Instead of a big city, Pine Grove starts as a tiny mountain town next to the highway: a one-stop station, small industry kept away from the homes, a deliberately rough trailer park, decoration with surfaces and trees, and a grain and vegetable farm down a winding country road.
What happens in this episode
Pine Grove County was my way back into Cities: Skylines II after about six months away. Instead of jumping straight into a big city, the first episode builds the smallest possible starting point: a mountain town on a plateau next to the map’s highway, on a modified California map with all tiles unlocked and unlimited money switched on so the hour can go into building rather than balancing the budget.
The first decision is access. A four-lane road branches off the highway so future traffic has room, and the trucks get their own entry straight into the commercial and industrial area. The idea is that freight unloads there and leaves the small town centre alone. Next to the highway sits the one-stop station, one of the game’s special buildings, because a roadside stop like that is exactly what a town like this would grow around.
The layout is simple: industry on the side the wind blows away from town, commercial along the main road, residential behind it, and a trailer park at the edge. Then the services, which I usually forget at least one of: electricity, a small water tower, a water treatment plant instead of a sewage outlet, a recycling centre instead of a landfill (the landfills are far too big for a place this size), a clinic, an elementary school, a police station and one of the small Netherlands fire stations.
How it was built
Mixing zoning and hand-placed buildings
I use the marquee tool to zone only some of the lots, not all of them, so the town fills in gradually and doesn’t look stamped out. Zoning and hand placement together give a town that develops on its own but still looks planned. Medium-density row homes go in first, then a handful of commercial lots to give the main road some character. Any industrial building that shows up with a chimney gets deleted. A mountain town shouldn’t have smokestacks.
Small parks and a cemetery
The one-by-one pocket parks are back, and I missed them from the first game. They’re less efficient than big parks, but in a small town they put green space on every street without breaking up the blocks. A large US-style cemetery on a levelled plot gives the town a bit of history.
A trailer park that looks lived in
The trailer park is my favourite part of the episode. It’s meant to be messy: campfires, makeshift tents, mixed trailers and a rough surface, half campsite and half trailer park. A ring of trees separates it from the regular homes, and the police show up there noticeably often.
Decoration with surfaces, spruce and boulders
The map is almost entirely spruce with some bushes, so the decoration sticks to that palette: spruce belts as visual barriers between uses, bushes along the highway, surface brushes such as riverbed in the gaps, and boulders hidden between the trees to make the ground look rougher. Traffic lights on the highway junctions go, because nobody needs a pedestrian crossing on a highway ramp.
The first farms down a country road
To finish, a winding country road leads down from the town to a flatter area: a grain farm, a vegetable farm next to it, and a few homes for the farm workers. Chicken coops and quarries don’t need fertile land, which leaves the good soil for crops. The road keeps a gentle gradient (about −2%) and snakes downhill instead of running straight, so it reads as a rural road rather than a planned grid.
Where this leads
Pine Grove stayed a single pilot, but the idea behind it — long, focused sessions on one small area, with decoration from the start — became the One Tile at a Time format in Cedarpoint County a few weeks later.
Video chapters
- 00:00The map and the modifications
- 02:11Where to start: a plateau by the highway
- 06:36Truck access and an overpass
- 16:18Zoning plan and basic services
- 22:41Commercial zones, no chimneys
- 28:46Small parks and a cemetery
- 33:07Building the trailer park
- 42:40Decorating the residential streets
- 47:32A country road to the first farms
- 56:19Wrap-up and what comes next
Clicking a chapter starts the video above at that point.
FAQ
Which map is Pine Grove County built on?
A slightly modified version of a community map of a California region. I added a water source, smoothed parts of the coastline and cleaned up the highway that runs through the region.
Is Pine Grove played with unlimited money?
Yes. This pilot uses the unlimited money setting and all map tiles unlocked, because the focus was on building something good-looking rather than on the budget.
Why does the town have no industrial chimneys?
It's a mountain town, and smoking chimneys would ruin the scenery. Any industrial building that spawns with a chimney gets deleted so the game replaces it with a different model.