Expanding a Passenger Harbour in Cities: Skylines 2

TL;DR · 要点

Smog over the beach was blamed on the passenger harbour, so it's moved further out with a new artificial coastline, a footpath from the station and a food plaza. The pollution stayed — pointing at the industrial district instead. Also: quay walls you can only see from one side, concrete pillars between tracks, low-rise homes with tree gaps and first steps with the Recolor mod.

What happens in this episode

Episode 12 of Takaoka starts at the elevated station that serves the new passenger harbour from episode 11, with a few fixes before the main project.

How it was built

Quay walls you only see from one side

There were stray quay walls along the single and double tracks that I hadn’t noticed. Some quay walls are only visible from one direction, so always check both sides when fixing them. The gap between the tracks looked unrealistic, so six horizontal concrete pillars, raised to the right height, form a concrete surface between the lines, topped with untrimmed wild green bushes.

Moving the harbour out

There was still too much pollution over the residential area by the beach. My suspect: the passenger harbour, very close to the shoreline. With Move It, the harbour is pushed further out to sea for more distance from the coast. A parking lot vanished in the process and had to be rebuilt, and the angle was adjusted to match the industrial side of the harbour. The shoreline is reshaped with the level terrain tool to come closer to the road.

A tip from this rebuild: if you can’t change part of a road, subdivide it. Place another road across it (not as a bridge, no quay wall), and you can set each segment with or without quay walls. One spot kept glitching, and deleting and re-laying the road fixed it.

A footpath, a food plaza and a new coastline

A footpath lets people walk straight from the train station to the harbour, and lots of them do. The new coastline gets a modern bookshop, a gas station, a small shipping centre with trucks and a food delivery service for the ships. An oddly shaped parking lot became a little food plaza across from the station.

The first two ships arrived, and the pollution was still there. So the harbour wasn’t the cause. Commercial zones and offices seem to cope with pollution better than homes, which is a strange mechanic: I wouldn’t want to work in an office next to a polluting industry all day either. That realisation set up the relocation of the whole industrial zone later in the series.

Low-rise homes with room for trees

Behind the hospital, a new low-rise area loosens the density using avenues. The tracks get a small rail bridge so roads can pass under without a huge tunnel. The zoning technique: leave a strip between building rows for trees. I accidentally used EU houses, so every lot had to be replaced with North American low-density houses and the built homes demolished one by one. Sorry, new citizens. Mid-rise low-income buildings make the transition to a busy road, plus playgrounds, an urban elementary school with 500 extra places, offices and Chinese-pack buildings.

First time with the Recolor mod

One grey mid-rise building looked too dull, so I tried the Recolor mod for the first time, settled on a yellowish-brown tone and copied the style to its neighbours. It looks much better. The episode ends with a motorcycle fire put out by a helicopter, and with the flat northern part of the island waiting for development.

Video chapters

Clicking a chapter starts the video above at that point.

FAQ

Why can't I see some quay walls in Cities: Skylines 2?

Some quay walls along tracks are only visible from one direction. Always check both sides when you fix them — I missed several because I'd only looked from one side.

How do you change quay walls on just part of a road?

Subdivide it: place another road segment (not a bridge, no quay wall) across the stretch. You can then set each piece with or without quay walls.

Was the passenger harbour causing the pollution?

No. Moving it further from the shore didn't change the smog over the beach — which pointed to the industrial district as the real source, as the next episodes confirmed.