Dynamic Traffic Paths
This mod upgrades the vanilla visual-only footpaths by turning heavily used citizen trails into real, functional dirt roads that can influence movement and city flow.
- Real Roads & Speed Boosts: High-traffic shortcuts can organically turn into actual Dirt Roads, giving citizens the normal road movement benefit.
- AI Reinforcement: Because generated paths become real roads, citizens naturally prefer using them, helping true desire paths settle in over time.
- Manual Roads Stay Permanent: Roads you place yourself are not part of the dynamic decay system.
- Nature Reclaims Unused Paths: If a generated shortcut stops seeing enough real traffic, it will eventually clear and grass will return over time.
- Pasture Wear: Animal movement in pastures can gradually wear down the grass, creating more natural-looking paddocks.
- Harvestable Protection: Wild harvestable plants are much harder to pave over by accident, so roads no longer tend to form over them after only light use.
- Safer Placement Checks: Dynamic roads will not form on water, inside rooms, under solid blockers, or on battle maps.
- Guard Patrol Exclusion: Guard patrols do not add traffic, so they will not keep old desire paths alive by themselves.
- In-Game Controls: Press Ctrl + P to toggle the simulation on or off, and Ctrl + T to open the settings menu.
The mod now includes an in-game settings menu so you can tune how aggressive or gentle the system feels:
- Harvestable Roads: Control how easily roads form over wild harvestable plants.
- Pasture Wear: Turn pasture grass wear on or off.
- Road Fading: Control how quickly unused generated roads disappear.
- Path Strength: Control how quickly walked traffic builds into roads.
- Grass Wear: Control how strongly traffic wears down grass before a road forms.
- Road Upkeep: Control how much upkeep discount generated roads receive.
- Reset To Defaults: Quickly restore the original recommended settings at any time.
The mod periodically samples active movement and adds traffic to tiles that are actually being walked:
- Fast-walking citizens add more traffic.
- Slow or lingering citizens add light traffic.
- Pasture animals can wear grass while moving.
Once a tile reaches enough traffic, it can become a dirt road automatically.
- Direct traffic only: Paths form from real walked movement rather than broad area-filling.
- Diagonal gap support: Obvious broken diagonal corners can still fill in, but only in strict cases to avoid “mega-highway” spreading.
- Generated road upkeep: Generated roads still receive janitor coverage, but their upkeep effect can now be tuned in the settings menu.
- Player control: Most of the mod’s major behavior can now be adjusted in-game without reinstalling or editing files.
The mod runs on a lightweight periodic background-style tick and only updates relevant traffic tiles, keeping performance impact very low even in larger settlements.
[ko-fi.com]
Mods should always be free! Though, consider buying me a coffee to keep me motivated 😉
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
