Dynamic Traffic Paths (Beta)
This mod upgrades the vanilla visual-only paths. It turns the trails left by walking citizens into real, functional country dirt roads that dynamically shape how your city grows and how citizens navigate.
Key Features
- Real Roads & Speed Boosts: High-traffic shortcuts organically spawn actual Country Roads, granting citizens a movement speed bonus.
- AI Pathfinding Loop: Since these organic dirt roads provide a speed boost, the game’s pathfinding AI naturally routes other citizens onto them, solidifying realistic desire paths over time.
- Permanent Player Roads: Any road you place manually is permanent and excluded from the decay system.
- Nature Reclaims: If a shortcut falls out of use, the road is cleared and nature regrows the grass after 2 days of inactivity.
- Pasture & Livestock Wear: Livestock hooves organically thin the grass in pastures over time (~1 game year), creating realistic paddocks.
- Structure & Farm Protection: Safe checks prevent paths from forming under buildings, walls, decorations, or farm crops.
- In-Game Toggle: Press Ctrl + P at any time to toggle the path simulation on or off.
How it Works
The mod scans active citizens and animals in the background every 0.5 seconds to record traffic:
- Fast-walking citizens wear down paths (+15 traffic).
- Slow/standing citizens wear down gathering spaces (+1 traffic).
- Pasture animals thin out grass slowly (+6 when moving, +1 when resting).
Once a tile registers high traffic (200+), a country road is placed automatically.
Performance
Optimized using a periodic downsampled main-thread tick. The impact on game performance is negligible, even in huge late-game settlements with thousands of citizens.
[ko-fi.com]
