Learning
August 27, 2026
City Sample gets a major update with PCG and Unreal MCP workflows
The City Sample project has been updated for Unreal Engine 5.8 with completely new levels that leverage recent advances in the engine, as well as a collection of additional toolsets, content, and examples for procedural worldbuilding. You can download it today for free from Fab, the Unreal Editor Home Panel, or the Epic Games Launcher.
The sample, which was featured in the State of Unreal 2026, showcases a large procedural city that incorporates uneven terrain, curved roads and sidewalks, and realistic leafy vegetation and forests. Unlike the original City Sample, released at the launch of UE5, the new city is built entirely in Unreal Engine.
The sample, which was featured in the State of Unreal 2026, showcases a large procedural city that incorporates uneven terrain, curved roads and sidewalks, and realistic leafy vegetation and forests. Unlike the original City Sample, released at the launch of UE5, the new city is built entirely in Unreal Engine.
A tale of two cities
A little history: Back in December 2021, we debuted The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, a tech demo showcasing the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 on next-gen consoles, prior to its launch. The experience featured a massive, densely detailed city, which was subsequently released as the original City Sample project. While it was rendered using UE5 systems like Nanite and Lumen, that city was built using procedural toolsets outside of Unreal Engine.But advances in Unreal Engine, including updates to the Procedural Content Generation framework (PCG) and the Unreal MCP server released in UE 5.8, mean that we’ve been able to rebuild that city directly in Unreal Engine.
Turning words into worlds
The updated City Sample project is both a showcase and a learning resource for how you can leverage PCG, with or without assistance from your favorite LLM (in this case, we used Claude, but you can use whichever model best fits your needs) to build complex, detailed worlds that remain fully editable throughout—no black boxes or magic bullets here, just your creative intent amplified, and its realization accelerated. The sample also uses World Partition, Nanite Foliage, and Quixel Megaplants.The following talk from Unreal Fest Chicago 2026 explains how LLMs can use PCG as their spatial language, tapping into the new PCG Primitives plugin and its included examples—such as roads, buildings, forests, and parks—to demonstrate the building of a city. It also reveals how the framework is highly adaptable, so you can extend it to your own production use cases.
What’s included in the updated City Sample
The City Sample project now includes the original level, built in Houdini, and two new levels built in PCG with assistance from the LLM: the full city, and a simpler example level with fewer steps. You’ll also find:- Multiple PCG graph examples designed to demonstrate the procedural recreation of a city, which can also serve as baseline references for the Unreal MCP server
- Five distinct species of Megaplants used to generate vegetation throughout the procedural city
- An extensive list of PCG Assembly data assets, offering ready-to-use configurations of Static Meshes for rooftop plazas and piers
- Several shape grammar definition assets for buildings and roads, enabling users to rapidly construct assets based on selected profile presets
- An additional PCG Primitive subgraph specifically engineered to construct the buildings for the City Sample project
Alongside the project, you’ll find the CitySamplePCG_demo plugin, containing all the necessary PCG graphs and assets required to replicate the City Sample using PCG.
The sample relies on several Experimental and Beta systems, some of which are not enabled by default. Check out the extensive documentation for more information.