Gimme More Garbage Trucks! (2025 Fix) [v1.1]

People are leaving in droves. Your garbage budget is set to max, but your incinerator only has 1 of 34 trucks out. Your landfill trucks are working, but they’re all on distant highways. ARGH! WHY?! This fixes that.

[This is a repost, as I broke the original post by accidentally disabling comments. Sorry to everyone who has to redownload it.]

Trucks fill up on random opportunistic pickups, then abandon their actual assigned targets and go home. They blindly accept whatever distant assignments they’re given, treat critical emergencies like routine pickups, and facilities have zero coordination. Mission failed successfully. (See GitHub link for actual code examples.)

Send a swarm of trucks to any building with a garbage alert, prioritized by whichever building has the most garbage. If you have 3 incinerators in a district, each will send its own swarm. OVERKILL? ABSOLUTELY. GET IT DONE!

The emergency is cleared but now you have a fleet of garbage trucks driving around your city. Well, then they’ll break into sub-groups and head off to the next buildings with the highest amount of garbage.

If you somehow have trucks that haven’t completely filled their cargo holds, you can send them home after X number of days.

And, every setting has an OCD level of customization, because
a) your megalopolis needs different rules than your starting town, and
b) I’m insane.

SERIOUSLY, I QUIT playing Cities: Skylines "forever, for real, I’m serious this time!" at least 5 times, because of this one stupid issue. Why did they never update it? How are thousands of people still logging millions of hours on this totally broken and unplayable game? Clearly I’m missing something, clearly I’m doing something wrong…

And you’ll be amazed at what you can do with just a single incinerator now!

• District restriction makes sure trucks NEVER leave their designated boundaries. If they do, they’re recalled home. (You can turn it on mid-game to recall trucks on distant missions.)
• If the stupid vanilla AI gives a truck a bad assignment, this mod says "yes, we accept that crappy job" and then secretly reassigns it without creating conflicts or bugs.
• By default, trucks choose nearby, high-value targets — but you can also tell them to collect from high-value targets on the far edge of the district.
• When a building needs garbage picked up, why send only 1 truck when you can send … 10 trucks? Configurable.
• Pathfinding fails? Trucks try visiting up to 20 different buildings instead of just going home.

• This is a modernized/updated/improved version of the old "Enhanced Garbage Truck AI" mods, now using Harmony instead of the old/broken Overwatch.
• You may need need Harmony installed (2.2.2-0 at time of publishing this) but it does NOT have to be activated for this mod to work.
• You can adjust how often the mod scans for garbage (to reduce CPU load on big cities).
• Intelligent caching further reduces performance impact. Also prevents memory leaks from stuck trucks and pathfinding failures.
• Respects vanilla mechanics for emptying landfills (let those trucks do their thing).
• Won’t break your savegames – load any old save and trucks will get to work.
• Provides a ridiculous amount of debugging, if you love reading detailed tracking logs.

Simulationists can stick with vanilla behavior of "no dispatch when facilities are nearly full" and still enjoy the intelligent dispatching features, while the rest of us can enjoy "aggressive mode" (dispatch even when full). Either way, returning trucks still despawn and make garbage vanish – that’s unchanged vanilla behavior.

Fix those effing garbage problems once and for all!

This mod is built for the vanilla game; I personally do not have any DLC and tend to run a minimal set of mods. (AKA, untested with DLC and other mods). Technically everything "should" work fine since it only patches GarbageTruckAI.SetTarget().

Users of Transfer Manager CE should note that this mod completely bypasses TransferManager for garbage trucks and uses its own dispatch logic. At best, TMCE’s garbage settings will simply be ignored. At worst, they could conflict and cause unpredictable behavior. I haven’t tested this myself (and don’t plan to, as TMCE is too complex for my little brain). If someone wants to try it and report back, please share your findings and I’ll share them here.

1)
I am not a career programmer. This mod was developed with assistance from Claude AI. It was iteratively designed, reviewed, rigorously tested and debugged across multiple sessions — not whipped together in a single prompt. All design decisions and testing were human-driven.

Download the code and audit it yourself:
https://github.com/Jeaudoir/Gimme-More-Garbage-Trucks-2025-Fix

Note: if you use an AI to inspect the code, their view of some files may be truncated; be sure to ask if they’re seeing the full versions of all files.

2)
Gaming, for me, is an occasional hobby. This mod was created as a necessity so I could just build a city and not worry about a half-assed AI any more. It works, and I consider my job done. If you want to do something serious with it, enjoy the code and consider the torch passed! If I do update this mod for the next game version, I may be a year late. Don’t get angry if it stops working one day. I’m doing my best over here, OK?!