Recent dev diary announcements have given me hope for the future of Chirper in Cities: Skylines 2, and well as a method (and an excuse, as if I needed one) to creep on my citizens' rich lives.
It had been hinted previously that any machinations made around your busting metropolis would affect your citizens—often referred to as Cims—in some super intricate ways. Keeping the standard necessities like city services running will ensure your Cims will be able to get to school, or the cemetery after a particularly gnarly road traffic collision, and taxing them into oblivion could see them becoming homeless only for you to find them mooching around in your city’s parks.
Developer Colossal Order has revealed that Cims around your city will live impressively full lives, in fact, with life events such as “graduating from a school, finding a spouse, landing a new job, and moving to a new home”. But the question remained, how were we going to keep track of all this life your Cims are living? Well, that’s where good ‘ol Chirper comes in.
As the most recent dev diary explains, "You can keep an eye on these events through the Lifepath Journal by following a citizen. This is done by selecting the citizen and clicking the Follow button, adding them to the list of Followed Citizens found on the right side of the screen right below Chirper."
So, just like the Twitter (or X) of real life, you’ll be able to follow the citizens of your choice, keeping track of their happiness, and peeping whether your choices as a benevolent Mayor have helped them to achieve their hopes and dreams.
"The Lifepath Journal records everything from the added citizens from the moment they are followed," the dev diary continues. "The journal entry lists their name, home address, current occupation, Happiness, and other information as well as their Chirper feed where they tell the whole world what is going on in their daily life."
And, if you follow a citizen from birth all the way through to death, you’ll end up bagging the "You Little Stalker" achievement. Not the most healthy of badges to wear on your public Steam profile, but hey, at least you can use the data here to understand how your choices are messing with your Cims happiness.
That's something you can track by clicking on Cims, as well as a handy tooltip to help you decipher what's missing from their life so you can improve it!
Chirper looks like a much stronger tool for understanding the needs of your citizens than the previous version, too: "Its functionality has been expanded and integrated more into the core gameplay as citizens voice their happiness and frustration about the various things happening in the city. The chirps relate to actual events and looking at the ‘likes’, you can see just how important the subject matter is to the chirp sender and other citizens."
So not only can you keep track of certain citizens without losing them, and make sure you’re there looking down with omniscient reverie at your Cims in their most intimate and triumphant moments, you can also like their posts on Chirper—"No way, guys, God liked my post!"
Maybe you can start up a car manufacturing industry, and rename the CEO Elon Musk, and watch as Chirper slowly goes down the tube after being renamed to Y, later in the game (just to clarify, the latter is not canon).
