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Citylab: Shoreline Limited

Originally published 2026-10-29 on Advisory Hour.

Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-10-29. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.

Original post

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

There’s a new lab on the site. It’s called CityLab. Many months ago I shared experiments with city construction, and then I found myself escaping the concrete jungle for island lab. After island v5 and the spacestation sized zoo I wanted to try something even bigger: a city along a shore and a train ride thru the moutains.

You don’t spawn on a street corner in this one. You ride in. You watch the city grow in the window, and you step off when it looks interesting. There’s an experience that is hard for me to put in words of what this is like. There’s a sense of place.

The first line is the Shoreline Limited. Seven boards a streamlined train at a snowy mountain pass and rides it down through the pines, along the sea, and into a city called Calder.

The entire lab experiment is quite large. The loading screen highlights as much

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The ride

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Or take the train itself…

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The line runs from Granite Pass, a stone-and-timber chalet with snow on the roof, down to Calder Union, a limestone terminal with a clock tower. In between there’s a request stop in the woods called Fernwood Halt and a little platform at Gull Point, where a red-and-white lighthouse turns its lamp after dark.

Citylab: Shoreline Limited video 1 from the original Advisory Hour post.

There’s a loop at each end, so the train never has to back up.

The whole train is built about a third bigger than a real one. So are the stations and the track. That’s the size a robot on treads needs to fit through the aisle and the doors with a little room to spare.

Seven can roll the full length of it while it moves, from the nose to the glass dome car at the back. There are five camera views, including a window seat, and you can press T to go from morning to night.

But I found being a robot on a train can be a little difficult, so you can also place Seven on the tracks and just transform into a train. The experience is part roller-coaster.

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The city

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Calder has five neighbourhoods: downtown towers, Old Town row houses, the harbour, the hill, and the waterfront.

Every window has a room behind it. The shader builds the room as you look in, and it’s lit from inside after dark. After dark the streets also turn damp, and the puddles pick up the street lamps.

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Radiant AI as a concept always fascinated me about Skyrim, and so I built up a small inspired version of just that. You’ll be offered little quests and tasks and this brings the world to life.

People around Calder post jobs when they need a hand. Carry parcels, find lost cats and kites, fix flickering lamps, catch fish. Do three jobs for someone and they become a friend.

Seven also changes shape. Drive into deep water and it folds into a boat-I really enjoyed that idea from Island Lab v5. As I mentioned earlier, press E on the track and it becomes a small locomotive. Call one of the cars and Seven folds into the engine under the hood. Their arrival is a lot of fun.

Outside the city, you can cut trees, break rocks, and build: campfires, cabins, a lookout tower, power poles that run off the railway’s old telegraph line. Cabins light up after dark. Also, the views are spectacular.

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

I haven’t even really touched on the building/crafting system, or the woodland critters. It’s the largest world space I’ve built so far and revealing in unexpected ways. What happens when the world is bigger than the person who built it?

Ride now: Shoreline Limited, CityLab | Eric Rhea

Read more: CityLab

PS Find a street and summon Firehawk

Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Citylab: Shoreline Limited image from the original Advisory Hour post.

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