Cities: Skylines 2’s asset editor remains a distant dream: Colossal Order is still working on it but says it’s ‘proven more technically challenging than initially anticipated’

Colossal Order said in November 2024 that an update on the long-awaited Cities: Skylines 2 asset editor would be shared “once the remaining issues are ironed out.” As it turns out, that promise was a bit off the mark: The studio posted an update on the asset editor today, and those remaining issues remained unironed.

“The implementation of the Asset Editor has proven more technically challenging than initially anticipated due to the hefty amounts of built-in assets affected by the changes, but it is moving forward,” Colossal Order wrote.

“Our focus is currently on removing Unity dependencies so we can provide a smoother, more responsive, and more reliable loading of the assets—both during loading screens and when changing playsets in Paradox Mods UI. Without this, the game freezes for extended periods of time and can become unstable. We want to support subscriptions to large amounts of assets with minimal performance side effects.

“We are also making the importing and baking of assets more asynchronous to reduce identifier conflicts with serialization. Assets created on different machines can easily cause these, resulting in the game getting confused about what assets it is actually trying to load.”

The dev team said it’s “committed to solving these challenges,” and expressed gratitude for everyone’s patience while they continue hammering away at it. But patience is wearing thin: Replies to the update on Steam are very clear expressions of frustration with the ongoing wait for the asset editor, a perceived lack of transparency and communication from Colossal Order, and the state of Cities: Skylines 2 overall.

There’s no denying that Colossal Order has faced some seriously over-the-line abuse from some Cities: Skylines 2 players, but there’s a lot of space for genuine dissatisfaction here too. Cities: Skylines 2 was not in great shape when it launched in October 2023, and subsequent missteps—the release of the game’s first DLC, Beach Properties, was such a mess that Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive released a joint apology—have only made matters worse.

Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja admitted in October 2024 that the game was released too early, and while Cities: Skylines 2 is in better shape now than it was then, it remains weighed down by a “mixed” user rating, and concurrent player counts that still have not surpassed those of the 10-year-old original.

The asset editor isn’t the only thing Colossal Order is struggling with. The console versions of Cities: Skylines 2 is also still floundering: The team said it’s making “steady progress” on the console editions, but added that “we have more things we need to address before we reach the level of quality and the experience we want for you as our players.” That means Cities: Skylines 2 will not release on console before summer, although Colossal Order isn’t ready to commit to anything beyond that.

It’s not all doom and gloom: Colossal Order noted that the 10^th anniversary of Cities: Skylines is “just around the corner”—March 10, to be specific—and said it has “a little something for our players to look forward to.” No clues beyond that, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s probably not going to be the asset editor.