Welcome to Cities: Skylines The Dev Diaries
These videos are based on the official Dev Diaries that can be found at the
Paradox Interactive forum and I'll include a link to them in
the video description
In this episode we'll be looking at Natural Resources
There are currently 4 Natural Resources
Oil, Ore, Forests and Fertile Land
These resources are divided into two categories renewable, Forests and Fertile Land,
and non-renewable Oil and Ore
Now as long as you don't pollute the land or bulldoze forests, renewable resources last
forever
But Oil and Ore deposits will eventually run out
Which has caused many people to ask the question
"How long will they last?"
The developers have been a little cagey on this subject not yet providing any specific
numbers
but Henkka, one of Collosal Order's developers, did post on the Paradox forums saying
"The resource deposits are quite large and it is possible to use them for a long
time"
I for one hope that a long time means more like 50 years than just 5 or 10
Henkka also pointed out that
".. they (resources) can be placed when you create your own maps"
but we'll talk more about that in Episode 6
when we take look at the map editor
The developers want Natural Resources and specifically their locations on maps
to play a strategic role in a cities development
When you begin a new a city you start out owning a single map tile
As your city grows you can purchase additional map tiles to expand into
The developers wanted the Natural Resources to act as a reward for good strategic expansion
while rivers and lakes act as a challenge to be overcome
It'll be interesting to see how that works out
The Info view shows where the different resources are located on the map
The dark grey area to the east indicates ore
while the greyish blue area to the north is an oil field
This starting tile has a lot of yellow fertile land for those who fancy agriculture
and the green areas are obviously ripe for forestry
Exploiting your city's resources is done by creating specialized industries
Creating a district that contains an industrial zone will give you access to
the four specialization policies
Selecting one of these will automatically cause the game to replace ordinary factories
with specialist buildings
and it appears there are two types of buildings within each specializations
Buildings that extract the resource
Like tree farms wheat fields
or ore extractors
And buildings that process the resources
Like sawmills and Oil Refineries
If you create a specialized district in an area where there is no suitable
resource deposit You will still get industry of the chosen
type
but these factories will only be processing plants
and they'll automatically import raw resources from elsewhere
either from another part of the city or from the outside world
Forestry and Agriculture will produce slightly higher profits than regular industry
but with lower levels of pollution
Oil and Ore, on the other hand, will provide a big boost to your economy
but wreak havoc on the local environment and not just with ground pollution
but also noise pollution
Note that Oil and Ore also require significantly more electricity in order to function while
Agriculture will put a larger drain on your water supply.
Oil and ore can be used to run oil power plants and coal power plants, respectively.
Each power plant has a reserve of fuel when they are built but once the reserve
runs out they require additional fuel either from local specialized industry
or imports from the outside world
For maximum tax income, the ideal situation is to have local industry (ie the Oil industry)
selling their products to another local entity (ie the Oil power plant).
and a good transport network of roads, railways, etc will be very important
in creating efficient industries
OK a word about the farms
Judging from the comments on the forums I'm not the only person who would like to
see much bigger farms
The current limit of 4x4 blocks on zoned buildings makes the farms look more like gardens than
crop fields or orchards
When pressed on this issue Henkka responded
"About the farm sizes
The spawning system of zoneable buildings (this includes farmlands, too)
is designed to work best with lots the size of 4x4 and smaller.
This is partly due to the freeform nature of the world and the way the game tries to
fill the zoneable areas most efficiently.
Therefore having larger spawnable buildings could lead to them spawning rarely,
due to their size, as the game would try to find suitable locations for them to spawn
and at the same time make the areas so that there would be as few
left-over cells between the different buildings as possible.
However, we are talking about the possibility to remove the fences between the different
farm plots to make it visually more appealing."
Meanwhile another Developer commented
".. I promise we'll look into the farms, as they are now limited in size
like all the other zoned buildings"
Now while that doesn't seem tremendously encouraging I guess
we should hold judgement for now and see how things develop
I'm hoping that, if nothing else, the modding community will come up with a solution
to make agriculture a little more visually appealing
Ploppable farms maybe?
Personally, I hope that the whole area of Natural Resources gets expanded
whether it's DLC's, Expansions or Mods I don't mind
there's huge potential here and it really should be exploited to the full
Well that's it for Natural Resources
Once again I'd like to thank Henkka for putting together
the original Dev Diary
and you enjoyed this vid hit the like button or better still, leave me a comment
I'll see you for episode 4 where we'll be looking at Public Transport
Should be fun