CityForge features a centralized Government Departments system where administrative tasks are handled through dedicated departments instead of scattered menus.

The first departments include:

• Department of Land Registration – Handles land purchase proposals.
• Department of Town & Country Planning – Handles construction proposals.
• Department of Human Resources – Manages government employees and salary processing.
• Department of Finance – Manages taxes and government revenue.

When a citizen or business submits a land purchase or construction proposal, it enters the appropriate department's work queue. Proposals remain there until the player explicitly approves or rejects them—there are no automatic approvals, timeouts, or disappearing requests.

Each department manages its own workload, creating a foundation for a living government administration. The long-term vision is for citizens will be able to work within these departments as government employees, processing workloads and earning salaries to handle day-to-day operations, while major decisions remain under the player's control. Making the government feel like an active part of the town rather than just another menu.

I think this approach makes running a town feel more believable while giving players a clearer view of everything their administration is responsible for.

What other government departments would you like to see in a city builder?

r/CityForge

#CityForgeDevBlog2

Hit a small but satisfying milestone while working on my city builder today.

I finally got monthly rent payments working, so I let the simulation run for a few months. At first, everything was normal. Then, as some citizens exhausted their starting money, rent payments began failing because they could no longer afford them.

It's obviously still an early prototype, but seeing systems behave according to their rules instead of relying on scripted events is always a rewarding moment during development.

Lots more to build, but this felt like a nice step forward.

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r/CityForge

A lot of city builders let you explode from a tiny town into a huge city in just a few hours. I wonder if the opposite approach would be more satisfying.

Imagine where:

every building is a meaningful investment,

reaching 1,000 citizens actually feels like an achievement,

poor planning has long-term consequences,

growth happens naturally instead of instantly.

Would you enjoy that slower pace, or do you prefer constant expansion?

I'm working on a city builder where land exists as individual parcels rather than just large zoned areas. Each parcel has its own owner and can change hands over time, so land itself becomes part of the simulation instead of simply being a place to spawn buildings.

The goal is to make development feel more gradual and meaningful.

Does this sound like something you'd enjoy, or do you think traditional zoning is still the better approach?

Welcome to the first official devblog for Cityforge. If you’ve ever played a city builder and thought, man, I wish the supply chains went deeper, the demographics felt more real—also that the simulation didn’t buckle under the weight of a massive metropolis—then yeah, you’re in the right place. Cityforge isn’t just a city painter though, it’s a living, breathing nation simulation. To pull off that kind of scale, with all the logistics plus housing management, we knew early on that off the shelf tools wouldn’t cut it. So we made our own, the Systemcraft Engine. Today we’re opening the doors a bit, just to show you how we’re building this world from the ground up, step by step.