we have our first look at Line City a few weeks ago, which is Saudi Arabia’s bizarre plan to spend a billion dollars to build a weird science fiction city along the Red Sea. According to the two-minute video above, the city will be a large straight line stretching 170 kilometers through the desert. The entire city will be the height of a skyscraper, but only 200 meters wide and completely covered in mirrors. For reasons? There are probably reasons.
While I think Line City would be a good location for a futuristic zombie movie where people have to fight their way from one end of the city to the other – make this movie anyway – it seems like a terrible place to house 9 million people without first asking if they want to live in a weird, skinny, mirrored skyscraper city. Not to mention all the people who will be displaced or worse? just to build the stupid thing.
But ridiculous plans in real life sometimes make for fun plans in video games, so I went ahead and built the longest, thinnest city I could build in Cities: Skylines, just to see if it would work. To avoid being charged or killed, I call my creation Skinny City.
And I have to admit that Skinny City more or less worked. It’s not as high as Line City, it’s not fully mirrored, and parts of it could have been considerably straighter had I put in even a little more effort while drawing my very long road. But it’s amazing how easy it is to build an incredibly stupid city when you have unlimited money, which I had with the infinite money switch from Cities: Skylines and what certain princes have thanks to being smart enough to join the right parents to be born. I also used a mod that allowed me to unlock every square of the map so I could build all the way to the edges.
To show the glory of my creation, I took the audio from the official Line City video above and clipped a trailer for Skinny City. You can check it out below (don’t forget to turn on the sound), though it honestly makes a lot more sense if you listen to the original two minute “What’s The Line?” video at the top of this page first.
As you can see I went with trams for local transport – Line City is a no cars environment – so I drew my way with two way tram lines and used a mod that allowed me to add a tram pivot point so they don’t have to go all the way from one end move from one city to another to change direction. That kept most of the cars out except for the endless parade of donut and hot dog trucks, so I didn’t really have any major traffic jams. Line City would also have a high-speed train that takes passengers from one side of the city to the other in 20 minutes. Before that I went with a monorail. Total travel time: only 4 minutes (although Skinny City is 26 km long instead of 170 km).
Water and power required most of the work, because while it would have been easy to throw pumps and some windmills along the river and bring them into the city with pipes and wires, I had the feeling that everything in Skinny City would be in Skinny City. should have been, or at least shoved next to it, so I used the terrain tool to dig a huge trench from the river to the edge of town and cram all my utilities into it.
It immediately made everyone in Skinny City very sick, because I was pumping sewage into people’s houses. Oops!
I still had to dig a huge ugly trench from the riverbed to my town and put the water pumps there, and everyone started to feel better except all the people who died. (Line City won’t say what it’ll do to its dead: presumably they’re pulling them out of their housing units with drones and piling them up in a glorious, gleaming cemetery skyscraper that’s just a five-minute walk away.)
If I’m not satisfied with one thing about Skinny City, it’s efficiency. Because my stupid city was one big line, I had to put in a lot more service buildings like police shops and schools because they operate in a sphere of influence and in Skinny City you can’t build things around things, you can only build things next to things. That means that while my city’s universities can accommodate 18,000 students, I currently only have about 250 enrolled. My crime rate is an extremely low 3% but I must have tons of totally bored cops due to having so many stations in the city.
There is also no good place to put buildings that cause pollution, such as garbage dumps or crematoria or any industrial buildings for that matter. I also don’t know where these things will go in Line City. Will there be garbage skyscrapers? Boer towers? The video, suspiciously, doesn’t mention how Line City will produce anything. Skinny City certainly not. City costs are currently $64,018, with a total income of $12 from public transportation. Seems feasible.
Besides, I can’t imagine living in the city trying to show people the way to my house: “So just turn left and go straight for exactly 21.36 km. I live on Skinny Road 464798590372. You can’t miss it. “
And finally I clicked on one of the monorails as it hurtled from one end of the city to the other, and it said there was only one person on board, who I can only assume was an extremely lonely driver . I guess my citizens just have no reason to travel from one side of town to the other unless I build something useful there. Like maybe a road to a city that isn’t so stupidly thin.
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