Complete reference for every system, building, faction, and mechanic. Bookmark this page; the game is deep enough that you'll want to come back.
MQ City Builder is a mobile-first low-poly city sim that plays like a premium Steam title. There are no microtransactions, no energy timers, no "wait 4 hours for your factory" mechanics. Build cities; build well; learn the loop.
A fresh save spawns you on a procedurally-generated map with lakes, rivers, forests, and elevation. You start with $5,000,000 in the treasury, a small starter toolkit (roads, low-density zones, parks, walking paths, districts, buy-land), and a city wide open for design.
The first time you launch, a 9-step play-as-you-learn tutorial walks you through paving a road, zoning, dropping a park, opening the Population and Treasury panels, growing to 200, and placing power + water. Elections and unlocks past Hamlet are silenced during onboarding so popups don't crowd you. You can re-launch it any time from Settings → "Show tutorial again".
Tap the rotate pill on the HUD (or use the HUD rotate button) to snap the camera 90° clockwise. The map can be viewed from any of four cardinal iso angles — useful for seeing behind tall buildings.
Population is the primary milestone-driving stat. It's the sum of residents living on developed residential and mixed-use tiles, distributed across 10 factions.
| Tier | Residential | Mixed-use (half-rate) |
|---|---|---|
| L1 (Low) | 4 residents | 2 |
| L2 (Medium) | 16 | 8 |
| L3 (High) | 64 | 32 |
Three bars on the HUD show city-wide demand for Residential, Commercial, and Industrial. Demand is in [−1, +1]:
Demand is driven by:
A weighted-average happiness score across the 10 factions, in [−1, +1]. Modulates building colour saturation (happy cities look vibrant, unhappy cities look drab) and feeds back into demand.
The Treasury pill at the top of the HUD shows current cash. Open the Budget panel by tapping it.
R / C / I tax rates are independently adjustable. Each tier (low / medium / high) of each zone has a base tax rate; the slider modifies it.
Tax sliders affect demand AND mood. Pushing R-tax above 0.5 angers Working Families First and Taxpayers' Alliance; cutting taxes drops city revenue. There's no "right" answer — find the slider that keeps both happiness and treasury sustainable.
A separate slider in the Budget panel adds a top-up tax on L3 R/C buildings + luxury homes. Up to 30%. Hated by Taxpayers and Chamber of Commerce; loved by Working Families First.
Ten named-leader factions watch every move you make. Each has a personality, a happiness score in [−1, +1] derived from current city state, and a natural share of city population. This is the keystone feature of the game.
Tap the Population pill to open the Community Sentiment panel. Each faction's row shows their leader's name, current happiness, and a Facebook-style comment in their voice. Tap a row to see their preferred policies + civic-action levers.
Anti-density-near-them, anti-industry, pro-park. Loves luxury homes. Loud at hearings.
Pro-density, pro-transit, anti-sprawl. Wants you to build up, not out.
Anti-industry, anti-deforestation, pro-park. Furious whenever a power plant lights up.
Pro-rural-feel, anti-skyscraper, anti-large-network. Wants the town to stay a town.
Pro-business, pro-low-business-tax. Bankrolls every campaign that promises a tax cut.
Pro-bus, pro-density-with-transit, anti-stroad. Wants bus lanes, not arterials.
Pro-road, anti-bus-stop-near-R, pro-easy-driving. Hates traffic; hates buses more.
Pro-surplus, anti-deficit, anti-high-tax. Holds the strings; tightens them when you blow the budget.
Pro-stop-signs, anti-accidents, pro-services. Will rally on the courthouse steps.
Pro-jobs, anti-high-R-tax, pro-services. The breadwinner block.
Every decision touches at least one faction. Bus-only lanes please Transit and Safer Streets; they enrage Drivers. A power plant helps Working Families (jobs) and furious Greenleaf. Plan for the angry side, not just the happy side — angry factions vote, mobilize, and run candidates against you.
Every 12 sim months, the city holds an election. The mayor (you) always wins ≥50.0001%; the 2nd-most-angry faction's leader runs as your opponent and is excluded from council that term. Of the remaining 9, 4 take council seats, ranked by vote score where vote = factionPop × turnout and turnout climbs with anger.
stance on every buildable; if they oppose, your cost goes up. mult = 1 − Σ stances × 0.25, clamped [0.20, 2.50]. If every councillor strongly opposes (all stances ≤ −0.4), the action is banned for the term.When an election fires, a modal shows the vote split, the 4 winning council seats, the opponent, and a sortable vote-share table. New leaders appear in a one-time bio popup so you "meet" them.
Banned tools show a strikethrough + 🚫 marker in the toolbar. Group buttons show partial-ban state when only some of their members are banned. After every election the toolbar re-derives the ban set.
Civic actions let you actively influence the next election. They cost Political Capital (PC), a slow-accumulating resource earned monthly based on faction happiness. Cap at 50 PC.
| Action | Cost | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Endorse leader | 5 PC | Boosts a faction's vote share. They can't be picked as opponent. Slight happiness penalty for everyone else. |
| Form coalition | 10 PC | Pick two factions. Allies gain happiness; their rivals (per the rival matrix) lose happiness. |
| Photo-op | 2 PC + $200 | Triggered opportunistically after placing a building strongly favoured by a faction. Boosts that faction's turnout; the building's opponents lose happiness. Per-term cap — can only photo-op each faction once. |
| Mayoral Override | 40 PC | Activates at the next election for one term. Bypasses cost multipliers, zoning gate, and bans entirely. Also lets you set the Beautification Budget tier directly. |
Photo-ops fire automatically as a banner after you place a building a faction strongly supports. Tap it to claim. Don't claim if you can't afford it — it disappears after a few seconds. The right photo-op can swing a tight election.
Population milestones gate the toolbar. Each unlock adds buildings + tools to your kit, fires a celebration banner (with the milestone leader's voice), and pays out cash + PC.
| Name | Pop | Cash | PC | Unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hamlet | 50 | $2,000 | 2 | Medium R / C / I / MU zoning |
| Village | 200 | $5,000 | 3 | Power plant, water tower, avenue, stop sign, walking path |
| Town | 500 | $5,000 | 3 | Bus stop, bus depot, traffic light, high-density C/I/MU, schools, fire + police stations, museum, City Hall, basic Architect tools, plazas, piers |
| City | 1,000 | $10,000 | 5 | Highway, high-density R, hospital, stadium, ferry dock, skyscrapers |
| Metropolis | 2,500 | $20,000 | 7 | Observatory, subway entrance, Provincial Capital, advanced Architect tools (fountain, reflecting pool, memorial garden) |
| Capital | 5,000 | $50,000 | 10 | Mayor's Mansion, National Capital, premium monuments (clock tower, triumphal arch), full Architect kit |
| Tier | Cost / tile | Speed | Capacity | Stripes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local | $10 | 1.0× | Low | Dashed yellow centerline |
| Avenue | $30 | 1.4× | Medium | Solid double-yellow median |
| Highway | $80 | 1.8× | High | White shoulder + inner-lane stripes + double-yellow median (bidirectional, divided) |
Roads are 8-connected: diagonal paint is supported and produces proper diagonal road meshes (not stair-stepped tiles). Drag-to-paint, drag to extend, retract the rubber band to undo within a stroke.
A road painted over a water tile auto-becomes a bridge — the renderer lifts the deck and drops pillars from the water surface.
For overpasses (upper-layer roads that cross at-grade roads without intersection), select a road tool and tap the contextual Bridge pill that appears above the toolbar. Paint as normal. Bridge mode auto-clears when you switch to a non-road tool.
Intersections (3+ incident road edges) with NO stop sign or traffic light occasionally produce collisions — destination tile loses development pressure, treasury takes a small hit. Cover busy junctions.
If both the origin and destination are within walking distance of a path or sidewalk, the trip has a 55% chance of converting to a pedestrian walker instead of a car. Build paths to keep car traffic manageable.
Four zone kinds, each with three density tiers + a luxury subtype for residential.
| Zone | Color | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Residential (R) | Green | People live here. Generates resident-cars and supplies labour. Tax revenue from rent. |
| Commercial (C) | Blue | Retail + services. Generates jobs. Tax revenue from sales — gated by the supply chain. |
| Industrial (I) | Yellow | Factories. Generates jobs + spawns freight trucks. Tax revenue from production. |
| Mixed-use (MU) | Olive | Half R + half C on the same tile. Cheaper land use; loved by YIMBYs / Transit, hated by Hometown / NIMBYs. |
When you paint a zone, you pick the cap: Low (L1), Medium (L2), or High (L3). The cap is a permission — buildings still need demand + services to actually reach a tier.
Each (zone, density) cell has multiple visual variants (3-5 per combo). A tile picks a variant deterministically from its (x, y) hash so neighbouring buildings look different but a tile keeps the same appearance across save/load.
The Lux tool (R group) places a single grand home that spans a 2-tile pair. Tap an R-eligible tile; the game finds a free road-adjacent partner and marks both. The renderer emits one mansion per pair.
Three deterministic visual variants per pair: mansion, ranch, modern-glass. Each gets a pitched roof, attached garage, twin chimneys, ornamental shrubs, paved walkway, and a manicured lawn.
Services unlock density caps and modulate faction happiness. Most have a coverage radius.
| Service | Cost | Unlock | Coverage | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Power plant | $25,000 | Village (200) | City-wide | Allows L2+ buildings. Furious Greenleaf. |
| Water tower | $15,000 | Village (200) | City-wide | Allows L2+. Pleases Working Families. |
| Park | $1,200 | From start | 6 tiles | L3 unlock + happiness boost. Pleases NIMBYs / Greenleaf. |
| School | $30,000 | Town (500) | 6 tiles | Boosts surrounding R demand. Pleases Working Families. |
| Hospital | $80,000 | City (1k) | 24 tiles | Productivity bonus on covered C / I jobs. Pleases Safer Streets. |
| Fire station | $25,000 | Town (500) | 18 tiles | Reduces fire-event severity in covered tiles. |
| Police station | $30,000 | Town (500) | 18 tiles | Lowers crime score on covered tiles. Pleases Safer Streets, NIMBYs. |
Parks come in 8 visual variants depending on cluster size: 1-tile cottage layout, 2-tile playground + pond, 3-tile pavilion, 4+ tile grand bandstand, etc. Park clusters look like real parks.
Ferry docks ($8,000, City+): place on land tiles with at least one adjacent water tile. Pair with their nearest partner across water; visible boats run between them with ~3-sec dwell at each end.
Subway entrance ($15,000, Metropolis+): radius 6. Within radius, car spawns are suppressed at P=0.85. Subterranean network is not visualized — these are surface station markers that just suppress congestion.
Supplies are a revenue bonus, not a requirement. Every developed commercial / mixed-use / big-box tile holds a supplies value in [0, 1]; warehouses hold supplies as a buffer. A store with zero supplies still earns its full base tax revenue — delivering supplies just pushes that revenue up by as much as +35%. The supply chain is about getting freight trucks moving through your city, not a stockout chore you have to babysit.
every sim month
each tile −0.10..0.18
↓
┌──────────┐ I→W ┌───────────┐ W→C ┌────────────┐
│ Industry │ ───────→ │ Warehouse │ ──────→ │ Commercial │
└──────────┘ +0.50 └───────────┘ +0.55 └────────────┘
↑ ↑ full supplies → +35% rev
│ │ zero supplies → base rev
outside-edge imports
+0.40 (half bonus for import-sourced)
0.010 × (industry + warehouse + commercial) tiles/sec, capped at MAX_TRUCKS = 50.Long-press a commercial or warehouse tile. The tile-info panel shows 📦 Supplies NN% — green ≥ 60% (earning the full bonus), blue below that (bonus still climbing). Low stock is never an alarm. The 🌐 chip shows when a tile is import-sourced and earning half the supply bonus.
Settings → Diagnostics has a "Restock all supplies" button that refills every commercial / mixed / big-box / warehouse tile to 100%. Use this to reset the chain and observe where genuine backlogs reappear vs an unreachable city configuration.
Forestry tool ($1,500, available from start): only places on forest tiles. Each tile generates monthly lumber-export revenue based on the current global lumber price, with a connection-to-edge bonus. Lumber price oscillates over time — the Stats panel graph shows the curve. Furious Greenleaf.
Farm tool ($800, from start): only places on grass tiles. Same export model as forestry but on the produce-price curve. Loved by Hometown + Working Families.
Warehouse tool ($3,500, Town+): modular building — paint any cluster shape (1×N, 2×N, L, T, U, +). Each tile holds its own supplies buffer. Industry trucks drop here at 0.50 payload; warehouse trucks ship to commercial at 0.55 payload (most efficient route). Requires a parking-lot tile adjacent to function. Also credits 1 industrial job per tile.
Big-box ($2,500, Town+): modular commercial. Each tile contributes 2 commercial jobs (warehouse-discount, electronics, home-improvement, garden-centre archetypes). Requires parking-lot adjacency. Major resident-car destination.
Parking lot ($600, from start): modular, paint any shape. Each tile has 6 stalls. Big-box and warehouse require an adjacent parking lot. Any commercial or industrial destination within 3 tiles of a parking lot may use its stalls — cars park, then walkers ("shoppers") complete the final leg to the destination on foot via the pedestrian path graph.
Toggle the leading toolbar pill from 🏗 Build to 🎨 Architect. The toolbar swaps to terraforming + decorative tools. Pan + Bulldoze stay pinned in both modes.
Premium end-game decorative builds. All glow at night with custom lit-overlay geometry and lamp-glow halos.
Independent of placed monuments. Council elects a tier each term:
| Tier | Cost / mo | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| None | $0 | No flair. |
| Light | $500 | Corner planters on developed C / MU. |
| Standard | $2,000 | + outdoor café tables. |
| Grand | $5,000 | + streetlamps + flag banners. Reaches L3 R / luxury. |
| Opulent | $12,000 | + public-art pedestals + flower spillover. |
If treasury can't cover the monthly bill, the effective tier drops to None for that month and the streetscape strips down city-wide. Mayoral Override can let you set the tier directly (one-term-only).
Multi-tile prestige builds. Each tile of a multi-tile build must be on owned grass; the lex-smallest tile is the anchor. Bulldozing any tile tears down the whole footprint.
| Build | Footprint | Cost | Upkeep / mo | Unlock |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| City Hall | 3×2 | $150,000 | $500 | Town (500) |
| Mayor's Mansion | 4×2 | $500,000 | $1,500 | Capital (5k) |
| Provincial Capital | 5×3 | $1,200,000 | $3,000 | Metro (2.5k) |
| National Capital | 6×4 | $3,000,000 | $8,000 | Capital (5k) |
Each is one-per-city — placing a second is refused. Each is also a massive political event: huge stance bonuses for NIMBYs / Hometown / Chamber, big penalties from YIMBYs / Working Families / Taxpayers.
Single-tile placeable landmarks that generate monthly tourism revenue scaled by city population. Visible from afar.
Every developed tile has a crime score in [0, 1] recomputed monthly from:
Tiles above 0.55 crime score show a 🛡 Crime NN% chip on the long-press info panel. City-wide crime drives a commercial revenue penalty: high crime → fewer customers → less tax.
Toggle the Crime heatmap from the More-menu HUD popover (purple gradient over developed tiles, mutually exclusive with the traffic heatmap).
Faction effects: high crime makes Safer Streets furious and Working Families unhappy. Drop police stations to compensate.
Open the Budget panel → Bonds tab. Three bond tiers, all 24-month terms:
| Tier | Principal | Monthly payment | Total cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $100,000 | ~$4,500 | ~$108,000 |
| Mid | $500,000 | ~$22,500 | ~$540,000 |
| Large | $2,000,000 | ~$90,000 | ~$2,160,000 |
If you can't make a monthly payment, the bond defaults. Taxpayers + Chamber become furious; you lose 5 PC. Repeated defaults compound the mood hit.
Slider in the Budget panel: 0–30%. Adds to the tax rate on L3 R, L3 C, and luxury R buildings. Loved by Working Families, hated by Taxpayers / Chamber / NIMBYs.
The Districts tool group lets you paint coloured overlays on tiles. Each district has a name, colour, and per-zone surtax sliders.
Surtaxes stack on top of the base R/C/I rate. Use this to tax a wealthy enclave more without raising city-wide taxes, or to give an industrial district a temporary break. Up to 8 districts; tile can only belong to one.
The Erase district tool removes the membership without disturbing the district config.
An 8-minute real-time day cycle. The sun arcs across the sky; sky gradient repaints from dawn → noon → dusk → midnight; ambient and directional light dim at night. About 70% of the cycle is day, 30% is night.
At night:
Sim speed multiplies the day cycle — fast-forwarding the city also speeds the sun. Paused = sun freezes. The day/night phase position persists across reload via the save (also via a synchronous localStorage backup, so even a refresh within seconds of pausing restores the exact time).
Tap the Day / Night pill at the top of the HUD to manually jump to dawn or midnight (cycle continues forward from there).
Settings → Theme has a card grid of cosmetic theme packs. Tapping a card swaps every dominant visual surface in-place (no reload required).
Theme is a per-device preference — it persists in localStorage, not in the save. So three save slots all use the same active theme; switching theme doesn't disturb city data.
Future paid theme packs will plug into the same registry; the renderer drives every dominant surface from the theme object at call time.
Three save slots. Open from the 🏙 Cities pill on the HUD (or from the More menu). Each slot persists independently.
Every 30 sim seconds (and on visibility-change / page-hide / before-unload). IndexedDB; survives offline.
Optional cloud save: sign in via Settings → Account & data. Saves push to Supabase per-slot; on a new device, the cloud version takes over if it's newer than local.
Settings → Backup & sync → Export city code outputs a single text blob that round-trips the entire current slot. Import city code overwrites the active slot. No merge — single snapshot pipeline.
Settings → Diagnostics has four debug actions for getting unstuck.
| Button | Effect |
|---|---|
| Clear visual ghosts | Drops every cached world mesh and re-derives them from current tile state. Cures the "I bulldozed a bridge but the visual stuck around" class of bug. |
| Restock all supplies | Sets every commercial / mixed / big-box / warehouse tile's supplies to 100%. Use to reset the chain and observe where genuine backlogs reappear. |
| Clear traffic | Wipes every active car / truck / bus / pedestrian / shopper / ferry + per-tile trafficLoad counters. Use when the city has gridlocked into a stuck state. New vehicles spawn naturally on the next tick. |
| Reset city | Two-tap arming. Second tap wipes the current slot back to a fresh map. Destructive — no undo. |
Settings → Cheats (for playtesting):
Stop signs gridlock fast. The moment you hit Town (500 pop), start placing traffic lights at busy junctions — 2-3× the throughput of stop signs at a 4-way. Set bus stops on busy R blocks to convert resident car-trips into bus trips. Paint walking paths between adjacent R / C blocks so the path-coverage system suppresses 55% of short-distance car spawns.
The 2nd-most-angry faction runs against you — but the 4 NEXT-most-angry factions take council seats. A faction you've been ignoring can ban half your toolbar for an entire term. Read the Community Sentiment panel every few sim months and intervene with Endorse or Coalition before things tilt.
Trucks A* to commercial. If your industry is on one side of the map and commercial on the other, every truck makes a long trip. Better: cluster industry near a warehouse, warehouse near commercial. Multi-stop trucks hit up to 3 stores per leg, so warehouses near retail clusters maximize throughput.
Aggressive low taxes maxes demand but starves city services. Aggressive high taxes maxes income but kills demand. Start at the middle; nudge ±2% based on the demand bars. When you blow the budget, raise rates briefly, then lower them once you're solvent — don't sit at high rates forever.
40 PC is a lot. Save Override for terms where the council banned something critical (e.g., banned all service buildings). Don't burn it for vanity. If the next council is even slightly friendly, just live with the cost multiplier.
Parks unlock L3 density within a 6-tile radius. Drop one in the centre of every R block before painting Medium zoning. Parks also raise the mood of NIMBYs / Greenleaf / Working Families simultaneously — one of the few buildings the whole council might agree on.