I wanted to find out how Cities: Skylines drives the constant motion you see in a growing city - residents looking for jobs, tourists visiting attractions, garbage trucks doing their rounds, even cims looking for love - and I couldn’t find much written up about it. So I decompiled the game and dug in. What I found is that almost every interaction in the game runs through a single, elegant system: a stock-market-style trading market.

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I wrote this post a few years back, and recently updated it to add detail to areas I thought lacked sufficient explanation.

I found it really interesting to explore how Colossal Order built such a versatile system, hopefully you will find it an interesting read.

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions! Thanks for reading.