Organic Towns: Cities that Grow

Still being tuned, and I'd love your feedback. I have put many hours into Organic Towns so far: more than 50 test sessions in the game and over 800 towns grown and compared across seeds, climates, eras and name lists. I'm really excited to share it.

My goal was a game world that feels more alive: towns and cities that respond to the land around them, street names that say something about the place, and a unique, interesting experience in every new game.

Town growth is hard to get right on every map, so I'm still tuning it. Please tell me how it works on yours: post screenshots of your towns and cities in the comments, the good ones and the odd ones, along with your climate, name list and start year. Every report helps make the next update better.

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Organic Towns: Cities that Grow makes towns grow the way real ones do: winding streets that follow the hills, rivers and shores, a shape and a character of their own, and new satellite towns out in the country as they grow. No more identical grids stamped onto every landscape.

Each town reads its site (flat and open, coast, river, hills, valley or ridge), its region and its era, and grows new streets to match. One map gets many looks: sprawling towns on big flat land, dense winding ones on the coast and in the hills, planned grids that become more common after 1910.

Features

• Streets that fit the land: new streets follow the terrain, keep off steep slopes and water, and join the town at its dead ends. Towns grow along valleys, shores and the roads out of town instead of in round blobs.
• Regional styles: European organic cores and 19th-century extensions, Mediterranean hill towns, Nordic towns, North American grids and suburbs, Japanese dense streets and superblocks. The map's name list picks the region, or choose one in the settings.
• Every town its own form: clustered, radiating, long and narrow, fingers, sprawling with meadows between, or a strip along the shore. Neighboring towns are drawn to look different from each other.
• Satellite towns: grown towns found small towns of their own nearby, linked by a road: residential districts on a hilltop, by the shore or across the water, and industrial Works by a harbor, a station or a factory. They are real towns with their own names and grow when you serve them.
• Rivers, shores and bridges: river towns grow along their banks and now and then bridge the river to start a quarter on the far side. Many shore towns spread along the waterline like seaside resorts and lake towns.
• Around the forest: many towns grow into open fields and meadows first and keep the woods around them. A few deep-forest towns wind their streets between the trees.
• Landscape motifs: a street climbing the hillside, a fishbone along a valley, a curved harbor front, a village green, a ring road around the old core, a small grid quarter by your station.
• Strong town characters: one to three towns per map on a striking site get a character that shapes all their growth: hilltop village, clifftop strip, harbor cove, street village, company town, garden city, island town, or a new town with roundabouts.
• Landscape names: on a new map every town gets a name made from its own site, region and climate: "Two Waters" at a river bend, "Watersmeet" where two rivers meet, "Hornholt Isle" on a wooded spit, "Steinbach am Eichsee", "Pont-des-Saules", "Coral Key". Rivers and lakes are named too, and new road stops get a fitting street name. English, American, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and Japanese name lists.
• Growth by deliveries: each town's mix of homes, shops and industry leans toward what you deliver and shifts gradually over the years: a town fed with industrial cargo grows more industry, one served only by passenger lines more homes. Choose how strong the pull is in the settings, from a light lean to full mill towns.
• Towns mature: young towns stay low and spread out; grown towns build up, and about a third densify their center. From 1950 sprawling towns get wide arterials on their through routes.
• An Organic Towns card in the town window: what is shaping the town: its mix of homes, shops and industry and where deliveries pull it, its character and form, its street style (pick another one for the town's new streets), its growth phase, its parent town and satellite towns (click one to go there), and why it got its name. A notification tells you when a town founds a new satellite town.
• A head start: on a new map every town lays a few streets along its form in the first minutes, so towns differ from day one. Streets never run more than a block or two ahead of the houses.
• Room for industry: towns prefer to grow away from heavy industry, and keep clear the land farms, mines and quarries need to expand. They also lean a little away from the harbors, airports, vehicle depots and freight stations you build.
• Roundabouts (with Roundabouts & Interchanges): from about 1960 towns build some one-way roundabouts at their new crossings, most in France and the rest of Europe.

Settings

• Act on (default New towns only): New towns only (on a new map, every town), All towns (existing towns too), or Off.
• Vanilla town street angles (default Automatic (by region)): the street angles the game itself uses for towns: straight grids in North America and Oceania, more irregular in Europe and the Mediterranean. Grid, Mixed, Organic or Game default.
• Streets at industries (default Game default): Off leaves out the small streets the map generator lays at industries, so no house clusters grow next to the works. New maps only.
• Town and stop names (default Landscape names): Landscape names or Game names. Other name mods keep their own names; the Asian, Chinese, Korean, Polish and Russian lists keep the game's names.
• Town growth (default By deliveries): By deliveries or Game default (the game evens each town's mix out).
• Delivery weighting (default Medium): how strongly deliveries pull a town's mix. Full makes clear mill towns and home towns, Strong and Medium are in between, Light keeps towns close to an even mix.
• Satellite towns (default On): On, Residential only, Industrial only or Off.
• Strong town characters (default On): On or Off.
• Town style (default Automatic): Automatic follows the map's name list, or pick a region: North American grid, European organic, Mediterranean, Nordic, North American suburbs and grid, East Asian, Japanese or Mixed.
• Town layout (default Organic): Very organic, Organic, Mixed, Gridded or Very gridded.
• Growth lookahead (default Medium): how far ahead of demand new streets are built.
• Debug log (default Off): writes every planning step to stdout.txt.

Notes

• Best on a new map: landscape names, strong characters, satellite towns and the head start only happen there.
• Safe to add to an existing save: by default only towns founded afterwards get new streets (pick All towns to include the others).
• Everything the mod builds is plain base-game streets and towns, so it all stays if you remove the mod (the game warns you); towns then grow the game's way again. The mod steers growth by locking some streets against the town's own street building; those stay locked, and the town still builds houses along them.
• The mod's street building is free: towns grow only while the game runs, and the streets it builds cost you nothing and belong to the town.
• Roundabouts & Interchanges is optional; its roundabouts here are base-game streets and stay if you remove it.
• Works with Left Hand Traffic: junctions get left-hand lanes. Towns build no roundabouts then (they would run the wrong way).
• Add or remove mods only from the main menu, never with a save loaded.

More from square

Most popular

Lines and passengers

Industry and supply

Roads and building

Screenshots and camera

Interface

Testing tools

Towns & Streets: Texas · Florida · California · Pennsylvania · New York · Hawaii · New Mexico · Alaska · Washington · Arizona · Oregon · Minnesota · Colorado

Changelog

Revision 12 (2026-10-28)

• Fixed: the Organic Towns card in the town window now shows for every town the mod builds in, also towns placed later or with another mod. Before the town's first new streets it says when its character, growth phase and family will appear, instead of a shorter card or none at all.

Revision 11 (2026-10-26)

• New: a town on a raised flat (a mesa or plateau with steep drops around it) fills its flat top first. Its long arms down the slopes come later, once the top has filled. Towns in existing saves pick this up on load.
• Fixed: new satellite towns (Works and districts) now want commercial and industrial cargo, not only passengers, so deliveries can grow them. Satellite towns in existing saves get their missing cargo needs on load.
• Fixed: a new district now gets a few streets of its own at its site, so its houses go up there instead of on its parent town's streets. A district in an existing save with no streets at its site gets them at its parent's next build.

Revision 10 (2026-10-23)

• Fixed: new streets no longer break tram lines. When a town's new street joins an existing junction, every lane connection there (tram tracks, custom lanes, traffic lights) is kept as it was. Towns no longer grow from the end of a tram street, and streets with tram tracks or bus lanes are never rebuilt.
• Removed the Starting town size setting: it could not shrink a new map's starting towns, only their residents. For smaller starting towns, set Population in the game's Gameplay Settings → Advanced. Saves that used it get back the game's own population setting.

Revision 9 (2026-10-22)

• New: pick a town's street style in its Organic Towns card. The town's new streets follow it; streets already built stay as they are. Automatic goes back to the town's own style.
• New: the Delivery weighting setting (Full, Strong, Medium, Light) sets how strongly deliveries pull a town's mix of homes, shops and industry. The default is Medium, a middle ground; Full is the strong pull of earlier revisions.
• Changed: a town's mix now shifts more gradually at every setting, and short swings in deliveries move it less. Towns in existing saves ease back toward the Medium aim over the years as they grow; nothing is torn down.

Revision 8 (2026-10-20)

• Works with Left Hand Traffic: the junctions towns build now get left-hand lanes (before, their lane connections were misaligned). Towns build no roundabouts under left-hand traffic. Junctions built before this update keep their lanes until a new street joins them.

Revision 7 (2026-10-20)

• Fixed for PlayStation 5: the town window card no longer risks crashing the UI where the console's game lacks a part the PC version has.

Revision 6 (2026-10-20)

• Changed: side streets leave a street at a proper angle (at least 60°), no more shallow branches peeling off and running back beside it.
• Changed: no new streets squeezed in a few meters beside another for a long stretch, and a new parallel row of streets waits until the row next to it has houses.
• Improved: streets that end close to each other connect more often, now also with a right-angle corner, and dead ends that sat empty for a while can join too.
• Fixed: a town whose houses spread to a far-off group no longer lays streets far out into the countryside toward it.
• Faster: the mod does much less work every frame, about half its previous cost.

Revision 5 (2026-10-19)

• New: a street that ends close to another street now often connects to it, with a T or by joining two dead ends, instead of stopping just short.
• New: towns lean a little away from the harbors, airports, vehicle depots, maintenance stations and freight stations you build. A gentle preference, not a ban.
• Changed: blocks between parallel streets are a little wider (at least 44 m), so far fewer blocks hold only a single building or a sliver of tiny ones.
• Changed: towns always keep at least a quarter of their growth residential, so they stay places where people live.
• Fixed: medium and large streets are built only as continuous through routes, no more single wide pieces between small streets that sent cars on detours.
• Fixed: new streets are always plain town streets, never tram, bus-lane, barrier or tree-lined ones, also where they continue a street you upgraded.
• Fixed: name lists from other mods (e.g. German town lists) are recognized, so new satellite towns get names in that list's language.

Revision 4 (2026-10-17)

• New: an Organic Towns card in the town window shows how deliveries steer the town's mix, its character, form and street style, its growth phase, its parent and satellite towns (click to jump there) and where its name comes from.
• New: a notification when a town founds a satellite town (a residential district or an industrial Works town). Click it to go to the new town.

Revision 3 (2026-10-17)

• Fixed: the mod's streets are now built at no cost instead of being charged and refunded, so your balance no longer flashes and your finances and graphs stay clean.
• Fixed: the streets the mod builds belong to the town, not to you.
• Removed: the "Testing: grow towns faster" setting. Towns grow only as the game grows them.

Revision 2 (2026-10-17)

• Fixed: towns no longer build streets while the game is paused. The mod's timers stand still during a pause, so nothing is built all at once when you resume.
• Fixed: the mod's street building is now free. Its cost is refunded to you, so a new game started with no money no longer goes into the red.

Revision 1 (2026-10-16)

• First release.