of teamwork and camaraderie. With this in mind, he recalls just how taken aback an amateur ice hockey teammate was upon discovering the esteemed Cities: Skylines modder 'Gula' was in fact Shannon himself. He laughs: "For that first game, my teammate was so starstruck."     

Crux echoes a similar line, suggesting the overarching desire to build has a metaphorical effect on the community itself. "There are so many games out there that are destructive and Cities is the opposite," he says. "In those games it's all about conflict and nasty exchanges, there's so much negativity and it becomes hateful. The community in Cities is very positive and it's a creative platform to express who are you and a chance to be artistic. As a modder, the community is so supportive: the coders, the modellers, they all come together.  

"If you're thinking about becoming a Cities modder, I for one absolutely support people doing that because it's a fun thing that creates great bonds between people—something which feels rare in videogames today."

I promise the rhyming in the following Cities: Skylines Mass Transit announcement trailer is better than my poor attempt in the strapline above. Due at some point later this year, the city builder's next expansion promises to deliver new forms of transportation to its bounds—by land, sea and air—as well as new transit service buildings, new mass transit hubs, new scenarios, new landmarks, and new road types. 

Let's have a gander at that trailer: 

Besides promising a range of new transit options—including ferries, blimps, cable cars, and monorails—Mass Transit gives mayor-players the chance to generate extra income by way of fares and journey ticketing. 

The aforementioned transit hubs serve to tie your services together, "letting citizens change rail lines in one building, or hop from the bus onto the ferry, or even find their way through a sprawling monorail-train-metro station." Likewise, new scenarios will centre around solving traffic problems and adding new transit systems—something the game is already being used to help design in real life. 

"New road types, bridges and canals adds  variety to your city, and new ways to solve its challenges," says publisher Paradox. "Become an expert in traffic flow, and then use that knowledge to improve your city." 

As is often the case with Cities: Skylines' premium expansions, the base game will receive a coinciding free update—the latest of which introduces "mod-inspired features" to traffic management, and the oft-requested ability to name roads. Furthermore, the update will bring with it new unique buildings, policies, achievements, and, crucially hats.

Cities: Skylines' Mass Transit expansion is "coming soon."