Cities: Skylines - Sunset Harbor

I've colour-coded more than a few spreadsheets tracking traffic throughput in Cities: Skylines, so when the ninth expansion promised a complete fishing production chain AND dedicated transport interchange buildings in one pack, I paid attention. Sunset Harbor is not the deepest single DLC Colossal Order has shipped, but it quietly fixes several friction points that veteran mayors have been routing around for years. The headliner is the fishing industry, and it earns its place even if it is not the most mechanically dense system in the game. You place fishing wharfs and fish farms along the waterfront, send out trawlers, run the catch through a processing chain, and push product out to fish markets - all governed by four new city policies that control freshness standards and distribution priorities. If you already own the Industries expansion, a Seafood Factory unlocks to tie both production lines together, which is a satisfying cross-DLC reward for completionists. The honest caveat: fishing needs more shoreline to breathe than most established cities have ready-made, and dropping it into a mature save can force awkward coastal redesigns. Starting fresh on one of the five new water-heavy maps - spanning boreal, tropical, and temperate biomes - is the cleaner approach. The transport additions are where Sunset Harbor earns serious respect from a build-order perspective. Pre-built interchange hubs now let you connect bus, metro, and train networks in a single footprint rather than jury-rigging proximity transfers with wishful thinking. Trolleybuses arrive on overhead-wire roads and fill a niche between trams and standard buses for mid-density corridors. Passenger helicopter routes work off user-defined stops, and metro lines can now be placed at street level or elevated - a feature that previously required mods. The Intercity Bus Service adds highway-connected stops for citizens moving between city borders, which meaningfully changes how you think about edge-of-map development. None of these individually reinvent transit planning, but together they close a lot of gaps that the mod community had been papering over. There are real caveats to document. The expanded healthcare system introduced alongside this DLC - child care and elderly care buildings - can trigger a death-wave crisis in older saves if the new facilities are not placed promptly after installing. That is a patching quirk rather than a design flaw, but it catches returning players off guard. Fishing, despite its charm, still feels slightly underpowered compared to the raw revenue potential of the farming and ore chains from the Industries DLC. Critics who reviewed it on launch noted it as the thinnest of the specialised industries, and that assessment holds. Traffic AI remains stubbornly bad at lane discipline regardless of what this or any DLC adds - the transport hubs help route citizens correctly, but the underlying road behaviour is unchanged. For strategy players who already own the base game and the Industries DLC, Sunset Harbor slots in as a logical next purchase: the cross-DLC Seafood Factory integration alone is worth the overlap, and the transport hub buildings will change how you lay out every city going forward. Pure newcomers should grab the base game first, get comfortable with zoning and transit basics, then consider this alongside Mass Transit and Industries as a trio that meaningfully expands the mid-to-late game decision space. The Steam Workshop ecosystem means any rough edge in the fishing system has probably already been smoothed out by a community mod by the time you read this.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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