Dubbed by Paradox as the “the feature fans have been asking for since launch,” we learned in August that Cities: Skylines is set to welcome natural disasters to its city-building bounds. By way of the aptly named Natural Disasters expansion—that's due at some point this winter—the developer has now teased a sliver of in-game footage.
Which means tornadoes, forest fires, hurricanes, tsunamis, and, evidently, meteorite showers which impact the city shown here to devastating effect.
"Natural Disasters will add a series of city-destroying emergencies to Cities: Skylines, which can occur unexpectedly during the game—or be manually triggered by mayors seeking a challenge or who just really dislike their citizens," reads a blog post on the Paradox blog.
When Chris went street-level in Cities: Skylines recently, his disasters were of a more existential nature. The next expansion's catastrophes, on the other hand, are very much literal occurrences.
"Buildings and infrastructure will suffer untold destruction unless cities include the right emergency countermeasures, and players will have to act fast to keep things running as fire and flood sweep through town," continues the post. "In addition, a new Scenario Mode allows for custom challenges to be designed and shared through Steam Workshop."
That last part sounds particularly exciting—given what we've seen from the game's keen community by way of official updates, and to-scale interpretations of real life cities. As was featured on Reddit yesterday, user radiativeDoctor spent 200-250 hours recreating San Francisco with the help of 60 mods and around 1,000 assets from the Cities Steam Workshop page. More interesting still, radiativeDoctor is French and has only ever visited the city in real life once while on business.
Anyway, no launch date for Cities: Skylines' Natural Disasters expansion just yet, beyond "this winter" as stated on the game's blog.
