Key Highlights:
- Hotfix 1.0.12f1 introduces GPU rendering optimisations and reduces oversized character textures in Cities: Skylines II.
- Commercial businesses receive adjustments to profitability, customer activity, resource consumption and bankruptcy behaviour.
- Colossal Order also fixes simulation bugs and removes the Spasm radio advertisement following complaints about offensive content.
Colossal Order released hotfix 1.0.12f1 for Cities: Skylines II on November 2, 2023, introducing PC performance optimisations, economy balancing changes and several simulation fixes. The update targets problems reported following the October launch, although the developer has not claimed that the patch resolves the game’s wider performance difficulties.
According to the official patch notes published on Steam, the update initially rolled out to Steam players, with the Microsoft Store version scheduled to follow.
Several improvements focus on GPU rendering. The game now prioritises larger objects before smaller ones in certain situations, while revised shadow level-of-detail calculations allow irrelevant shadow casters to be excluded earlier.
Colossal Order has also optimised area lights, reduced oversized character textures and addressed situations where trees and other partially transparent objects exhausted virtual texturing space.
These changes are intended to reduce unnecessary rendering work, but their actual effect depends on the scene and hardware configuration. The patch notes provide no specific frame-rate measurements or guarantees of improved performance across every city.
The update also changes how commercial businesses operate. An increased probability of citizens participating in leisure activities aims to reduce situations where shops report having no customers, while adjustments to company profitability and bankruptcy behaviour address problems with the economy simulation.
Businesses should also place fewer orders for input resources when their storage facilities lack available capacity. A separate fix addresses a trading bug that prevented certain resources from being consumed correctly.
These adjustments build on the interconnected commercial and infrastructure systems outlined in our Cities: Skylines II gameplay preview.
Other fixes address incorrect calculations of college and university eligibility, a land-value dependency error that could cause instability, and water simulation data becoming inconsistent with saved information when loading another map.
Players continuing existing saves may not see every simulation change immediately. Colossal Order warned that many fixes require the simulation to run for some time before their effects become visible.
I think the economy changes are particularly useful because correcting how companies obtain resources and attract customers could improve the behaviour of existing cities without requiring players to start again. However, the patch does not establish that every commercial demand or profitability problem has been eliminated.
The developer has also removed the Spasm in-game radio advertisement because of offensive content.
The hotfix follows earlier controversy surrounding reports that excessively detailed citizen teeth were responsible for poor PC performance. Colossal Order clarified the claim in October, explaining that citizen life simulation was unrelated to the models’ detailed geometry and that rendering teeth was not a significant cause of the performance problems.
Although hotfix 1.0.12f1 reduces some character texture resolutions, that change should not be interpreted as confirmation of the earlier speculation. Colossal Order continues to investigate broader rendering and optimisation issues.
Those technical difficulties also provide context for the earlier decision to delay the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S editions. However, the console versions remain separate from this PC hotfix, and the update does not establish whether performance targets on those platforms have been met.
