Ride the rails with the new All Aboard expansion for Spirit City — now featuring Lofi Girl playlists!

Several of us here at Blizzard Watch are big fans of Spirit City: Lofi Sessions and so the announcement of a new expansion is (lofi) music to our ears. Spirit City: All Aboard! is the latest DLC for the productivity tool and unlike the previous expansion — which added the Kitchen as a destination — we’re taking the Lofi Productivity vibes outdoors. As the name suggests, All Aboard! is adding a train for our avatars to travel on while working on tasks or just listening to the music.

Because a train wouldn’t make sense to board from our bedrooms Spirit City has added a new “Locations” option to easily switch from the indoors to the outdoors. The train itself has two spaces: a typical locomotive compartment as well as an outdoor deck that lets you enjoy the passing view. Like the other rooms these spaces are fully customizable with an array of seating and accessory options to make the space your own; the train itself can be made to look like one from the 19th century, the 22nd century or a pirate ship.

Activities in the two new areas are varied with nine options while seated indoors and five for the outdoors. While many of these options will be familiar to Spirit City fans, photography or just “looking” at the passing views are new to the expansion. There are eight backgrounds to enjoy ranging from farmlands to forests to cityscapes to more fanciful locations like a city in the clouds, underwater and even outer space! There are also several new atmospheric sounds to set the mood, from the clickity-clack of a train to the subtle swishing of the deep ocean, and a few outdoorsy ones, like seagulls and cicadas. Besides the background gliding by the train itself has a little vertical movement to simulate typical train bumpiness, but thankfully both axes of movement can be slowed down or even turned off if you’re prone to motion sickness like I am.

Oh the places you’ll go (in the clothes you brought from home)

Of course it wouldn’t be a Spirit City game if you didn’t have a bunch of cute and lovable spirits to join you on your travels. All Aboard! introduces eleven spirits (five all-new, six variants of existing spirits) you can add to your Spiritdex by finding the right combination of activity and setting to lure them. Like the kitchen spirits there are no location restrictions so you can have your new Aviotter spirit hanging out with you in your bedroom or you can bring Moonpaw on the train to ride along.

While the All Aboard! expansion does provide a new environment there do not appear to be any new player customizations. While a scarf that blows in the wind if you’re using the rear deck is probably a little too much to ask, I was surprised that an engineer’s cap wasn’t available. Perhaps they’ll be added later?

The other thing that players might miss are updates/additions to the productivity tools. However that does make sense, as any changes there would impact all versions of the game, not just the new expansion — I did find it amusing however that during timer breaks the train would stop too!

Spirit City adds a new music partnership with Lofi Girl as well as new music customization tools

The biggest news for the Spirit City franchise is a brand new music partnership with the extremely popular Lofi Girl music channel, available to everybody — not just those who purchase the All Aboard! expansion. There are seven new playlists from the vast Lofi Girl collection, with more expected in future updates (I really hope we get a few of the Synthwave playlists because those are my favorites). I’m actually really excited about this partnership because as a fan of Lofi Girl I was worried they’d come out with their own app and then my loyalty to Spirit City would be tested. Now I get to enjoy both together!

If you were a fan of the existing Homework Radio playlists though you don’t need to worry. The license for them has been extended for three more years so they’re not going anywhere — although I suspect there won’t be any additional Homework Radio playlists coming in the future. The external web music browser also remains if you prefer to listen via YouTube.

A new feature with this update is playlist customization. By default all tracks will play but if there’s a certain song you’re not fond of you can turn it “off” so it’ll be skipped whenever you listen to that playlist. You can also like songs now; those songs get added to a personal “Liked songs” playlist so you can curate a new playlist of your own from all the included ones. While there’s only a single custom playlist option currently perhaps in a future update we’ll have the ability to make multiple.