On the 21st of May, your favorite Finnish game developer Colossal Order will continue their effort to suck the wallets of every single Cities: Skylines player dry. Yet another DLC will be released, Cities: Skylines - Campus. In this DLC, university life abounds with new area types for any sort of student - Trade School, Liberal Arts, and University. As always, there will be new buildings to plop down in your city, new policies, and, of course, new Chriper hats!

Last year, we learned of Springwood, a thriving city just North of the valley. Before Campus is released, Springwood needs to grow. You can’t just build a campus in any city. Let’s consult the mayor’s journal to see how things are progressing in Springwood.

March, 2024

From the Mayor’s journal:

Since we last spoke, amazing things have happened. Despite my best efforts I had not managed to make the housing in Valley Square self-sufficient. The reason was quite simple: I’d clicked the wrong button in the planning software. Upon clicking the correct button, however, every single house was demolished! 10,000 people promptly lost their homes, and naturally moved away from Springwood. We had ₡100,000 in the bank when the unfortunate clicking incident happened. But suddenly losing ten thousand citizens - being left with less than a thousand - had a very negative impact on the city coffer. The city’s industry crashed, the commercial districts crashed - basically the entire economy crashed!

Thankfully, we didn’t go bankrupt, even when we were ₡123K in the red. We’re slowly recovering, and people have started to move back into Valley Square, which now contains actual self-sufficient housing.

July, 2024

We’re back on top! With ₡76K in the bank, and over 13,000 citizens, our next projects are to open a few bus lines, and to move to a totally clean industry! Then we’ll relocate everything that’s currently polluting to the other side of the highway. Moving the power plants, and garbage dumps will be expensive, but worth it in the long run. When that is done, we’ll build enough recycling centers to handle the city’s garbage.

It turned out the area we reserved for the city’s prime park, Cypress Garden, was way too large. Because of that, we have now split the area in two, and opened an amusement park. Willow World a raging success, and one of the Springwood’s most popular places to hang out whenever our highly educated citizens aren’t busy operating the money presses in the business district.

September, 2024

Because of the massive exodus that happened earlier when Valley Square was somewhat accidentally demolished, very few of Springwood’s citizens remember the Giant Meteorite of ‘21. By pure luck the huge rock barely missed the city. This was fortunate, since we didn’t have a single emergency shelter at the time.

Now we’re once again faced with an impending catastrophe. A category 5 tornado is heading straight for us! We’ve named it “George”. I’d love to say that Springwood is ready this time, but we’re not even remotely prepared. The city has ₡200K in the bank, and we probably should have spent some of that money on emergency shelters. But because of what will shall call “reasons”, that didn’t happen.

When the tornado came, it took a left turn, avoiding our brand new amusement park, Willow World. This was fortunate for the people in the park, but very unfortunately for the citizens of the Northern part of Valley Square, which now was straight in George’s path. With no emergency shelters to run to, all they could do was to hunker down in their self-sufficient, non-tornado proof homes.

It did not go well. 49 buildings in Valley Square were destroyed, and 391 brave citizens perished. But we can’t grieve forever. Now the rebuilding starts. We will prevail! The city council has decided to allocate ₡15,000 to a disaster response unit. With state-of-the-art trucks and helicopters, they’ll clean up this mess, and we’ll never speak of it again.

September, 2025

We’ve managed to get through the aftermath of the tornado. The destroyed parts of Valley Square have been rebuilt, and new families are moving in.

Springwood is now officially a Grand City! We’re home to 17,000 souls. With the promotion to Grand City, we have been awarded the solar power plant blueprint. No more pesky oil for us. The new power plant is an expensive investment, but money is pouring in at the moment. We’re have a ₡15K budget surplus every month, and almost ₡500K in bank. With our current electricity demand of 217 MW, we only need two solar power plants to will replace our three oil-powered power plants. Good times!

We’ve also manged to empty all our land fills, and the recycling centers are taking care of the waste. They are generating some pollution, though, and I’m not sure if it’s possible to handle that somehow. My advisors just stare blankly at me when I ask them.

The same advisors are, however, informing me that there’s a high demand for industry or office zone. But none of the idiots can tell me exactly what kind of demand. Is it heavy industry? Is it offices? Farms? Without proper advice, I decided to go for trail and error - which seems to be the common way to do things around here anyway. Thankfully, the offices areas I zoned, quickly filled up. So I guess it was an office demand, then.

November, 2025

Springwood’s youngsters are hungry for education, and the city’s high schools are literally overflowing with students! We’re over 300 students beyond 3,750 students capacity of our three high schools. In the earlier rush to build enough of them, it seems we’ve totally forgotten to give the third high school a proper name. It’s now simply called “High School”. Think of the embarrassment and mental disarray we’ve caused the school’s poor students!

To overcompensate, the city council has unanimously voted to give High School a fabulous name, a name like no other name, one that will be found in future history books: High School shall henceforth be known as Super Duper High School!

When planning the construction of our fourth high school, we’ve decided to build an Institute of Creative Arts. This will diversify the kind of education the young adults of Springwood have access to. 800 lucky students will learn how to dance their way through life. We’re placing the Institute of Creative Arts right next to the crematorium. Happy learning, kids!

May, 2026

We’re expanding! Springwood has come a long way since we first broke land back in 2018. The demand for office zones are skyrocketing, and we’ve purchased two plots of land to the west. Here, our business district will continue to thrive and grow.

But all is not peachy in the city of Springwood. Because people are moving in, we’re naturally seeing an increase of cars on our roads. With that comes gridlocks, and more pollution. But our goal of becoming a self-sufficient, green city, void of dirty factories, and pesky combustion cars is not forgotten. We’re toying with the idea of only allowing electric cars in the city, and the city council is continuously trying to find ways to make it easier for people to get around without using their cars.

Plans for a brand new subway system is being laid as we speak. If we can move people underground, the need for roads will decrease, and we can replace them with parks and other gathering areas.

This is my 8th year in office, and no-one has even asked about elections. It looks like I’m here to stay. The Springwood future looks bright.

This story continues in the post The Fall of Springwood.