Cities: Skylines 2's UI is getting an "extreme makeover", as new developers Iceflake take the reins

The new custodians of Cities: Skylines 2 have announced that they’re giving the city builder’s UI an “extreme makeover” in the game’s next patch, while tuning up the day/night lighting, and ensuring that snow actually sticks to the ground. I had an “extreme makeover” once and ended up with ginger hair for several months. Being a redhead didn’t really pan out for me, but I’m cautiously enthusiastic about Skylines 2’s new toolbar.

“We know that the UI can sometimes be a bit confusing when it comes to communicating things,” Iceflake write on Steam, “and while it’s still a work in progress, we’re really excited to show you the first changes we have made towards making the UI clearer to understand.

“We have streamlined the onboarding process and changed some icons to be more expressive and easier to understand the context from them. The toolbar has had the most changes as the colors and the visual style have gone through a big makeover. Now there are more round shapes, and the demand bars have more focus.”

Here’s a WIP screen. Behold the additional roundness and focus. Extreme enough for you?

Elsewhere, the devs are adding the ability to set custom colours for buildings and vehicles, inspired by yenyang’s “Recolor” mod – they may also eventually let you twiddle with the colour of trees and plants, favourite a colour, and apply colours to whole districts.

Aside from tuning up the daytime and nighttime lighting, they’ve rebalanced the cloud system so that you’ll probably see more clouds, and made it so that fog levels now respond to other weather – you might get more fog during storms, for example. Snow will also settle properly in lots, once the patch is live.

“We have already begun the process of improving other aspects of the environment, like ground textures and how to make them look more realistic, as well as being able to plop trees much closer together and toggling their age,” the devs add. “While some of these improvements might not be ready for this first patch, we are hopeful that they will be ready for the next one.”

They’ll describe the next patch’s mechanical changes in a separate blog post, and suggest that you “will be able to see these changes firsthand in the second half of February”. One thing that won’t come in the next patch is a planned in-game encyclopedia with a search function.

Iceflake Studios – a Paradox-owned joint previously known for post-apocalyptic city builder Surviving The Aftermath – took over development from original Skylines 2 developers Colossal Order at the start of 2026, following an announcement last November. At the time, Paradox framed cutting ties as a “mutual” decision, while Colossal Order said they had left to “work on new projects and explore new creative opportunities”.

The cynical read, of course, is that Paradox actually gave CO the boot and are simply masking their disappointment about how Cities: Skylines 2 has performed. It had a mixed launch reception and required a lot of fixing. I think it’ll take more than flakier backyards and a rounded UI to right the ship, but it’s a good start.