Admin Settings
Civilian Services
Which civilian jobs exist in your city — tow, mechanic, taxi, lawyer, press — and what each of them can do.
Defining a service
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Code | TOW — the short form on presence counters |
| Label | Tow / Impound — what players see |
| Icon | a Material Symbol name |
Modules decide what it does
A service is not just a name; it is a set of capabilities you switch on. What you switch on also decides which panels a provider gets on My Service, their workspace:
| Module | What it does | Workspace panel |
|---|---|---|
| Presence | going on and off duty, and showing up in the directory and the counters. Every service has it | — |
| Tasks | a job queue: accept a request, work it, complete it | Job queue |
| Task intake | civilians can send a request straight to the service. Without it the service shows in the directory but cannot be requested | — |
| Map | jobs get a pickup on the map (and an optional destination), a route preview, and an in-game GPS route to the provider on accept | Map |
| Live location | other people see on-duty providers move on their map — you pick who | — |
| Road status | providers can mark road closures, roadworks, accidents and hazards from their workspace map | — |
| Routes | providers build and drive routes with stops — a bus line, a tour, a flight — shown to whoever sees the service live | Routes |
| Radio | gives providers a voice on the radio while they are on shift | — |
| News feed | providers write and publish articles for the city | News editor |
| Impound | LEO can impound a vehicle from the MDT, which creates a lot record and a tow job | Impound lot |
| Legal linkage | clients can grant this provider access to their legal file — this is what makes a lawyer a lawyer | Clients |
Some modules need another one. Task intake and Impound need Tasks; Live location and Road status need Map, and Routes needs Live location. Switching one on switches on what it needs, and switching that off again takes its dependants with it.
Tasks, task intake and the map together are what make tow, taxi and mechanic behave the same way underneath.
Live location and Road status
Both work on the map, and both are optional on top of it.
Live location puts the provider's position on other people's maps. Under Visible to you choose who: Civilians, Dispatch, LEO & SAFR, or any mix. Without the module nobody else sees it; the provider always sees their own position on their workspace map either way.
Road status gives the provider the same tool dispatch and the MDTs have: right-click the workspace map, Mark road here. It suits a roads department, and a tow service that clears the wrecks it is called to. Who sees the markings is set once for the whole community, under Map Settings, not per service.
Routes
Routes lets providers build their own routes on the workspace map — stops in order, a vehicle and a colour — and drive them. It suits a bus company, a tour operator or a pilot. Each provider builds and keeps their own routes; there is no list for you to set up.
Who sees a running route follows Live location: whoever you made the service visible to there sees its route, its stops and the stop it is heading for. There is no separate setting. Civilians who can see it also get an Active transport list on their Overview, and the stops show as blips on the in-game map.
Radio: an own channel, or the ones you pick
The Radio module has two shapes, and the choice matters more than it looks.
Own channel creates a channel named after the service. It opens when the first provider goes on duty and closes when the last one goes off — the channel belongs to the shift, not to the city. That is right for a tow service, where the channel has no purpose once nobody is towing.
It is wrong whenever other people are still using the channel. An air traffic controller signs off and the pilots still in the air lose the frequency with them.
Existing channels is the answer for that. The service gets no channel of its own; instead you pick from the channels that already exist, and set each one to:
| Listen | hears the channel, can never transmit — a press service monitoring dispatch |
| Talk | hears it and transmits on it — an air traffic controller running the pattern |
Talk overrides the channel's department restriction, and that is the point. A controller is not an active unit, so a channel limited to LEO and Dispatch is otherwise closed to them permanently. Picking the channel here is the only way in — which also means picking it is a deliberate decision, not a default.
So for air traffic control: have a dispatcher create a permanent channel, then give the service Talk on it. The channel now outlives every shift, and pilots — staff air units through their department, civilian pilots through their own service with the same Talk grant — stay on it while controllers come and go.
Two things worth knowing. Changing the selection does not reach a provider who is already on shift until they reopen their radio panel, and revoking Talk can take up to an hour to take effect on someone currently connected. Neither matters for setup; both matter if you are changing this mid-session.
Audiences
Each service picks who sees its presence counter — under Visibility in the Presence module: Civilians, Dispatch, LEO & SAFR. That is how a dispatcher knows there is a tow operator on duty without every counter appearing on every screen.
Put a service in front of the people who need to call it, not everyone.
The counter and the position are two separate choices. Presence decides who sees that someone is on duty; Live location decides who sees where they are. So dispatch can see that a tow truck is working without seeing it on the map, or the other way round.
Gating
A service can be open to anyone, or restricted. Restricted services are how you keep a role that requires vetting — press with a real audience, a lawyer with access to legal files — from being claimed by whoever clicks first.
Advice
Start with two or three. A service with nobody on duty is a gap in a counter, and a city with twelve empty services teaches everyone to ignore the presence row entirely — which is the one thing that makes the feature work.
Add the fourth when the first three are regularly staffed.
See Civilian Services for the player's side and Civilian Services Presence for what dispatch sees.