Cities: Skylines 2 just received its first update from new developer Iceflake Studios, which replaced Colossal Order at the end of 2025. You might think this would be a prime opportunity to breathe new life into the struggling city-builder. To come out swinging with some big new features. To make the flowers bloom, the birds sing, the babies gurgle in a way that makes you think "Are they happy or about to barf?"

Nope! Instead, Iceflake's debut patch is utterly obsessed with death. Turns out your idiot citizens have been croaking in completely the wrong ways in Cities: Skylines 2, so Iceflake has donned its black robe and sharpened its scythe to sort things out.

Dubbed First Frost (though really it should be Last Rites) the update makes numerous tweaks to systems that govern the lights going out, the buckets being kicked, the farms being bought, etc. Chiefly, it fixes a bug that prevented time of day being taken into account when determining citizens' demises, which meant everyone was popping their clogs between midnight and six o'clock. It also quadruples the number of times the game calculates deaths from four to sixteen, in order to "further reduce the number of citizens dying at the same time".

In addition, the patch fixes an especially peculiar bug that made most of your citizens immortal when playing in easy mode. "Previously, about 80% of them never died of old age," Iceflake writes in a Steam post. An ageing population is difficult enough for modern governments to deal with, so I can imagine how challenging an immortal one would be. Shuffle off, grandad! How else am I to get a house in this economy?

Not everything in First Frost is about departures from the mortal realm. The patch also reduces trips made on the bicycles introduced by Colossal Order before it moved on to pastures new, by 80%. In short, your citizens are spending less time cycling and more time dying, which I suppose is how exercise works in real life too.

Elsewhere, the patch introduces a bunch of new UI icons for roundabouts, cul-de-sacs, road maintenance depots, pollution types, and more. It updates the onboarding tutorial for new players, makes terraforming tools less aggressive (otherwise known as a terrorforming tool), and makes a bunch of graphical improvements like improved shadow rendering, snow support for decal-based lots, and fog that adjusts according to weather conditions.

Oh, and the update finally switches autosave on by default, which is good, but also kinda wild that it's only happening now. It took two years, four months, and a change in developer, but Cities: Skylines 2 will now save automatically without player intervention.

While not bristling with new features, Iceflake's first patch still seems to have improved the sequel's immediate fortunes. Recent Steam reviews stand at 67% positive at the time of writing, compared to 54% positive overall. Let's hope this proves a new foundation for a brighter future for the sequel.

Medieval city-builder Manor Lords had a quiet 2025, as its developer adjusted to the game's enormous success following its release into Steam early access in 2024. Things picked up speed toward the end of the year, however, with a major patch arriving in December that introduced a rework to core systems and an overhaul to castle construction.

It seems Slavic Magic and publisher Hooded Horse are keen to maintain that momentum in 2026. In a Steam update, Hooded Horse's CEO Tim Bender provided a detailed rundown of what's coming to the management sim this year.

The most immediate planned change is a new upgrade level for the Burgage Plot—Manor Lords' basic homestead that can be expanded and tailored to a variety of uses. Burgage plots currently have three upgrade levels, but Slavic Magic is adding a new level, which exists between 2 and 3. "Its goal is to more smoothly bridge the gap between early and late-game housing", Bender explains.

Alongside this, Slavic Magic is also considering shifting certain workshop progressions to later in the game, tying baker extensions to level 3 Burgage Plots to encourage use of the early-game communal oven, and also doing the same with cobbler extensions. According to Bender, "shoes as an item aren't strictly required until this stage of progression anyway", though Manor Lords' barefoot peasants might disagree with this point.

More interesting, though, are the ideas Bender discusses for the patch due after the Burgage Plot update. To summarise, Slavic Magic is working on an extensive rework to trading, one designed to allow players to compete with rival lords economically as well as militarily.

According to Bender, this new system ties trade routes to specific locations, with said location using them to import and export specific items. "While a good like iron may appear on multiple routes, some cities will offer better prices than others, making certain routes more desirable…and more contested", Bender explains.

Each of these trade routes can support up to three merchants using it, while engaging in trade along any route requires you to hire at least one of them. If all merchants for a route are hired, lords can attempt a buyout of that merchant, increasing the hire fee and triggering a cooldown before they can be bought out again. "This turns profitable routes into contested economic territory rather than guaranteed income", Bender says.

This, Bender reckons, enables players to apply specific economic strategies. "You could, for example, attempt to monopolise Iron Slabs by hiring all Merchants on routes that export them. This would be expensive, but could leave a rival Lord without access to Iron, forcing them to adapt by paying inflated prices, expanding into an Iron-rich region, or negotiating with you directly." It might even result in "diplomatic deals where a rival trades excess weapons or other goods in exchange for Iron Slabs, effectively paying you as a middleman."

Bender is clearly jazzed by the concept. But both Hooded Horse and Slavic Magic are keen to know what existing Manor Lords players think about this potential direction for the game's economics, requesting that they leave comments on the post. "We're interested in how this kind of competitive trade feels to you, what concerns it raises, and whether it adds meaningful strategic choice to the game."

Hooded Horse has had a lot going on in this first week of the year. On Monday, it launched the 1.0 version of Terra Invicta, the massively ambitious sci-fi grand strategy from the creators of X-COM The Long War, which is sitting pretty with a 'Very Positive' Steam rating. Then on Thursday, Bender revealed just how much he hates generative AI, explaining that "It's written into our contracts if we're publishing the game: 'no fucking AI assets.'