Summary
- Use the Light Brush tool to fine-tune your dystopian city's look. Add or remove lights to get the Blade Runner or Night City aesthetic.
- Experiment and unlock new elements by playing. Try different building placements to unlock cyberpunk decorations like holographic ads or neon lights.
Dystopika is a city-building sandbox for creating the types of locales commonly associated with Blade Runner, Cyberpunk 2077, or Akira. Basically, dystopian super-cities full of big buildings, bright lights, and a pervading sense of soullessness throughout.
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PostsAs dour as that sounds, Dystopika actually bills itself as a cozy game, albeit a dark one. You create cities free of any usual game mechanics like management or stated goals, just a set of tools and some vibes. While it’s easy to pick up and go, the game doesn’t actually tell you much about how it plays, so we have some beginner tips here to get you started.
6 Adjust The Brightness
We all love a dark dystopia, but there’s such a thing as too dark. Bare minimum, you should be able to see more than half of the stuff on the screen. Unfortunately, by default the game doesn’t give you even that.
Generally speaking, if you can’t see the filler buildings that pop up as you fill out your city, then the game is probably too dim.
Luckily, a quick stop to the options menu will allow you to adjust the brightness. The game starts out at 20/100 brightness, far too dim to see anything. If you want to see everything you need to see while still maintaining the cyberpunk vibe, try 50. Higher than that, you’d be trading style for visual fidelity.
5 Fine Tune Your Dystopia With The Light Brush
If you want to get the look of your dystopian future city just right, the Light Brush is vital to get the correct look. The Light Brush (Add) tool adds lights to windows and bright screens to the buildings, having a more pronounced effect on the filler buildings. Conversely, the Light Brush (Remove) removes these lights.
Weather also plays an important part in the aesthetic, which the My City menu allows you to control alongside the time of day.
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PostsThe level of lighting often adds to a city’s personality. If you want the Blade Runner look for example, use the Light Brush tool sparingly (or not at all) and change the weather to a night of heavy rain. If you love the look of Night City, go nuts with the Light Brush and set the night to clear and cloudless so you can really catch those bright city lights. If you like your cyberpunk grungier, like in Dredd or Demolition Man, set the time to day and have the weather be a hazy orange, with lights concentrated in small parts of the city to really highlight the class divisions.
4 Filler Buildings React To Your Placements
If you look closely, you’ll see that you’re not just operating on an empty canvas and that buildings already exist in the world. Adding your megastructures will alter this status quo, changing in size or density of buildings.
Aside from the Light Brush, there’s no way to interact with the filler buildings.
Placing buildings close to each other will alter the buildings around them, while placing them at some distance might cause the smaller buildings to sprout between them. Generally, the more buildings you place or the taller you make existing buildings, the taller the filler buildings get. Conversely, shortening or deleting buildings will shorten or delete buildings around them.
3 Experiment To Unlock New Elements
Dystopika isn’t a game in the classic sense, it’s more a sandbox rather than a city builder proper. But it does have a staple of gaming: unlocking new elements as you play. In this case, you get new decorations to spruce up your world. These unlocks are usually staples of the cyberpunk genre like big holographic ads, flying car traffic, or neon lights.
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PostsTo unlock these elements, you'll have to experiment a bit, but generally there's decorations associated with each type of building (Central BD, Lowtown, New Eden, Omega Corp., Alpha Corp.). Try changing the heights of buildings or building them different distances from each other. New decorations tend to come with achievements as well.
2 Modifying And Moving Buildings
If you’ve played other city sims or strategy games where you place buildings, you might be used to being able to rotate them before you place them. However, in Dystopika, you can only alter buildings after placing them.
After you place a building, you can change it in a number of ways, depending on where you place your mouse on the building. Click on the bottom of the building to move it around, the middle of the building to rotate its facing, and the top of the building to adjust their heights.
1 Keep Billboard Files Compact And Simple
After your city gets going, you’ll get access to the billboard decoration. Clicking on the billboard cycles it between the different default pictures, but the real fun is when you press the I key to upload your own pics.
Billboard Type Image/Video Dimensions Small: Square 512 x 512 Medium: Landscape 1024 x 512 Medium: Square 512 x 512 Medium: Portrait 512 x 1024 Large: Portrait 512 x 1024 XL: Square 1024 x 1024You can also put videos on the billboards this way. According to the dev, the game supports H264 .mp4 and VP8 .webm video files. Also, running too many instances can negatively affect your game’s performance.
Unfortunately, this feature is limited in that you can’t control the size of the pic or what part of the pic is projected onto the billboard in-game. For best results, keep your files small, ideally small enough to fit in on the billboard. Symbols work best. However, if you’re savvy, we’ve also put the image dimensions of each billboard size above.
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