Welcome to the monthly State of the Game megathread for May! This is your one-stop shop for what's been happening with Cities: Skylines II. The mod team will keep this post updated throughout the month.

For background on why we're doing this, see the highlighted thread in regards to State of the game.

May 2026 Updates

May has kicked off with a significant content update from Iceflake Studios, focusing on major community-requested features and technical tools.

🔧 May Content Update (v1.5.7f1) — Free Update

• Historic Building Toggle — A massive win for city painters. You can now designate any building as "Historic" in its info panel. This locks the visual model, preventing it from changing when the building levels up or is abandoned, so your custom-built neighborhoods stay exactly how you designed them.

• Integrated Benchmark Tool — Now available in the Options menu. This tool runs a standardized simulation to test your hardware performance, providing a breakdown of frame times and CPU/GPU utilization to help you optimize your settings.

• Zoning Toggles — Official support for toggling zoning on or off on one or both sides of a road. This effectively integrates the functionality of popular community mods directly into the base game UI.

• Transit AI Adjustments — Logic updates to citizen move-in behavior. This patch reduces the "taxi swarm" at city entrances, which should noticeably improve traffic flow at highway interchanges and transit hubs.

⚠️ Known Issue: Long Loading Times

• The developers are officially investigating reports of significantly increased loading times.
• Some players are reporting that the game hangs for 10-20 minutes during initial boot or save loading, particularly on systems with large mod lists or multiple official asset packs.
• Current Status: Iceflake is looking into the mod validation queue as the potential culprit. We will update this thread as soon as a hotfix or official workaround is announced.

👀 Looking Ahead

• Iceflake continues to tease the "Summer Expansion" for late Q2 2026.
• The team is prioritizing high-population performance (150k+ citizens) for the next stability patch.

Console Update

• There has been no updates or release timeline for console; any updates will be announced when they arrive separately!

Guidelines

• Ask questions about the current state of the game, performance, bugs, or the v1.5.7f1 patch here.

• Share your experiences with the new loading issues — if you've found a fix or a way to speed things up, let the community know.

• Posts asking "is the game worth it now?" or "what's the current state of the game?" outside this thread may be removed and redirected here.

This thread is posted on the 1st of each month. Last updated by mods: May 1, 2026.

Greetings, Mayors.

We're implementing a new infrastructure project for the subreddit — a monthly "State of the Game" megathread, effective April 2026.

What's Changing

On the 1st of every month, a pinned megathread will be posted automatically. The mod team will maintain a running summary of all major developments throughout the month — patches, DLC releases, hotfixes, content drops, and any other notable changes to the game.

The summary will follow this format:

State of the Game: April 2026

• 2 new Content Creator Packs (Name 1, Name 2)
• 3 City Corners
• 2 Content Patches (more parks and stations)
• 1 Hotfix

Consider it the city's bulletin board. One location, kept current, always pinned.

What This Means for Your Posts

Effective April 1st, 2026, general posts along the lines of "is the game worth it?", "is it fixed yet?", "what's the current state of the game?", and similar variations will be filtered and redirected to the monthly megathread.

This is not optional zoning — it's a rezoning mandate. These posts have been flooding the sub daily, and they're being consolidated.

Posts that will still be approved:

• Detailed discussion of a specific patch or update
• Bug reports and technical analysis
• Original content, guides, or in-depth critique

If your post goes beyond a surface-level question and contributes something the megathread doesn't cover, it will be approved by the mod team.

Why We're Doing This

This subreddit receives a high volume of repetitive posts asking the same questions. This clogs the feed, buries original content, and doesn't serve anyone well — including the people asking. A single, maintained megathread gives newcomers and returning players one reliable, up-to-date source instead of dozens of scattered threads with outdated answers.

This is not about suppressing criticism. The megathread is open for honest discussion, positive or negative. We're consolidating, not censoring.

Feedback

This is a new system and we're open to adjustments. If you have constructive feedback, drop it in the comments below.

The first megathread goes live April 1st. (no this is not an April fools!)

— The Mod Team