Cities Skylines 2 | How To Fix Broken Postal Services | Post Office and Sorting Facility Fix

[@TheEireknight]

Unfortunately, the bug still occurs without a cargo terminal of any kind. It just sporadically fixes it if you shut things off for a while. Ultimately the problem is the same one that happened with garbage dumps, only worse I think: I have a roughly 3000 person test city I've been running structured tests in. If I plop one post office, everything looks great at first, it collects and distributes the mail. I'm in the green, etc. Then, suddenly, it starts shrinking. Wondering why, I watched my post office and lo and behold my stored mail and Mail for Delivery stats were steadily rising... yet my entire city was bright green and only a handful of mail trucks were moving. Then I saw the culprit: A pair of out-of-city tractor trailers dropping off more mail... then more mail... then more... OK, maybe there's just a lot of backed up mail coming into the city. Might make sense on some level (not really, but let's run with it). It should even out eventually. It doesn't. More mail is coming in than going out, and then I notice another problem - every mail delivery truck that leaves with around 2k of deliverable mail is only delivering MAX 25% of what they're holding and most aren't delivering anything at all even though they drive around the city. They come back, adding to the pile everything that wasn't delivered. OK, maybe their route just picked up mail that wasn't on the route (which would be silly, but again, let's run with it), then we should be able to scale by adding another post office. Nope, if you do that, eventually you notice that while you sometimes get a spurt back up to 7-9 mail trucks, it eventually ends up splitting the employees between the post offices with only an average of 4 trucks active where it was 8 at first. I decided to test what happens when you create a third post office. I then got only 2-3 active delivery trucks on average. It's freaking splitting the employees and active trucks across post offices rather than scaling them. If you shut everything down and restart, sometimes you get a spurt where everything's working correctly (sometimes not) but eventually you wind up back in the same situation because behind the scenes, the game is feeding perpetual mail to the post office and never actually delivering all of it. I think the cargo hold issue is probably a non-sequitur or amplifying one of the half dozen bugs that is actually plaguing these in-game systems. I also tested splitting the post offices up among districts to see if dividing the labor would make things better. I got exactly the same results. Nobody can tell me that this game was tested. I've been a software developer for over 30 years now and this has all the hallmarks of an untested piece of software. All of these bugs are very easy to replicate, and I can tell you exactly what kind of amateur mistakes that are causing them. Things like shared resource pools that aren't appropriately distributed across arrays of resources are standard, first or second year developer training type bugs that bite everyone every once in a while, but there's just so many of them here in this game and they're in all of the systems. It's what I'd expect from a college class that didn't know how to do structured QA. I'm not trying to be harsh, there's just a lot wrong here that is very easy to tease out with structured testing.

[@MrKony98]

Economy 2.0 patch - the issue still persists. What a joke.

[@Bris01]

Thanks for the tip, although after some testing it seems that just turning off the cargo terminal and deleting the cargo lines should fix the problem as that should remove any funky export attempts. What's funny is that it doesn't even get fixed all at once but post offices seem to wake up one after the other for some reason, so it takes a while for all of them to get going if you got a big city with many POs...

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Thanks for the info!

[@deathhawk81]

@ChasetotheFinish - UPDATE - Follow these steps Step 1 - Save Your Game - Alternate File Step 2 - Delete Cargo Harbor and Cargo Terminal. IF you have multiple terminals, I suggest you remove several. In my test I removed the one and only Cargo Shipping and two Cargo Train terminals Step 3 - Delete ALL of your Cargo lines, can always recreate them Step 4 - Save your game to the alternate file, EXIT the game entirely Step 5 - Relaunch the game and load your Alternate file you just saved to. Step 6 - Hit the Game Speed, set it to max, and open up the mail menu, now if you watch closely, mail trucks will start to now just flood the city and your main processing speed will start to steadily pickup. Annoying we have to do this, but hey it works.

[@dominiqueelhage325]

Does rebuilding the cargo terminal create the same problem afterwards?

[@deathhawk81]

@@dominiqueelhage325 from what I've seen so far it stays fairly stable I haven't had much trouble afterwards.

[@gsari]

deleted 2 cargo terminals and it worked for me.. Thanks a lot!

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Of course! Thank you!

[@fahmioz]

i dont even have cargo terminal

[@Griefpluto]

What a game breaking bug. It's one thing to have performance problems, but this should have been spotted and resolved well before they released the game. This is why we should never pre order games ever again. Don't buy their garbage until maybe 1 or 2 years after release and until they fixed all their shits, don't give them a single dime.

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Luckily it was with the Game Pass so didn’t cost a cent.

[@zeroibis]

If you put a post box on every single road and spam them everywhere it works. I guess the devs just always built a bunch of post boxes when testing and so did not come across the issue. But you should not need post boxes literally spammed every 500ft on every single road.

[@GC__99__99]

so after i delete can i not build back a train cargo terminal? (basically does the existence of a cargo terminal at any time just stop all mail?)

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Yes it is a bug where the cargo terminals try to export mail causing the processing to stop

[@ragnarls]

@@ChasetotheFinish Have you tried getting around this with districts? I might give it a go later if no one has tried it yet

[@ChasetotheFinish]

@ragnarls as long as the terminals are placed it ruins it

[@werner-k]

i did immediately rebuild the terminal and post has still recovered fine. after a while, offices started delivering mails again. let’s see if this fix is permanent as long as no new rail cargo is created.

[@ragnarls]

@@werner-k This has been fixed in one of the December patches

[@zeroibis]

I found what appears to be the actual fix, you need to SPAM post boxes. I have a bunch of cargo terminals for trains airports and ships with the train add-on. I did not want to remove these. So first I tried to spam post offices to see what would happen. Nothing. Then I spammed post boxes and then the trucks went out in force and got the post and problem solved.

[@ChasetotheFinish]

How many post boxes do you have in the city? Are your post offices working to 100% rating? Which would be 150k per office.

[@zeroibis]

@@ChasetotheFinish Would need to check but to put into perspective I had spammed post offices before so I sill got quite a few with 0 post trucks out. I also have a bunch that are full of post trucks. Before spamming the mailboxes there was virtually no post trucks going around getting the mail and the mail processing meter was in the red and all my buildings were red. This is in a city with over 200,000 population. After I spammed the boxes and I mean I literally just placed them randomly so there was one on every single road and block. Some places that I really wanted to make sure they got mail I would put 3 next to each other. I just spammed the crap out of it. Now my mail is very far in the green and non of my buildings have postage issue. Let me load the game and check the exact numbers.

[@zeroibis]

@@ChasetotheFinish So I loaded up and checked it again and now the level has fallen where it used to be in the green it is now on the center part of line now (orange). I still have a bunch of post offices that are not sending out trucks and there is still some (just a few buildings) that are red. I just watched a post truck drive down a street and turn some buildings green but leave others red. I have a similar issue with garbage trucks in that I have buildings with garbage piled up but no all my trucks are sent out. Then 1 truck that is almost full will go to the buildings right before the ones filled with garbage and then get full and turn back. Likewise I have that building that is supposed to reduce ground pollution and you would think it would send out all 250 trucks but oh no it just sends a few and I have yet to notice any difference having the building. So I would say in general there is still a lot of craziness with both the postage and the garbage systems. Also noticed another issue that if you delete a mailbox it can mess up the zoning.

[@zeroibis]

@@ChasetotheFinish Just wanted to post another update, that it does appear to be climbing again slowly. I think becuase the problem was so extreme before I tried to fix it and due to the size of my city it is taking hours upon hours to sort out. However, it still does not change what I said before that this should really just be considered a work around and it is clear that a lot of service buildings are still messed up in general. On another note you can imagine how many elementary schools I have with a pop now around 250k ROFL.

[@ChasetotheFinish]

@zeroibis 250k is crazy! I will try your information and see if it fixed it! Thank you for explaining this all out. Hope to see you around on the channel. Glad you’re here.

[@ismaeld0117]

cargo train terminal and cargo harbor same problem. excellent video it is very helpful

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Glad to know the cargo harbor is in the same category. Looks like it’s trying to ship out mail instead of processing it.

[@felixchun1995]

also airport i think, with the cargo upgrade, i don’t own any train terminal and harbour other than the one included in airport

[@ChasetotheFinish]

@felixchun1995 have that coming up in a future build with me episode. Broke the postal service again!

[@максимкрупенко-ж5э]

Thanks man, deleting cargo terminals(without deleting depo) and spamming mail boxes helped. Built terminals back, will check how it will work.

[@kommentarepostenwill]

I got no Cargo Terminal but got this Problem also

[@IlanDavid]

Same

[@pilotadam733]

Dude, thank u for this solved!

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Of course! Hope to see you around on the channel’

[@ree397]

I don't have ANY cargo terminals at all and mine are still doing this. @ 1/20/2024

[@Bizarrebinx]

I would prefer if the post office was replaced by food delivery or package delivery service so citizen will not leave the house which reduces traffic between residential areas to commercial areas and has a wider reach to solve the "lack of customers" caused by distance

[@ChasetotheFinish]

That would be good - mail boxes solve this however - place them everywhere

[@victorsousa7239]

Thanks man deleting port worked for me

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Glad to hear man! Don’t forget to check out the build with me series and let me know what you’d like to see in future episodes.

[@magicstix0r]

Considering how badly this breaks the game you'd think they'd have patched it in the December patch...

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Would make too much sense

[@derreander]

Thannks goinng too try this out. Hooope they cann solow this soon.

[@floridaman4073]

Are using mail boxes? That’s what I do. Use districts to define a postal code?

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Yes - but if you have cargo terminals they don’t work.

[@floridaman4073]

@@ChasetotheFinish at this moment I have them working as it shows in my neighborhoods far from the Post Office showing happiness with mail service with boxes. I have a cargo station as well. 🤷‍♂️

[@ChasetotheFinish]

@floridaman4073 how many post offices do you have and what is your demand versus your supply?

[@floridaman4073]

@@ChasetotheFinish have one with a couple extra garages 30k residents, 52k collected mail, 33k delivered mail. About a dozen mail collection points spread out to provide coverage. 114% eff.

[@ChasetotheFinish]

So you’re using the districts and it has helped to ensure the post offices are functioning… I’ll look into and see if it works for me as well. Might be a good fix to help with things.

[@MBob89]

Thank you it worked to delete all train stations.

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Glad I could help! Hope to see you around on the channel!

[@ryangysbert8759]

It's working, thanks

[@ChasetotheFinish]

You're welcome!

[@RealAICCl]

I really find that frustrating.... but I hope its fixed soon thanks.

[@ChasetotheFinish]

hopefully

[@RealAICCl]

@@ChasetotheFinish just started a new city with the plan of no cargo but truck’s, hopefully it works

[@ChasetotheFinish]

@RealAICCl I’ve been doing my new one as such too. Demands are different for sure. Less Residential demand so far.

[@RealAICCl]

Meh, I still can't get the mega post office to actually DO anything even when there's nothing else going on in the city. I mean I rushed it and it just sits empty with employees. Gonna have to wait for a patch.@@ChasetotheFinish

[@ChasetotheFinish]

@RealAICCl it will only sort if your other post offices have too much mail sitting around. Wont work unless it has to

[@CadelBL]

Didn't work for me and i actually have now deletete my cargo harbor, all cargo train terminals, the airport cause (i had build the freight extension)... And I have a lot of postal building :( edit:: Nevermind after deleting the airport and waiting some minutes it finally worked.. now I just gotta rebuild all that shit

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Can’t rebuild it - it will break it again.

[@David-dr5fx]

I can not even fine the post offices

[@ataripunkprod.1413]

Thank you

[@ChasetotheFinish]

Of course I got a lot more info coming as well

[@christianbass10]

Why is the game dev not doing anything about this? we paid so much for this crap!!!

[@theopposite-22]

This game is a load of shite. I might just not bother playing it till 2030

[@s0rnt]

i minimized the game to watch the video and when i came back the game crashed , sweet.

[@ChasetotheFinish]

If you’re not playing on dual monitor when you click out of it and click back in sometimes the game thinks you’re trying to reload and crashes due to logging too much.

[@BlueSkyEyes]

@@ChasetotheFinish thank you. i was wondering why all those crashes were happening xd

[@briedabarb]

w video