Endless Creativity: Customize Your ‘Little Cities’ Experience With the Sandbox Update, Out Today

Little Cities, the relaxing city builder from nDreams and Purple Yonder, is getting a substantial free update today. Out now for all players, the Sandbox Update includes a brand new mode that lets you completely customize the shape and features of your archipelagos and build your cities however you want. The update also adds new landscape features and Attractions, providing even more options for decorating your creations.

If you haven’t tried Little Cities yet, you can dive into Sandbox and catch up on all of the other updates by grabbing the game on the Meta Quest Platform for $19.99 USD.

Sandbox gives you total control over your Little Cities experience. It starts with the Landscape Editor, which lets you carve and shape your islands from scratch using different types of terrains. Once you settle on a layout, you can add topographic features to make the island stand out, like mountains, forests, huge fossils, and lagoons. You’ll use the same intuitive mechanics as before to build your cities, and you can do it without worrying about money or satisfying any of the other rules from the campaign mode.

Sandbox is a perfect entry point for new players who want to create and experiment without any pressure. But there are also new features that longtime players will appreciate as well, like tweaking a variety of modifiers to customize your experience—if you’re looking for a creative challenge, you can decrease the city budget and the amount of resources available to you.

We spoke to Purple Yonder Founders James and Kelly Howard about the Sandbox Update and just how much Little Cities has grown since it first launched over a year ago.

Kelly Howard: It’s been an incredible year for Little Cities, and we can happily say we’ve created a game that we’re super proud of. Building upon a great launch, we’ve been delighted to further enhance the game with a steady stream of updates since Spring 2022. We’ve strived to add more depth and creative possibilities for our players in every update, so after delivering Attractions, Hand Tracking, Snowy Islands DLC, and Little Citizens, we’re excited to share that the Sandbox Update is absolutely our biggest yet!

With the support of our publisher, nDreams, the plan was always to add multiple post-launch updates that are based on the community’s most requested features. So while the idea of empowering endless cozy creativity has been a dream from the start, our vision for the Sandbox Update has gone through plenty of tweaks and iterations that were directly shaped by the feedback and involvement of our incredible community.

We’re really excited about the Sandbox Update and think it’ll add a lot of value to the game. It not only grants players the freedom to shape the islands of their dreams with the brand new Landscape Editor, but it offers genuine replayability through highly customizable gameplay options to create a truly unique Little Cities experience. It’s a wonderful piece of community-driven content!

James Howard: Our favorite bit is the way players can unleash their imaginations to create unique landscapes. We’ve also added new landscape features, Attractions, and citizens to provide players with even more variety. This freedom empowers players to express their individuality and enjoy the relaxing gameplay in a fresh, creatively limitless environment. With the new Sandbox Update customization options, players can also fine-tune their strategy to test different approaches and combine gameplay elements in truly novel ways.

KH: We’ve seen some really impressive designs from players so far and we love how this update has opened up so many possibilities to get creative. It’s interesting to see how the landscape themes are being used in ways we didn’t anticipate—particularly through mixing the grassy, desert, and snowy landscapes together for results that span the complex to the downright odd!

For example, from our hands-on experiences with content creators, we’ve seen how the freedom of island creation translates to roleplaying opportunities, with some folks dividing islands by purpose—bridging islands as diverse as national parks, to wintry holiday destinations, to industrial powerhouses. On the sillier side, we’ve even seen people create self-portraits by honing and carving their island shapes, featuring everything from beards made of forests to eyes crafted from lagoons! So it’s truly down to your imagination.

Of course, for all the imaginative possibilities, it’s important to note that for those that don’t want to invest time in designing a layout, we also have the random level generator to help players dive right into the gameplay!

JH: We’re so grateful that we’ve had the chance to nurture and develop Little Cities over the past year. It has felt like a collaborative experience for us as we’ve had so much positive support and feedback from our community throughout. The Sandbox Update is our biggest piece of post-launch content yet, and we hope it provides players with a sense of freedom and immersion that builds on the game in even more enjoyable ways.

Go wild with your city-building aspirations in the new Sandbox Update for Little Cities, available today on the Meta Quest Platform.