Cities: Skylines 2's editor tools are still a couple of months away

A huge part of Cities: Skylines appeal lay in its modding community, which expanded on the citybuilder's robust foundations with new maps, assets and more for years post-release. Cities: Skylines 2 is still waiting on its own official mod support, but Paradox have offered a new update on progress, saying that the editor is "a couple of months" from being in a releasable state, with no concrete timeline as yet.

"Our goal is to release the Editor as soon as possible, and we will keep you updated on the progress," writes Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen in the update. "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."

An updated version of the editor was shared with a group of closed beta testers last week. Right now, the editor includes "only maps and support for code modding", which is what will feature in the initial public release of the tool. The asset editor - which lets you import your own buildings into the game - will come later. "I’m calling it an initial release as we will be adding to the modding tools throughout the game's lifetime, just like we did with Cities: Skylines," writes Hallikainen.

The new modding tool looks pretty approachable, but Colossal Order have a slightly different approach to mods this time around. While Cities: Skylines 2 made use of the Steam Workshop, its sequel will use a new proprietary platform called Paradox Mods. The advantage of this is that it means mods will also be available in the console versions of the game. To help launch the platform, Colossal Order are working with modders to produce free region packs which will add 2,500 extra buildings to the game.

Work continues in the meantime to resolve Cities: Skylines 2's various performance issues. "The team is now focusing on LODs and improving GPU performances, and while geometric LODs are largely automated, there are a ton of tweaks and adjustments required. We are expecting a relevant performance boost with these asset fixes," writes Hallikainen. Some of the coming fixes require bigger patches, however, meaning releases will be less frequent than they have been in recent weeks. "The workload is significant and unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to improve the performance at once."