Cities Skylines 2 devs say teeth are not responsible for performance problem

Your citizens may not have the best life in Cities Skylines 2 right now, but Paradox and Colossal Order are working on performance issues in the new city builder. And while there’s a long list of what’s wrong, citizens’ teeth aren’t among the biggest concerns – so says the devs.

Right – I’m talking about the people of your fantasy city having resource-hogging teeth, but apparently it’s not quite as bad as players initially worried over. On Reddit, user Hexcoder0 shared an image of… teeth. Well, more like a screenshot of teeth meshes you can find on citizens by poking around game files.

Originally, they hypothesized Cities Skylines 2 performance issues were made worse by the game rendering individual teeth and no LOD (level of detail) to generate those chompers with less detailed versions of the models. To their credit, they noted there could be mechanisms in place they’re unaware of, and the inspection uses third-party performance tools to inspect what’s causing stress on your PC.

According to the devs, the character models do need more work, but they aren’t affecting performance in the ways you may think. In a statement to Destructoid, Publisher Paradox Interactive and developer Colossal Order said:

“Citizen lifepath feature does not tie to citizen geometry and does not affect the performance figures of the characters. We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their LODs which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets. Characters feature a lot of details that, while seemingly unnecessary now, will become relevant in the future of the project.”

Colossal Order and Paradox reference further plans for the Lifepath features in Cities Skylines 2. Not all citizen-related aspects are in Cities just yet, but they do note this is important for later use. However, the statement acknowledges the lack of LOD and some performance hits, but it sounds like that’s not major concern.

As for other Cities Skylines 2 performance fixes, the developer just launched another patch yesterday addressing optimization. For now, the patch is only available on Steam, but should follow up soon on the Microsoft Store. Some updates include improvements to fog, Depth of Field, stuttering, and Global Illumination. It sounds like the teeth cleaning check-up comes later.