Cities: Skylines 2 finally gets its asset editor in a parting gift from the series' original developers

It's been a rough ride for Cities: Skylines 2 over the last two years, with the sequel's premature launch in 2023 leading to severe technical issues and lengthy delays to planned future updates. But the troubled city-builder has received some significant TLC lately. November's bike patch brought bicycles, scooters and associated infrastructure to player-created metropolises, and now, developer Colossal Order has finally added its hotly anticipated asset editor too.

As Colossal Order concedes in a recent Steam post, development of the asset editor has been "long underway", with the community clamouring for it more or less since the sequel launched. The developer admitted in March that the editor had "proven more technically challenging than initially anticipated". Citing issues such as lingering Unity dependencies and the large amount of in-built assets affected by the editor's addition.

In any case, those issues have seemingly been resolved. Colossal Order's aim with the asset editor is to let players "create complex assets on par with official content", and the tool has a few interesting features to make this easier for players.

For starters, rather than having its own bespoke menu, the editor opens into a custom Skylines 2 map where users can build numerous assets simultaneously. "That's right! If you're making multiple asses, you can prop them all at once." Users can also choose different scenes in which to build, including a plain green landscape and one dotted with roads and trees to aid "size comparison and [provide] a visual reference for how your asset will look in game."

Elsewhere, the editor supports "flexible" prop placement, letting users select and adjust props as much as they like once placed, and streamlines the process of managing bigger lots: "Gone are the days when you had to manage multiple assets to create truly large building complexes," Colossal Order says. "Now, all you have to do is simply type in the numbers for the depth and width of the lot for the whole building."

The editor bundles in several tutorials to help aspiring asset modders get started, while the official wiki features detailed guides for how all the editor's functions, er, function.

Short of any surprise updates, the asset editor represents Colossal Order's final major addition to Cities: Skylines 2, as the studio parts ways with publisher Paradox Interactive and moves on to pastures new. Neither Paradox nor Colossal Order has explained the reasons behind the split in detail, simply claiming the choice represents "the strongest possible future" for the series. But Paradox has developed a habit of transplanting troubled projects into new development hosts, having done the same with the recently released Bloodlines 2 and the currently MIA Prison Architect 2.

Come January, development of Skylines 2 (and the series as a whole) will be taken over by Surviving the Aftermath developer Iceflake Studios. While Skylines 2's future direction remains unclear at this point, Iceflake has stated it will reveal its plans soon.