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This update is going to be largely out of character because a lot of what I did here is just fiddling with stuff.



This is where I started recording. This majority of the update is debugging the export problem I mentioned last time. As well as general upgrades to the farm.



I had two animal product warehouse yards set to fill. So I set one to empty its contents into the other and then when it was emptied, I demolished it.









All three of these get toggled on for Bail Acres. So now the farm plots produce more while the production chains also produce more as well.





Next up, let's revisit the dedicated highway connection. I have four lanes going down to two, and while it's not a problem currently, let's just ensure it never becomes one.



I love how the new road is immediately dry. It's a cute touch. Anyway, we now have two lanes going to two lanes. It just makes everything smoother.



And speeds are revisited as well. Now cars aren't asked to go from highway speeds to town speeds instantly. The step-down should now work as such:

Highway (60 mph/96 KM/h) -> Offramp (50 mph/80 KM/h) -> One Way Roads (45 mph/ 72 KM/h) -> 4 lane road (35 mph/56 KM/h) -> Sterling Hunter Street (35 mph/56 KM/h) -> Bail Acres Unpaved Roads (20 mph/32 KM/h)

Sterling Hunter is the road that also connects Bail Acres and Bailville proper. It's also the name of like four other roads in the city somehow.



At the end of the last update we unlocked a bunch of things. One I didn't mention was heating. Because we're now responsible for heating the city, suddenly everyone is complaining that the city isn't heated. This is because of the DLC that adds snowy maps. However, there's no need to use heating outside of those specific maps. And there's ESPECIALLY no need to supply heating in Bailville which is described in-universe as a California-like environment. If you can read the pixellated text, you can go back and see that in the second update it was summer temperatures in the dead of winter.



So we're going to tell everyone to use electricity for heating. If you all really want, I can install a geothermal heating plant in the little public utility campus that's developing near Smokestack City.

But, again, Bailville is mostly Mediterranean forest and scrubland. The coldest I've ever seen it on the map is ~54F. (around 12.2C) While that's certainly jacket weather, you wouldn't be huddling around the heater.

The recycling center is actually doing fairly well still. Another one probably wouldn't hurt, but I also want to hold out for incinerators for as long as possible.



The landfill is also not doing too badly. Another recycling center would alleviate some of the burden put on it. We need to be a Big Town to unlock that, which needs 7000 residents. That's... not as far off as it sounds. A few dedicated neighborhoods would get us there in no time. But I want to grow the city organically.



In the previous update, I mentioned Unique Factories. The bakery is the first one we unlock and it only needs stuff produced in the agriculture area. At the next farm level, we'll get a lemonade factory, but that will need glass, which is produced from an ore area oddly enough.

Anyway, the bakery needs animal products, crops, and flour. The game doesn't differentiate between milk and steak, so we can assume the bakery is producing not only cakes, but also meat pies. Not Mrs. Lovett's. Hopefully.



Unique factories are so named because they only produce unique factory products. For the sake of the narrative, they're pies and cakes and scones and whatever, but in game terms, they're only a single type of good.

"Well wait," I hear you ask. "Doesn't that mean that multiple unique factories could supply one warehouse?" Yeah, probably. Unlike the rest of the production chain, unique factories don't need to be placed in an industry area. There's no reason you can't have an industry district where baked goods and lemonade and furniture and lord knows what-all are all serviced by a single gargantuan warehouse set to empty. Unique factory goods are also only designed to be exported. They're the terminus of a production chain. So we can just set the warehouse to empty and money will trickle in as we produce these unique goods.



This area is going to expand drastically before the end of this update. I don't know the production ratios for each good nor do I really care to learn. You can vastly overproduce and it's not a problem because you can just export the excess. If you really want to set up an efficient industry area, I'm sure there are spreadsheets that lay out how many of each input you need in order to cleanly and efficiently produce, say, 2 bakeries worth of goods.



As for why nothing was being exported, I still don't know fully. I can speculate, though. The game is reluctant to export crops even when multiple silos are full to capacity and are also set to empty. But no animal products or flour were set to export. So that's part of the reason why the industry area was a pit of money loss.



Soon enough Bail Acres hits level 3. There's the aforementioned lemonade factory. We also get more crop fields, which produce more than the smaller versions, but also a milking parlor as well. This produces even more animal goods than the pasture and the cattle shed.



The production area is getting crowded and is going to be reworked soon. But now I've fitted in a milking parlor and more storage nearby. The new small animal products warehouse is set to empty. So we should start seeing profits from selling milk and whatever else.



The new medium-sized fields become the greenhouses, while the old fields now grow potatoes because why not?



Over on the fruit side, the same thing is repeated. The old greenhouses are now orange citrus trees.



I really like the way the fields look here. The greenhouses off in the distance feel realistic.





I clicked the school button by accident, so I didn't see this at the time. But we have a bit of a problem here. The elementary school is at 97% capacity. Yikes! Anyway, that's a problem for future me. And she's a bit of a dick.



No profits yet, but with the new fields, it won't take very long at all to get Bail Acres to level 4.



Oh no. Nooo. Do you see it?



It's begun. Already 23 dead citizens. So let's just cut this off at the pass.



Is it explicitly cheaty? Yes. Do I care? Nooooope! This makes corpse problems disappear in a plume of smoke.



I put it in near old town.



Almost like magic, immediately after this happens. 16 tons of crops becomes 8 tons of animal products, which becomes a tidy profit.



A barn with a couple silos looks nice.





Gonna let the farm percolate for a while. So in the meantime, I'm gonna slap down some advanced wind turbines, which can only be built in the water.



Meanwhile, east of the landfill is what everyone's been waiting for.



Taxis are the opening act. Unlike other public transit options, these don't need dedicated routes.





I sprinkle several taxi stands around the city as well. Each beam on the display here is a taxi stand.



This is the first bus depot I plop down, but eventually I had to swap to the regular one. I don't think the noise pollution is a very big deal, so the benefit from these is dubious.

So... transit. We need to manually lay the bus routes. Unlike in SimCity where they Just Work, here we need to set them up ourselves. I'm gonna set up six routes to start. You'll see what I have in mind in a second.





Both Old Town and Bail Heights will each have a clockwise and counter-clockwise loop that runs around the outside of the neighborhood and down Park Street.



Each loop has a different color scheme. So in the narrative, if you're lost, you can hop on a red bus in Old Town and eventually find you way to Main Street. Or the park. The same with teal and Bail Heights. Also my wonderful spelling is on display here.



The bus routes actually use the highway, which is pretty neat. Like with the park loops, there's one going each direction.



Smokestack City and Granola Court are both generally unserviced by buses, but they're also not really big enough to warrant dedicated routes either.



One complaint I have is that when buses are first sent out, they are one right after another, so the routes are extremely inefficient. That sorts itself out over time, but it is annoying regardless.



Another nice thing is that you can see people lining up at bus stops. So if there's a bunch of people waiting, it's a sign you need to tinker with that route. In this case, no bus has yet come by the CCW loop. But these people waiting for the bus are a very good sign. That's some dozen-odd people who aren't commuting with their cars!



It didn't take long at all to replace the biofuel buses with regular buses.



There were upwards of 10 or 11 buses on a single route and it was getting ridiculous. So I changed over to regular buses and increased the capacity. If you're curious The Solaris Urbino 15 Mk2 is a real bus. Each route has 3-4 of those instead of 10-11 buses that hold 30 people. It costs a lot less to run and more people can ride at one time.



The bus models aren't customizable, but I don't care. Triple the capacity is worth losing neon pink buses.



Back over in the industry area, profits are really taking off now. In fact, Bail Acres is actually in the black! It's also not very far from the next level. So while we wait for that to tick over, let's take a quick look at the "newer" housing developments.





Here's a status report both on Smokestack City and Granola Court. They're a little less expensive than Old Town and Bail Heights, but not by a lot.



Ah, there we go! A clothing factory needs plastics, which is an oil industry product. The slaughterhouse is the top-end animal products building, the large barn is more crop storage, and the farm maintenance building makes industry buildings more efficient.



Level 5 will take a while. Workers are probably gonna be a big pinch point. While the resource number looks big, that's a thing that will keep climbing regardless. So it just takes time. On the other hand, workers are flighty bastards. Many buildings in Bail Acres aren't full up on workers, so there's no easy way to tell how many more buildings we need to plop down.



Moving on, the slaughterhouse produces a lot of animal products. But...



It's fucking gigantic.



The farm maintenance building is pretty useful.



It also makes sense for it to be placed next to the farmhouse. While we're at it...





That's +80% efficiency from worker barracks. Nobody lives there, so they're named a bit awkwardly. But they're meant to be places the workers take a break. I think they work better as actual living quarters.



Unfortunately, the bike lanes on Main Street need to go. Because all six bus routes are using it as a staging area, it gets a lot of bus traffic. The bike lanes are gumming stuff up unnecessarily.



The two-unit four lane roads are a good workaround. The ideal thing here would be to upgrade Triumph Avenue to an actual arterial and make Main Street an avenue, but we don't have the space to do so.



For some reason, upgrading the roads broke a bunch of the bus stops. So the game's gonna sulk and pout for a while before it mends them.



On the left you can see a broken route.



And a minute later, it's magically fixed itself!





It's happening again. Just gonna turn my head and pretend it's not doing that...



Bail Acres keeps having a problem where there's no place to store crops. Again, the barns and silos are super reluctant to export even though we're sitting on thousands of tons of food.



And adding more raw storage isn't really helping. It's just putting a band-aid over the problem. We need to address it in a more direct fashion.



So we're going to make a new road branching off of the main production area road.



...oh. So this problem is a bit more complex than I first thought.





So with a little more fiddling, we now have four flour factories built into the side of the hill. Flour factories take crops as raw input, so this is a better way to use them than (not) exporting for pennies on the dollar.

It's not quite as pretty, but it does work. There's even a dedicated large barn to support the flour production. And the storage warehouses are across the street. So this is pretty efficient even without knowing the exact numbers.



And now just for fun... the slaughterhouse. It was big enough that I had to take out the old road just to fit it!



I messed up with the road and had to put a new one in. That's when I noticed a little problem. There's two nodes here when there shouldn't be any.



Thank god for the Network Multitool. Removing unneeded nodes in the road is a snap!

Nodes, by the way, are where the road snaps to. So in the shot up above, this otherwise straight road would have had to veer left or right to hit either of those nodes, which isn't ideal at all.



Nice and clean. And there's only one node now where the new road is.



All this rearranging and shuffling of buildings has given us enough room to slide in another bakery. With the, frankly, industrial amounts of animal products and flour we're producing, as well as the utter glut of crops, it's a no-brainer.



While I've been working on this, residential demand has reached 100%. I've overlaid the RICO graph on top of the Chirp for reference. Also for some reason people are clamoring for industry jobs despite Bail Acres being right there.





Anyway, the new (and final) production area is much different from how it was at the start of the update. Compare and contrast for yourself!





Bail Acres is also far enough away from the recycling center and landfill that it's having trouble being serviced. So I put in a small neighborhood garbage site across the road from the farmhouse. They can take their trash there, and then when it fills up, I can send a garbage truck by to empty it. It's another band-aid solution, but it keeps the building working!



Bail Acres itself is almost at level 5. Though it doesn't hit that mark by the end of the update. Regardless, we're done tinkering there for now.



Spring Gardens has a bigger problem to contend with. Cities Skylines has had a pretty big bug since the Plazas and Promenades DLC came out last year. Park areas will lose all visitor counts between save and loads. So you basically have to level the area up all in one go, or you have to start over with visitors from the floor. It sucks. Colossal Order has been aware of the problem since at least September of last year, but hasn't really put out a fix for it.

They have, however, released several DLC packs since then. So, y'know, priorities.

There's nothing I can really do in the park because it just takes time to get the visitor count back to where it should be.



Because there was a request for it, the road in front of the park was named PepsiCo Avenue.



Also, paving over the dirt roads removed most of the beech trees around the campus area. So I replaced those in a way that the simulation won't instantly delete next time I load the game.



While I'm thinking about it, let's do a little detailing in the park. We can't do a lot yet, because there's still a bunch of buildings we need to unlock yet. But even this rock is gonna help.



Upgrading the road deleted my fucking fences. Why? Ugh...



Much better. Fences replaced, little bushes are now lining the paths. But hold onto your hats because we're not done yet. This is a technique I learned from City Planner Plays.



A smattering of trees...



Looking better already, but it's a bit boring, yeah?



Putting several types of trees together in the faux forests makes them look more realistic.



It didn't take very long at all to detail the park like this, and it looks a million times better.



Smokestack City and Granola Court have no parks nearby at all. So let's fix that, shall we? It'll drive up the land value and make everyone happier all at the same time.



It's not ideal, but it's a lot better than it was.



I want to build a little health campus near the park.



Right here, between the park and Bail Heights.



Moving forward, the land didn't work out right and this is why. It looks flat enough, but there's a pretty sizable height variance across the squared off area. Grading it off looks terrible no matter how you slice it, so let's do a little softening instead.



A child health center...



A community gym across from it...



An old folks home...



And a carousel.



Ignore the bouncy castle. It won't remain. But then we just run a little gravel path off to the nearby Spring Gardens and the health campus is all set up!



A playground fits the aesthetic better than a bouncy castle. Now little Timmy can get his measles vaccination and then spend time with Nanna and Pop-pop. They can take him to the nearby playground. Or even across the street to the park. How nice!



For more aesthetic reasons, I decide to line the river with quays.



I think it makes the city look much nicer.



Both sides of the river, no less!



It does make the Desire Path look like it's running through a canal, but I'm fine with that.



The piers fit better on quays than they do on raw shoreline.



Anyway, that's enough out of me for now. I want both the farm and the park to be at level 5 by the end of the next update. We're also going to need to replace the schools with high capacity versions, as well as lay down more housing. I have some ideas in that regard that I'm excited to implement. The ongoing narrative should resume next time.