Microlandia news & patch notes

• We now show a simplified version of the city at the farthest zoom levels with less detail and less triangles, which is ~20x faster
• Simplified buildings can be disabled in settings (very useful for screenshotting your entire city with full detail)
• Improved the rendering of cars, flowers, street lamps, contributing greatly to better FPS
• We now try to recover corrupted city files when loading, with minimal progress loss, instead of throwing an error and having to manually recover the city from the backups folder.

• Improved the traffic and public transport maps to better show where are the buildings with access failures due to traffic jams, public transport issues or disconnected roads
• Improved AI of companies so they make better decisions on when to grow and rent bigger buildings/office space
• Add „hard to reach“ indicator to companies that are have production problems because of traffic / public transport
• Improved for company founder AI allowing more diverse buildings from being rented instead of the absolute cheapest but likely saturated in sector demand.
• Improved the database compaction cycle so city save files are not bloated (and thus avoiding unnecessary extra work at the storage drive)
• Better texts in the stats panel.
• Hotfix for a problem with the game not rendering correctly after changing resolution / monitor while playing.

• Car traffic can now slow down and disrupt bus routes and the travel time of commuters.
• Added new „Company Lifespan“ metric. showing average age in years companies are going out of business.
• The public transport map is better at showing slow stops and bad travel times because of congestion.
• Hotfix for the ferris wheel not rotating on it’s axis sometimes and flying off above the city like a UFO

• Hotfix for the company founding AI that sometimes was not starting up buildings, leaving them vacant
• Hotfix for tutorial getting stuck at the civic development screen

• The gift shop: you can buy the same gifts that appear in loot boxes at 10x the selling price. You can only buy gifts that you already received via loot boxes in any of your cities.
• Increased the limit of 4 bus lanes to 5
• Job titles: now we track what role each member has in a company. motels have night clerks, restaurants have line cooks, tech start-ups have cloud architects, etc.
• Improved police view with real time indicators of crime events happening in the city

• New rare gift on lootbox rotation: Ferris wheel, the very tall and eye-catching tourist attraction
• Fixed a rendering problem with basketball courts
• Improved civic development UI: it now notifies when you have a new policy available
• Policies now need less civic development points and need less time to become active.
• Added optional hotkey mapping for pausing the game
• Remember in settings the windowed/fullscreen mode
• Improved the couples-matchmaking simulation to avoid slowdowns
• Improved tutorial

• New gift: Blimp, iconic airship that flies above your city for 6 months bringing a tourist wave
• Improved night-time visuals: lights and materials were fine tuned for better-looking nights in the game
• Better build tool: more buildings now can be placed by dragging, zones are easier to replace with buildings or other types of zones.
• Workforce churn economics: employees will not contribute to company productivity in the first 30 days. companies with a high rotation of employees will suffer churn.
• Improved how we merge geometries in big cities to avoid CPU work
• Cleaned up database schema in city saves
• An easter egg 🦆

• Fire headquarters: A bigger, more effective fire brigade building taffed by up to 40 firefighters and equipped with two pump engines.
• Improve performance of sound engine, it now uses a reasonable amount of CPU
• Reduced the polycount of many models, for better FPS in some systems.

• New variants corporate offices, towers and high rise buildings.
• Improved user interface of public transport / bus management
• We fixed many small bugs around the creation and deletion of bus stops that allowed invalid paths and prevented valid extensions between existing lines
• The public transit map is now smarter about choosing paths when extending lines between existing stops
• Camera movement with right click
• Hotfix for property values that were estimated too high, because they were counted by habitants * rent, instead of household * rents. This means that property tax revenue will be significantly lower in cities with a lot of big-unit buildings.
• Hotfix for „City“ achievement (reach 100.000 habitants) not triggering.
• Improved job-seeking algorithm, for better simulation performance in big cities.
• Improved the UI of the company inspector, also now with more information like sector demand and the employee list.
• Improved the look of shadows in „high“ setting.

• New rare gift in rotation: Statue of chonkers, the fat cat (+1 toxo)
• Hotfix for a problem with park index calculation that didn’t account correctly for the „distance to parks“ points
• Improved performance of tax and payrolls, that were causing slow ticks
• Improved summer atmosphere lighting

• New triage view for hospitals: watch live your bed capacity, who’s in the waiting room and their urgency, and overall status of your healthcare system.
• Citizens who died awaiting care will hurt your healthcare satisfaction score more dramatically and it recovers slowly over time.
• Citizens will make better transport mode decisions when driving licenses or parking spaces are too expensive.

• New palm trees 🌴
• Improved love simulation. We now use a better couples pairing/break-up algorithm. This also fixes a problem in our previous code that made couples without children moving in together very unlikely.
• Improved housing „floor prices“ (the minimum that a landlord will ask for a unit) instead of a constant tied to the building quality, is now a number based on a „return over investment“. the amount that the landlord will make back the construction price in 20 years. This makes some buildings more affordable than others and property tax becomes a better lever for influencing the rent prices.
• Hotfix for open jobs not pulling immigration strong enough.
• Fixed problems with wealthy people ending in homeless shelters and not relocating despite having enough income/savings to do so.
• Increased period election years from 4 to 5 and incidents every 9 years, in order to give more time for setting up a city before worrying about elections.

• Promenades: a new road type that’s pedestrian-only. Can be connected to most buildings, when connected to residential buildings, only households without car will move in.
• Retail shops: a new small building that can be used for retail or food sector businesses.
• Connect promenades to retail shops for creating shopping districts that tourists and residents will visit.
• Optimized most buildings polycount in order to avoid the „slideshow effect“ in cities with a lot of construction diversity.
• Added a setting in controls for selecting a specific gamepad or completely disable gamepad controls.

• Improved the precision of parking, commute routes, parking and bus simulation
• Fixed a shader bug that was wasting CPU and GPU work
• Fixed a problem that caused artifacts in view on max zoom out
• Improvements in traffic sim performance for cities with 10k+ citizens

• New policy: Rent control. When enabled, you can set a cap on how much rent can be increased by landlords, at the cost of reduced residential demand points.
• Set rent control to 0% and rents will freeze.
• Landlords might raise rent prices up to 3% yearly on full buildings when rent control is not enabled.
• Optimized the tree models, now with less polygons, same look.
• Big groups of trees will position more organically instead of being at the center of the tile. Single trees and rows of trees will continue be positioned uniformly.
• Improved the look sky and reflective glass in buildings.
• Reduced the size of some textures that were unusually big.
• Improved the performance of in-construction building models (scaffolds)

• New building: Shopping Mall. Can hold up to 12 retail or food shops.
• Fixed a problem that prevented playing the game windowed on a second monitor at 2x speed

• Better looking shadows in the „high“ preset (better grounded and sharper)
• Better performance for shadows in all presets
• Fixed a problem with casino gambling that made casino failed to account for some money wins and going bankrupt
• Fixes a bug that caused the bus utilization to report %1 that wasn’t real

This update is for everyone who has already explored the kinds of cities Microlandia lets you build. We wanted to add fresh challenges to dig into, plus a couple of new ways to make your cities prettier.

New Velaria map

Velaria is the first Microlandia map with water. A river cuts the city clean in two, so the challenge isn't only keeping a bridge standing, it's how you connect the two halves, how you route traffic between them, and how you zone each side so the whole city still works as one. It's also a very windy place, and wind makes fire far more dangerous: blazes spread faster and cost more to put out, so a well-organized fire service stops being optional.

Of course, this also means you can now build bridges.

Factories now need power

Just as farming needs water, manufacturing now needs electricity. Before you can build more factories, your city has to be able to power them. The easiest way to get electricity is to import it from a neighboring city: drop a transmission tower on the edge of the map and it pulls in enough power for around eight factories. You can build up to four towers. Once you've maxed out everything you can import, the only way to keep growing your industry is to go nuclear. Nuclear plants are expensive, slow to build, and your neighbors don't love living next to one, so it's a real decision if you want to turn your city into an industrial powerhouse.

Don't worry, your old cities with factories will work fine. This is just for the new ones.

Remodel your City Hall

It's your city, so your City Hall should give off the vibe you want. If the classic default doesn't fit your style, you can now remodel it. There are three looks to choose from: Neoclassical, Brutalist, and Gothic. Each costs $300 million and is purely cosmetic, so if you'd rather keep the money, the default City Hall is still a perfectly handsome building.

Also in 1.13:

• Dozens of bug fixes

• Performance improvements that lets cities pass 50,000 citizens without turning your computer into a deep fryer

• A better-looking game and UI

• Two new gift buildings: The Cat Casino and the Pixiu Statue. Both with special abilities that will bring you luck and toxoplasmosis (yes, the parasite that all cats carry)

• New fiscal policy: Universal Basic Income. When enabled, pays every adult an unconditional monthly income, with no job or age test.

That's it. We really hope you enjoy it and expect more updates about water, energy and city customisations, as this version was all about adding the systems that will enable us making new content for this features. As always, we are hard at work, and updating often.

Happy building!

• New fiscal policy: Universal Basic Income. When enabled, pays every adult an unconditional monthly income, with no job or age test.
• Improved how immigrats take jobs and rents in the algorithm more effecitvely, but also leave priority for the already residents
• Fixed a bug and now people who are retired don’t leave the city for other jobs (they are not in working age)
• Now census shows the exit poll with data from 1 year (instead of just 30 days)
• We now count the pension rate as income when evaluating if a citizen can sign a lease contract

• New gift in the box rotation: the statue of Pixiu. When it stands in your city, you get +10% odds of pulling rare or legendary gifts from future boxes.
• Fine-tuned landlord greedyness.
• Improved performance of shadow rendering, expect less GPU and CPU usage and an increase of FPS, specially in cities with more than a thousand buildings.
• Improved performance of cities with 20k+ citizens.

• Rebalanced construction costs of some buildings
• Fix for a bug that was causing the park score to stop updating each month
• The game now attempts to recover after a lost interface <-> simulation sync due to laptop sleep

• Hotfix for steam overlay crashing the game occasionally on Windows
• Fined tuned the migration flow algorithms

• Landlords don't do yearly increase of rent anymore. This is something that exists in the real-world because of inflation, but in the game just seems to create market distortions. This means that rent prices are frozen for each contract until households or companies move or dissolve.
• Now upward-pressure of prices relies on the landlord AI, who will probe high prices, but eventually adjusting when flats are not rented for some time.
• Likewise, we improved the renter AI so they don't choose bad deals, and they have more propensity to leave the city when the market is bad.
• The prices of rent will emerge from the antagonistic process of landlords vs. renters.
• Immigration is not hard capped at the city's culture points. Now jobs + culture points determine how many people will want to move in. This means that a city with lots of jobs could attract more people than its culture points.
• Updated translations
• Improved the look of roads

• New high tension tower allows you to import electricity for factories. Must be built at the edge of the map.
• Now factories need energy, either coming from imports of neighboring cities, or a nuclear plant. Factories are the only building that requires energy, in the same way agriculture needs water.
• Likewise, nuclear power plant provides electricity for factories and allows the city to build a lot more than the limit of 4 towers when using only imported energy.
• Old cities that had factories without power will continue to work just fine, but new factories will require power.
• New OST music by Pablo Rubio
• Refined the look of some apartment building skins

• Hotfix for a rare bug that could cause a city's time to stop as if it were paused
• Rebalanced the Velaria map, now instead of having a crime penalty, it has more likelyhood of fires
• Rebalanced the prices of bridges according to US FHWA

• Traffic in the city better represents what is actually happening in the simulation
• In night mode, police patrol cars have strobe lights. this is useful to visually confirm that your police is doing patrol work.
• Improved visuals for the Velara map
• Improved fire visuals at night
• Improved how the newspaper reports catastrophic fire events