Ah yes, it's that game that I forget how much that I enjoy

unless something new and shiny comes out for it

every couple months or so.

Or in this case, like 10 months.

The last pack for this was back in May of 2019,

but you know what, I'll take it.

It's rather fortuitous timing because of,

I don't know about you, but I've been finding myself

rather physically isolated recently,

and you know what?

Jumping into a virtual city to explore

and build and mess around with

sounds like a pretty great time at the moment.

So yeah, let's dive into Sunset Harbor,

the 9th expansion pack to Cities Skylines

released on March 26th, 2020.

And this time around there was no code

provided to me for review, no early access or anything,

but that's okay, I just went ahead and bought it

whenever it came out and it costs $14.99,

or your regional equivalent as always.

As for what you actually get in this expansion, well,

this is an intriguing mix of items and things and features.

Kind of think of this as an expansion

to previous expansions, really adding on to the same ideas

introduced in Industries, Mass Transit,

and little bit of Green Cities tossed in there,

because why not?

One of the first things you'll note

is that there are five new maps that make pretty good use

of the new resources, as you'd expect.

But it will work on any existing map,

as long as it has waterways.

Meaning that the new desert map, Desert Oasis,

is going to be a challenge for this water-centric content.

To say the least, you might be missing out on a few things.

Like one of the biggest additions to Sunset Harbor,

the fishing industry.

Really it introduces a new resource supply chain,

augmenting both industry and commerce,

and that new resource being-

["Fresh fish!"]

Four fresh types of fish

to be exact, with each one spawning

under different conditions in the waters.

Anchovies will like still, shallow waters.

Salmon, they need shallow flowing water.

Shellfish requires deep, still waters,

and Tuna likes deep flowing water.

And yeah, this means that you can just

manipulate the terrain to generate different fish

as you terrain edit in real-time.

And naturally, one of the main things that's

going to screw up fish production is pollution,

so you've got to keep an eye on that.

Like, you might have some ideal water

but it's full of crap, so that'll screw things up,

reducing your yield significantly.

How we actually get them fishies out of there

is by building a fishing harbor to begin with.

There's more specialized ones that we'll unlock

the more fish you fish.

And the way you dial in what your boats

are going to be grabbing out of the water

are with fishing routes, and yeah,

these work a lot like the Road tool,

pretty much the same as blimps.

Just draw yourself a path out in the open waters,

and as long as it connects in a closed loop

back to the originating harbor then it'll work just fine.

In fact, you can even send boats outside of city limits,

although you do want to make sure that they're long enough

to catch 100% load per boat,

but not so long as to waste time either.

Like some of the ones I made early on, it's like

half of the boat's travel was coming back

after they had already gotten 100% load.

And you can overlap them as much as you want,

but it's annoyingly tricky to tell each

individual fishing route apart after a while,

as all are the exact same pattern and color.

As far as I can tell there's no way to change this,

at least right now, it's confusing.

A far less confusing and much more simple option

are Fish Farms, and these will unlock at City Milestone 5,

letting you farm fish in the area instead of going out

to search for them, and actually later you can also

farm seaweed and algae, but, yeah.

The farm, man, it's a static thing

so it doesn't need a route.

And in fact it'll also work in a small lake,

which is pretty cool.

As long as you've got some kind of water

that's not polluted, you can farm water critters.

Much like the farms that you'll find on land in the game,

each one has its own growth cycle,

showing the current yield and the more healthy the farm is,

the quicker and more effectively you'll grow

whatever you tell it to grow.

These farms and harbors only hold a limited capacity

of fish at any given time, so it's well worth building

one of the places that can do things with fish.

One being the Fish Market where the raw food material

can be sold directly to citizens and tourists,

and it gives the surrounding area

a nice health benefit for some reason.

And also, some entertainment.

The other place you can send the catch of the day

is the Fish Factory,

a more traditional, industrial destination

where sea creatures of all kinds are packaged up

as generic goods to be shipped out to whoever needs them.

It's worth noting that this doesn't work

how the Industries DLC does,

you're not going to be painting fishing districts

or unlocking more levels

or adding a bunch of little extra buildings off to the side.

It really is just another way to accumulate

generic, commercial goods,

which is somewhat disappointing, honestly.

Effectively, it's just an industry overlay

saying you're doing something different with each type

of fish and building, but in reality it's producing

those generic items all generically.

I will say it is nice to have boats at least,

not just giant cargo and cruise ships

going around in your waterways all the time.

It kind of always bothered me that Jetski rentals

and marinas that we had in the game before this

didn't generate boats.

So having a bunch of different types of fishing boats

out there, yeah, it's a cool look.

And really that's about it for the harbor part

of Sunset Harbor.

Aesthetic diversification really is

its shining attribute.

You get harbors at sunset, and boatloads of boats,

and that's that.

Thankfully there's a good bit more to go over,

just not really related to fishing or harbors or anything.

For whatever reason they've included a bunch of stuff

regarding water and waste management, bus systems,

transportation hubs, and aviation city services.

I don't know why they bundled all these in this pack,

but I'll just go over them anyway,

starting with the water and waste management buildings,

adding on to the usual city-wide garbage service.

With the two main new buildings being

the Waste Processing Complex and Waste Transfer Facility,

each sending out transfer and collection trucks

to go and handle trash

in between the normal trash collection stuff.

The way it works is that you get these other trucks

that are picking up garbage from landfills and incinerators

and the Green Cities recycling centers and such,

then they take them to be processed at a Transfer Facility,

before again being taken to another place

for its final destination.

The positive being that this also works well

in residential zones, you can put one of these buildings

there and it's not going to be extremely polluted,

I mean it's still going to be a little bit,

but it keeps it way down compared to a lot

of the other garbage buildings, and opens up some room

for other, less nasty things.

There's also the Inland Water Treatment Plant,

which will clean up your water

without dumping it into a waterway, so hooray!

Now you get tons of ground pollution instead.

These new treatment plants also come with an Eco variant,

kind of going along with the Green Cities stuff,

as well as advanced versions of the same buildings,

doing the same thing but more... advanced-ly.

Oh, and the new, bigger Water Tower.

I think this thing looks excellent,

it's all retro-future-funky-looking,

very much from the Cloud City school of architecture,

I approve.

The next big addition to this pack are,

inexplicably, bus systems.

First up being the new intercity buses,

and these work differently than any other bus in the game.

It just allows citizens and tourists to travel

to and from off-screen cities,

reducing highway traffic and traffic overall ideally.

There's no need for stops or lines or anything like that,

you just need a Depot or a Terminal,

place it down somewhere and it just works.

I like the effects of this and I like the idea as well,

but the execution, man, I just still wish

that you could do something more

with those unseen outside cities,

like trading things back and forth or something,

I don't know, I played too many SimCity games.

As it is you've just got these buses going in and out

of the blue void at the edge of the map,

and supposedly there's other cities out there.

I don't know, it's fine, I'm glad these buses are here.

Something I'm less on board with are the trolley buses,

basically trackless trams, electric buses

drawing power from overhead wires,

meaning that they require yet another specialized road

that you've got to commit to if you want to use them.

And I'm not really sure I see much reason to use them.

It's nice that they're not stuck in one track like a tram,

so they're able to change lanes and pull over

to the side of the road and stuff,

but the biggest reason to want them

would seem to be an aesthetic choice.

A lot of the advantages that I could think of

for having these in real life,

they're just not modeled in the game,

things like vehicle pollution or smog.

Yeah, Cities Skylines doesn't worry about that with traffic,

and you don't get any advantages over, like, a gasoline bus,

extra torque or endurance that an electric would have,

going up hills or anything,

it's just not modeled in-game.

So, I don't know, man, props to them for solving

the technical challenge of making the wires work,

it's cool to see that animation happening,

but I can completely leave these behind

and I don't think I'll ever be using them after this video.

Keeping in line with all the transportation add-on stuff,

they have also added five new Transport Hubs,

connecting different networks together

and allowing citizens and tourists to change

from one type of transportation to another in the same spot.

And I like these, they're a good way to simplify things

and save a little bit of space.

So you've got a hub for bus and intercity buses

to transfer between one another,

a hub for Metro and intercity buses to do the same thing,

a bus/Metro hub to go back and forth between those,

and a train/Metro hub doing exactly what it sounds like.

And the last one is a little bit of a different thing,

it's the Metropolitan Airport,

counting as a really large hub.

In fact it's the biggest building in Skylines to date.