How to Start a City in Cities Skylines, Part 1: From 0 to 10k Population |No mods, no DLC, Vanilla|

[Music] hello everyone over the last couple weeks there have been a number of sales on city skylines and a free giveaway in the epic game store that has led me to think about uh what it would be like to be a brand new city skylines player without any mods or dlc and that that's made me want to create this video to show you how to begin and grow to a city of uh about 10 000 people if you were starting from scratch so today i'm going to build this city on the two rivers map which is included in the vanilla based game and i'm going to work on this completely vanilla map and show you how i would begin i'm going to explain everything as though i anticipate that you've never played the game uh before so if you have this might not be the most thrilling tutorial for you but if you haven't this might be really helpful so to start out with whenever you're building a city in city skylines you end up with one way into the city off a highway and one of the struggles that people have is you don't have a highway connection to begin with in fact you don't have any collectors or arterials either but truthfully this isn't much of a problem in fact i think it's it's kind of a good thing so what i generally do is i will go ahead and make a short connection and then uh find a way to to meet that connection up so i i'll generally connect this out you know 10 10 units in create another connection and then after you place those initial roads you get a couple more road options available to you you get gravel roads and you get one-way roads now what you're going to notice is that i'm going to initially build mostly gravel roads but coming into the city i'm going to start with these two lane roads so you'll notice that these are in the wrong direction if you're playing on the pc uh you can right mouse click these to change the directionality there um on the but it's it's using this this upgrade road tool uh to change them from uh two lane roads to the two-lane one-way road so i have that now and i know that there's a couple things i need to think about first i'd like to think about the geography of the land so you don't really have many tools available to you when you're starting out including the tool that lets you view the topography uh the terrain heights tools you're kind of left to your own visual inspection of the land so i know that for the city to begin it's going to need water that's available to me sewage power roads and zoning so i only have seventy thousand dollars to start out with and i've already spent two thousand of that just building this city entrance so i do want to be thoughtful and careful about the way that i start the city because i think it really lays the foundation for everything that comes after it but at the same time i don't want to bankrupt myself um you think it creating this city entrance so that's one of the things that you know i think i where i deviate from some other city skylines players is i just i don't get very elaborate on the city uh entryway just because i i don't think it's necessary so having a two-lane road that's going to act as main street is completely fine and then i like to get close to the water i think that this would be a natural place for a city to begin um but you could really start this anywhere and i'm going to use this as the main street and from there that's basically as far as i will get with paved roads i want these to be paved i want this road in particular to be paved so the speeds are a little bit higher there the speeds of a dirt road are obviously going to be lower so from here i do want to start a real basic grid and you know there are guides here you can do whatever you want for the grid i'm going to expand this a little bit further on this particular row this will be a collector in the future and i know that when i upgrade this it's going to be wider so if you go 11 tiles out you will be able to have maximum density in this area the other thing i'm going to do is i i think i want to do a 15 tile wide grid when you're doing that you can do you can figure this out one of two ways number one you can look at the cost and do some counting or for me i know that this guideline comes up when you get 15 tiles so that's how i build this out so just a real basic grid and you might wonder what i'm going to place here and we have a few things available to us residential commercial industrial and if you look at this meter down here which is the rci meter residential commercial industrial you'll see what the city needs and right now the city needs residential zoning districts that said those districts aren't going to grow unless they have sewage or unless they have sewage and fresh water so i'd like to think about these together and i think that you're going to like to think about them together as well you want to make sure that when you're placing your your storm water or when you're placing your water you aren't sucking up uh sewage so there's two things you can do to prevent it you can make sure that the water pump is upstream from the drain pipe or you could place a water tower but be really careful with this when you look at some of the externalities first of all the noise is the same for both but if you for both a water tower and a water pump so you're going to get that negative externality no matter where no matter what you go with but what you'll notice is the water tower costs a thousand dollars more and produces half the amount of water so it's to your best interest in the beginning to just pump fresh water out of a lake or a a river it's just going to be a little bit more cost effective and for sewage you only have one option to start out with and that is the drain pipe so you're going to want to get that as far away from your water as possible you know this is probably a little more extreme than it needs to be but i figure better safe than sorry then you're going to want to make sure that these uh are both connected to your community and both have power i like to place my my water and power underneath roads is it necessary no but i think it adds a little bit of realism so i do it just kind of a personal ocd thing i guess and then the last thing you need to get your city started is power you have two options here you can go with a wind turbine or you can go with a coal power plant wind turbine produces no no no pollution it does produce a significant amount of noise pollution more than the coal plant interestingly [Music] but it produces significantly less power that said it's only six thousand dollars as opposed to the 19 000 you would need up front with the coal plant so i would be using half of my my financial uh coffers right now to build the coal power plant another thing to think about is the coal plow power plant in the beginning is going to rely entirely on imported coal so if you have a traffic problem and traffic gets backed up you could run out of out of coal and your power plant would as a result not work so i like to start out with uh windmills quite frequently because i just think they're a little bit more effective in the early stages of the game at protecting not only your finances but also kind of just keeping the infrastructure in the right place in relation to your budget so i'll probably place one or two of these to start out with and when you place these you also need to think about getting the power to your zoning districts so i'm going to make sure that my zoning districts are going to have power and i also need to make sure that my sewage over here has power now you might have noticed i skipped this area the main reason for that is i'm going to use this as the first place that i zoom so i'm going to zone there and then unpause this real quick okay so this is what i was hoping for uh because i um zoned this entire area it filled in with property and those properties act as power lines they can share power from a building that's directly adjacent to them so as a result i don't have to place a power line in between these buildings and i save a little bit of maintenance costs there it's not significant but you know a little savings is a little savings so why not go for it so i'm just going to continue zoning to try to meet the rci needs and eventually like right now you're gonna start seeing that we have commercial and industrial needs there that are that are coming up so i like to place commercial along the main drain commercial definitely needs traffic to to be successful and this is a place where you can accomplish that it also makes it so that all the residential properties can walk to uh shopping and workplaces relatively simply so i like to go and do that also we're seeing that there's some industrial demand as well so i am going to start to build out my grid again proceeding uh 11 tiles up off the main street and 15 tiles over [Music] now i'm gonna turn my snap twos off and what those are is they're they're tools that make it so that you snap to roads or snap to um the grid and i find it easier to make curves or or slight angles if i have them off so i'll turn them off for things like laying water pipes from time to time but they are incredibly helpful and i'm going to show you where they're the most helpful soon we'll get power to this district and then start with some industrial zoning now one of the things i could have been really careful about here is well i actually i got i didn't get lucky so i could have tried to line these up perfectly i'm not overly concerned about that a little bit of deviation in your grid i think makes it interesting so i don't stress over things like the grid being broken up a little bit or having multiple grids that join so in the beginning of the game you only have a general industrial district district available to you and you don't have the ability to view your resources which is kind of a bummer it'd be nice to be able to look at the resources and you know see what is available that said it's not the end of the world i am going to speed things along a little bit we do have some demands so i'm going to continue to keep up with those demands and the demands are mainly for industrial and for residential and through a little bit of youtube magic i will get rid of the night because i think it's difficult to see what's happening now with the night cycle on so let's continue to to simulate and keep responding to those needs and what you'll see now is we're actually starting to make money so we've responded to needs and as a result our city is doing fine uh clicking on the electricity i can bring up this panel and see that the consumption is below the production and we have plenty of water now while we think while we're waiting for this to fill in a little bit i do want to mention when i placed this windmill i placed it in some of the darker area i placed it there because you get maximum production when you remove over you can see that it tells you your estimated production on a hill you're gonna get eight megawatts which is as much as you're gonna get with a window so uh it's it's important to keep that in mind and it's also important to keep these spaced appropriately if you get them too close the production will drop because the windmills will actually they'll interfere with the wind that the other windmill produces and as a result produce less power so now we're at a point where all we need is residential and i'm going to continue building with dirt roads the main reason for that is it costs 20 cents a cell and 19 cents uh 20 uh 20 a cell and nineteen cents a week upkeep and it's double that for our two lane road right now there's just no real need to to have a nicer looking uh higher cost road people will be just fine with these uh these dirt roads in a smaller town like this they'll function appropriately as well so there's no real there's not really a good reason to change it at this point in time [Music] so until our population builds up we're kind of just waiting so one thing that we could do is start thinking about how we're going to integrate these grids into one another so i might just build out a little bit more oh until i reached little hamlet so population of 420 people gives us the ability to build garbage healthcare and education change tax rates and take out loans this is really important to think about because uh all of these things that are now new services available to us are now new services that are required by the citizens in the city so we can't neglect placing these we need to place them right away and to facilitate that the game will give you a little bit of money so it also slows the speed of the game down to make it a little bit more possible to place these things so the other thing is you'll notice that in our info views we're getting some new views to that we can take a look at so we can see that in our education view there are 58 citizens that could be educated so we better get a school placed and this should be centrally located so i'm going to put it right in the middle of all of our residential districts we will also need trash collection so i'm going to place this trash collection on a local road very near our collector so i'm going to put that right here and this will serve all of the citizens of the city well next we have our healthcare knowing that this street's going to widen in the future i'm going to place it just a little bit off main street on a local road that will in the future have good access to our collector so one of the things i just noticed is i went 11 tiles over down here but i didn't do that up here that's going to be a happy accident it'll be something that makes our city a little bit more unique maybe i'll fix it down the line maybe i won't uh it's not the end of the world i i i think that one of the things people can get stuck on is being too perfect and these are the sorts of things these little mistakes uh i think they make a city interesting and they simulate some of the odd design decisions you might see in reality so roll with them no need to no need to get crazy about fixing things just uh just roll with it so i just did something interesting here so i used the curved road tool in combination with the road guidelines to create a road that perfectly met this future collector at a 90 degree angle i would highly encourage you to do that whenever you're meeting a road at a 90 degree angle it's a safer road and a better connection so you might as well do that i just use the curve the freeform tool here to do the exact same thing and have a nice join with this neighborhood i'm going to do the same thing to get around this rock and preserve this natural feature i'm going to have to turn off my snap tubes to make this really clean connection so it got a little funky there but we preserved the natural landscape that we we have been given and i think this could be a unique space as a result we don't have any of the dlc so we're unable to turn this into a formal park space but there's no reason that we can't just make it an interesting place for our city our citizens to walk by a place that you know we just enjoy looking at so that is the sort of thing i will do work with the landscape when you can and obviously in the early game it's easy just to grid out and uh honestly it makes a lot of sense grids facilitate rapid expansion and that's why they're so popular in a lot of newer cities so we've got all of our needs our new needs covered so at this point it's just responding to our rci meter and i know that there's no need for commercial but i know that i'm going to want to put it here in the future so i'm just going to leave it there anyway and just build out our residential area also going to lay water pipes now i like to place redundancy in place and this is part of you know being a planner um that redundancy means that you could work on water pipes in the future and not need to cut off water to an entire neighborhood but in the game it's helpful too particularly if you have natural disasters um because it would give you the ability to have a natural disaster occur and not need to completely not not completely sever water from a particular area i noticed that the rci meters slowed down for a while and what that might mean is that you're missing um a core city service and for us right now that is power our water's still good we have lots of water production um using the facilities that we have but our power production is lower now we do have the ability to look at sound now and you can tell that these power plants they have a lot of uh sound issues that come with them so i am going to move that as a little bit further away from the city and try to spill some of that noise over in areas that don't matter as much to the city just want to make sure it didn't impact my other turbines so we should be good at this point i'm going to turn the simulation speed up we've got everything placed that we're going to place now and at this point we just want to fulfill our demand i'm going to build this industrial area out just a little bit turn my snap twos back on [Music] the other nice thing about a grid is it makes it easy to expand your infrastructure like water um and reach worthy village so now we're at a population of 850 and that opens up districts some policies police departments fire departments industry industrial specializations um and uh police and fire so that's that's great we also have the the power and water policy which can be used in conjunction with our tax rates uh to to kind of get around some power issues that we could uh could face in the future so that said it also gave us a boost in our city's coffers and so we're in a good spot there we've also unlocked the four-lane road and i do think i want to upgrade this right off the bat because we're gonna end up demolishing a whole bunch of buildings to get this road upgraded that just is the unfortunate reality of the game i wish that you could start out either reserving right away or having a four lane road off the bat but you can't now i want to do this for a couple of reasons first when you look here it creates a more logical connection uh now you have two lanes meeting up with two lanes even though unfortunately the inside lane is is looping back around there's no way to fix that without mods and if you were playing on the console or uh on on the pc vanilla build and from the epic store that'd be difficult to rectify um still i like to keep it reasonable if i can and that's that's one of the ways that i find to do it when you perform these upgrades that you're going to notice that zoning breaks down a little bit so i'm going through and i'm just fixing the zoning so that i get four tiles deep in each of these areas and four tiles is kind of a magic magic number uh because that's the maximum density that you can reach uh would be or the maximum building size for a zonable building which is that'd be four tiles so might as well go out right away and make that your zoning size in these areas and just kind of clean things up the other thing that we're going to do is we're going to look we're going to use our one of our new tools we have a traffic route tool so so we'll come in here you can click on a road and make it a priority road now what this will allow you to do is if you look at your junctions tool you can change the stop lights now if you don't have priority set it'll just turn everything off but if you have priority set it will add stop signs to all roads connecting into the priority road which is really helpful because none of these signalized intersections would be warranted at this point so warranted means necessary there's actually specific engineering terminology related to signal warrants and you have to meet a certain threshold of traffic to actually warrant the traffic signal you don't get into that level of detail on city skylines but i still like to think about that if there aren't enough turning movements or traffic from an intersection there's no reason to have that signalized intersection and for me i like to keep them um stop controlled or not controlled unless uh it's a collector coming into a collector or an arterial coming into a collector so we didn't place our new buildings and we have a a small crime rate but it's gonna it's gonna continue to creep up if we don't take care of it so i'm gonna place the police station just like i placed the uh the hospital near a collector but facing the local road the main reason for that is i want access to come off that local road not off from the collector particularly with this medium they would make those movements difficult i'm going to do the same thing with the firehouse once uh once i have enough money to buy it so let's speed it up a little bit i'm really close and i will spend every last dime available to me to build this building because it's so necessary um it's important to keep in mind that fire departments are absolutely necessary if you want to level up your industrial areas so truthfully we probably need two here uh the other thing we could have done and this was kind of short-sighted on my behalf would have been to put this a little bit closer the industrial area it would cost money to move this at this point uh 2400 i don't have that money uh so that brings up something else i'm noticing right now that we don't have enough power to serve the city our current consumption is 27 megawatts and our production's 24. so there are two ways that we could approach this we could enact a power usage policy which would add an upkeep of five cents a building we don't have that many buildings so maybe it's not that big of a deal let's see what that does to our budget so it resolves our power issue we're now just at our need and our budget produces by about a third not great but let's take that off and go the other route which would be to pump up our electricity production to 150 percent now what that does functionally is it takes these wind turbines from producing eight megawatts of power to 10 each so we're now at 30 megawatts of power meeting our needs but it's costing us 50 more than it otherwise would so this is not a good long-term solution this is a way to get from uh having no power or not enough power to building your next power plant so it's something you should really use sparingly if at all possible six thousand dollars of power plant i'm gonna place this thing as soon as i can um again let's look at our sound because that's going to be our biggest limiting factor here the commercial buildings can deal with it the residential buildings cannot let's make sure we're connected that was a really uh that's close uh that said we now have a natural connection through so i'm gonna eliminate these power lines just to save the money and take my budget back down to a hundred so i'm not over producing power uh if money was more of an issue i could reduce that uh the budget associated with water treatment as well i just i don't see it as a big issue right now and i'd rather not think about that in the future [Music] so interestingly our power consumption is still above our production and i know that we're going to run into some issues with sewer backups and ultimately people getting sick and going to the hospital if we don't pump up our power so i'm going to pump that up temporarily we have enough money now to build another one of these wind turbines i'm going to build that again place it near this we don't run into any problems near our drain pipe ever again and then repair our budget okay and now because we've been meeting the needs of our citizens uh the residential demand has skyrocketed through the roof so we have some unique buildings available to us or just the icon unlocked so i guess that's a thing uh you can't do anything with it but it's there so let's get back to expanding let's grid out a little bit more [Music] and i messed this all up so i'm going to redo it that could have been a happy little accident but i'm gonna i'm gonna change it just uh because my ocd won't won't allow me to keep that as crazy as it was all right and with that we've reached our next level up this allows some interesting things we have canals parks and recreation landscaping high schools you know a variety of parks and that's going to bring us to our next uh city view that we can take a look at that's land value so naturally places closer to shore are going to have a higher land value and land value has a direct correlation to happiness you can see that some of these properties that are further away from the shore are not as happy so we might want to place some playgrounds or well botanical garden or other amenities to make sure that the citizens are pleased with the place that they live in let's place a couple of things so we've placed that small park let's also place a playground pick out a couple houses for it all right you know the neighbors aren't concerned that the houses uh took the place of their neighbor we'll also place a large park so i don't get too concerned about placing these there's an upfront cost but i find that when you place these sorts of buildings you end up raising the land values and as a result your tax collections increase so it's in your best interest to place these buildings we'll do a dog park as well right off main street you'll see all of these buildings start to turn blue blue means that uh the availability of of this amenities is good one more and i bet you that will max it out so let's place really nice japanese garden overlooking the river let's see what that does here we go locally this area is maxing out now the japanese garden has a lower radius than some of the other buildings and if you look this little green line that's that's really showing the impacted radius okay so we have some other buildings that we haven't placed yet so we have high schools i think that's about it right now but we also have some other districts uh industrial districts that we have in place now that we have industrial demand i'd like to take a look at those and give that some thought so i'm going to click on this natural resources view to see the resources available to us now it looks like we have at least in our main area we have forestry and fertile lands just over to the east there are some ores available that said when you click into your district's menu you'll see that you only have farming and forestry available to you ores are locked until you reach a population of 2 400. so let's think about those districts a little bit so i'm going to click on this natural resources map and use that to create a grid for these areas i'm going to completely deviate from what i have been doing this will provide some visual interest and allow me to kind of mimic the area for these districts a little bit closer so i have that grid and i'm going to start out right off right off the bat by painting a district so you go into the district's menu go into district painting tools and i like to follow the roads to make as clean a district as i can now this is a tedious task i wish that you could just highlight an area and create a district um you know you just kind of fill it in but you can't so then you go to your industrial specializations and you click on the one you want and click on the district and and there it is those are the buildings that will develop there if you want to rename it you can click on the the name and give it something else but i'm going gonna leave it i'm not overly concerned about that right now i do want this to fit in well with the community that i've already developed so i will use dirt roads to join this up use the freeform tool meet one of the nodes and have a nice clean connection so we have a curved road meeting up this will form a nice interesting grid in the future you also need to zone this area provide it with water and power and then it will start to develop so one of the considerations here is that now this district is going to almost entirely rely on this local road back here or the series of local roads for getting traffic in and out of the district and that's not ideal so i think that we're going to want to to improve that in the near future i'm also getting a little bit tired of struggling with power so i think it might be time to place a coal power plant now similar to the industrial districts i want to place that near the interstate away from the residential area so that the first district served uh is is the one that has the power plant so the power plant is the first thing off the highway now so we know that we'll never have issues with power at least as long as this is the edge of the industrial district now let's extend this out a little bit so it's no longer the edge i suppose and the reason i want to do this is i want there to be a new collector in this area and this collector i think is going to be entirely different than our grid that we have established i'm going to use part of fawn square our new farming district as the boundary of that collector so this will be another east-west collector and this road right here that we created that turns that could be a north-south collector so to remind myself of this i'm just going to upgrade these roads this will also formalize this route as a destination and and the main path that will be taken to get from any other part of the city to this area i also want to be just want to double check that signalized not interested in that another interesting thing that i learned not too long ago is you can change roadway uh if if you're naming the streets you can click on a road on on the adjust roads tool modify its end location and name the road [Music] based on where this ends so something else to be aware of so right now we're running into problems with employees the main reason for that is we don't have enough residential buildings constructed so let's continue to build out [Music] so i initially was going to keep this a little bit separated from the the future collector but i figure why let's just keep it with this this this buffer here in the future maybe we'll just improve this road have it kind of be a frontage road to this collector maybe we'll just upgrade that off the bat i like that so upgrade that right off the bat then make our connections into this road so i like to minimize my connections into a collector this is is is clearly a mobility first collector and i can't even make connections in where it's this close so i might just leave it with this one connection and focus on making a secondary connection over here in this area [Music] okay and now that we have landscaping tools available if we wanted we could you know get fancy plant some trees down this little area right here whatever we wanted to do to make this a little bit more interesting so lots of options here i just chose a simple one i don't think this is particularly attractive it's it's very symmetrical ish and kind of boring but it works it's something one thing that i like to do sometimes and i don't know if i have the ability availability to do it here i do not um you can if you have some some of the uh the parks life dlc in particular you can put a fence along the road and prevent the zoning from occurring unfortunately in vanilla you don't have that option available to you okay so now we have some unique spaces and i like these kinds of spaces because they are what makes the city unique so i like to use the freeform tool to create uh some some grids that that kind of blend into the the environment that we've created so you know create some interesting spaces fill things in with trees make it make it more interesting than it than it is right now so let's pop some trees and make some place some residential districts again that's still our one of our top demands okay before i even place this road we will reach boomtown so now we have recycling policy recreational drug use or industry specialization the ability to make highways and on-ramps plop a couple of different intersection types toll ways advanced wind turbines buses cemeteries elder and child care now the elder child care and death care are the main things that we're going to need to worry about with boom town because these are now requirements for our city so right off the bat i'm going to stop what i was doing and place a cemetery i'm also going to think about child and death care too because this will have a direct impact on the health services provided in the city so again this is another radius focused building so we will think about we'll need to think about the location we're replacing it obviously like for child care if i place this here it's serving industrial buildings that's not nearly as is useful is placing it here where i know it's going to serve my future residential expansion so that's where i'm going to put it okay so i'm just going to continue again to build out my roadway network [Music] and you can kind of see having this area just a little bit different creates a unique development pattern which i think you know is really really cool so let's take a look our power connections are being made through here so i'm going to eliminate some of these power lines save just a little bit on maintenance and zone some more commercial now one of the things we haven't done yet is zone a a district that's primarily geared at forestry so i think i'm going to extend this area out and do just that now one of the interesting things about forestry is it's one of the few uh districts that you can are one of the few resources you can control so if you don't have enough density of trees to fully get the benefits of this district go ahead and go wild place some trees in that district and get the maximum benefit just be aware that when you place these trees it's going to take any fertile lands that you have in this area and completely sap them away the trees are going to take away that benefit so just something to be aware of [Music] all right i think we're treat out so let's uh let's paint our district hillside hills and it's flat all right well hillside hills it is good enough for me we will zone that but we need to make sure that we set our industry specialization or we'll end up with things like goods unlimited no you are not welcome here sorry again i'm going to formalize this as the collector by upgrading that road in the future i'll probably want to upgrade it to a four-lane road [Music] [Music] okay so at this point i just kind of built out the grid a little bit tried to keep it interesting while still working it in as naturally as i could [Music] [Music] okay so i i made some interesting roadway connections here and things are for the most part connected up well and the main reason i've been able to do this is i've used the free form tool i think it's the easiest way to make an organic road network i know that a lot of people like to use the curved road tool and the straight line tool and they have their place but so does the curved road tool so i'm looking at this park and i'm realizing that i want to make some connections to some of the paths in the park and the neat thing about some of these assets is that you can so that's something i just wanted you to be aware of with some of these park assets you can actually dive right in there and make connections if you want to so don't feel like you can't you can integrate them a little bit more into your cities by doing so so not a lot going here based on the location this might actually lead me to want to center this park whoops let's turn our guidelines back out unfortunately that carries through let's better center that and see if we can get some connections to both sides there we go this will make the pedestrian environment much more inviting in this area you can walk through the park to get around rather than walk around it so just something i like to do there you go now this park basically takes up the entire block and if you wanted to formalize that you could plant some trees around there make it appear that this entire block is the park you probably want to randomize this a little bit but we're just gonna do something simple [Music] okay people are gonna love that uh so much that they're gonna want to move to the city in droves and we aren't gonna zone anything appropriately uh so as a result they won't be able to live here so let's take care of that let's get some zones developed and you'll notice that without high density buildings it's kind of slow going and let's speed this up as we add some of these districts the nice thing about both forestry and farming districts is that they're pretty compatible with residential uses let's take a look so right here we have our pollution nothing really to speak of uh our sound pollution we've got some of that but nothing that these residents can't handle if it were too much we could place a row of commercial or in the future offices even better to buffer from these uses very good so now we kind of just want to go through and make sure that we're meeting all of our city's needs so we can tell that we are not meeting the elementary school need and we're certainly not meeting the high school need because we don't have one yet let's place a high school and then we'll need another elementary school so that all of the citizens are served deaf care is fine health care is okay we could probably use another clinic over on this new in this new part of town elder care is fine so our most pressing issue is is likely elementary schools [Music] place another one of those i think jail availability is probably a close second to elementary schools so we will get that ready as soon as we have the financial wherewithal to do so [Music] so at this point we could wait or we could take out a loan we can also adjust our our power and water i noticed that we are at the edge of our electricity availability same thing with water so we're going to need to focus on that soon luckily we're about to level up and hopefully get some some money that will help us move forward so that's one of the things that you got to balance when you're first starting out a new city is you got a lot of needs and not a lot of money everyone loves feeling safe surprise surprise so i do think that we are just going to increase our budgets to get by at this point in time [Music] so we're okay now on power and water you see the city's looking pretty good okay i am happy we do have some more industrial demand so let's build some general industrial to satiate that demand [Music] and as we place these things you'll see that other needs arise almost immediately now we need commercial i think i'm going to place a row of commercial on the edge of this industrial district and continue to build out our main drag filling it out with different commercial uses so this is going to be the end of our industrial district that in the future i might transition to some more residential uses once uh once we have the ability to do so so i just kind of want to form a buffer there the other thing is after work people could go to the grocery store or during work they could walk to a place for lunch so having these sorts of uses here would be totally natural so we do have our power connected in this area without the need for that power line so i am going to eliminate it give us a little bit more zonable land just because i'm paranoid i'm gonna place a power line there anyway just in case we have the same situation over here save us a little bit on maintenance not enough to really matter but i guess every little bit counts [Music] i think i'll plan a little uh commercial district over here separate from some of the residential uses and provide people a place to walk to and shop at so not a bad not a bad use and now we're kind of in this weird lull where we are just kind of waiting for the city to grow and reach our next milestone and we're so close in fact i'll take this screen off and watch it get there in now all right there we go so now we have our our oil specialization level four unique buildings city planning policies including free public transportation and a heavy traffic ban and we have some more roads available to us arterials and some of the four land roads with trees which would would help define some of the sound pollution that you might might encounter in some areas uh the roads that have grass medians or grass grass terraces will limit parking so that's something to keep in mind they do look nicer but there's no parking available on those roads now we have some other buildings available to us tropical garden which would look weird on a temperate map like we have here a large hospital oil power plant large fire station and a police headquarters so some really useful buildings are now available to us still we don't have some of these things available in this map so we're not going to approach them so we're just going to continue to look at our rci meter and continue to meet the needs of the city still no new buildings outside of these these larger buildings available that said we do have a need for a fire department and i do think having a large fire station near the collector but not on it would be a benefit so knowing that these buildings can sometimes so the dirt roads are just slightly narrower than uh than the pave road so i'm gonna upgrade this road before i put the fire department on it [Music] oh please well no no never mind the fire department and that will uh make sure i don't have to move this or prevent the upgrading of the road in the future [Music] i do think from a budgetary standpoint we're at a place where we could start upgrading these roads if we desired i also don't think it's super necessary just yet let's look at our traffic we're at 93 percent you know you could place transit now i love transit the city doesn't really need it if i'm just being totally honest there's a little bit of a bottleneck here um that's kind of a hierarchy issue if we went through and fixed hierarchy and then set our roadway priority changed our junction junctions i bet you all this traffic goes away let's do it real quick let's add a signalized intersection where these collectors meet and just double check that nothing weird has happened as we've expanded the city yeah lots of weird stuff has happened uh one of the things let's see so our priority road does extend through however wow that's weird so i wonder if we have stop signs that if yep a whole bunch of stop signs have been placed because this was a priority road because it looped back around so we've adjusted that turn that off and now all these stop signs are gone um that said because right here is no longer a priority road for some reason we have some issues with our junctions so i'll just adjust that priority road come back through and make sure that we have stop signs so good there then let's look at our zoning districts like i said earlier when you upgrade roads they can get messed up and they certainly have okay so we are in a better spot there now we have demand for basically everything again so knowing that there is a commercial need and we want to provide some buffering between the whoop between the commercial uses and the residential or the industrial uses and the residential uses i'm going to place some commercial uses along this collector [Music] on the other side of those commercial uses i will place some residential uses we should also take a look at our park space we've placed a lot of new residential uses and we don't have enough park space but i suppose the more pressing need is power so let's make a decision between a coal power plant and oil plant we don't have either the resources available to us we're going to be importing it so the pollution with the coal power plant is greater than that of the oil power plant the oil power plant costs more up front and significantly more per week that said the power output is three times higher so maybe it's worth it it's more than it's more than three times the upkeep cost but we'll diversify um if for no other reason than to take a look at the buildings there we go another power plant again in close proximity to the interstate now there's some stopping here you might wonder why that's happening when i changed the priority of this road it added a stop sign right here at this junction so let's get rid of that now before so let's look at the traffic we're still at 93 even with this bit of craziness turn that off everything's flowing well again traffic up to 94. maybe we'll hit 95. nope back to 93. that's fine and our our residential demand is again through the roof so i want to start to mirror the neighborhoods again so the road guidelines are the tool that makes this really possible so i am going to use that tool to to create neighborhoods that are identical on the other side of this collector to the ones that created south of the collector and then i'll use my free form tool to line this up the other neighborhoods that i've created [Music] just got an opportunity to make a unique road here so i think i might just square this up and send this off and use that as a way to kind of make a unique gateway into the community and then i'll i'll round this off a little bit this uh roadway connection okay so i did mention that i want to take a look at parks again park space make sure that we have enough because i know that we don't i think it might be fun to place a bigger more unique park space we're going to place the botanical garden we will put place the rear on the collector and have this building facing the local road you could have this face the collector it's probably a little more natural but from a loading standpoint it's better to have it off the local road you can see the buildings around this absolutely love it leveling up going to a level three building homes in the area leveling up from two to three we're in a good spot so land value has a direct association with the leveling up of the buildings you'll start to see places that have higher land value will have buildings that are leveling up more difficult to see right now but it will become more apparent in the future we are having problems with trash collection and the reason why is our landfill is full so landfills are something i like to avoid in this game and as soon as i have the ability to no longer have a landfill i get rid of it [Music] that said let's see the population we would need so we have incinerators at our next population milestone 7 000 people until then we need to keep our landfills functioning we are having significant garbage problems and if this keeps up people are going to get sick so let's just be really forward thinking about it place two landfills uh and really get this get this cooking [Music] back to our parks before we place buildings in these neighborhoods it's probably a good time to start thinking about parks because then you don't have to take down a bunch of houses to place the parks just a kind of a good practice like over here we're gonna take out a few houses just to get that park space in the park space is necessary but it'd be better to get that park space without demolishing a whole bunch of buildings okay so residential demand is still our top need what you'll notice is i haven't had to worry about the budget at all once you get past that initial kind of sting it's just keeping up with things just really keep track of what your city needs don't over build build neighborhoods don't build entire towns and you'll be fine and you'll see that that's the way that the rci meter best responds to you building small neighborhoods over building large elaborate grids your roads will look more natural as a result as well that's one of the things that is kind of a pet peeve of mine i have two pet peeves one is creating these elaborate entry ways into the city that don't have any place in realities big overpass monstrosities or um you know creating this freeway that you're planning into the city before there's a need for it that those that's not how those develop so don't do it if you can avoid it um think about the best way for your city to actually naturally develop a mini grid okay so you can place we need water and sewage treatment you can place these in close proximity and they won't impact each other so that's exactly what i'm doing oh look at that terrible this is exactly why you don't want to place your uh your water pumping station [Music] before your your sewage your uh your water drain pipe you wouldn't want to be sucking up this dirty poo water and giving it to your residents to drink [Music] okay so we're good there things are looking i think really good in this town i'm i'm liking this a lot [Music] we'll kind of just continue to follow our grid okay so we've got this let's work it out [Music] it's kind of something so i'm just kind of i'm kind of uh at this point just kind of doing what feels interesting and good to me and that's creating little pockets of commercial activity in neighborhoods it's creating well-connected roadway networks that can easily have transit retrofitted in the future it's it's not sprawling it's it's preventing cul-de-sac it's making sure that people can walk to work walk to where they shop where they get groceries those are good principles to think about when you're building your cities and good things to you know if you're if you're picking a place to live good things to think about there too okay so commercial and industrial are our greatest needs again so let's zone some more industrial and we can build out this commercial as well the nice thing is we're we're filling this in in areas that we already have infrastructure in place for so it doesn't cost us anything to continue our expansion and ideally that's what you would do so you can see i'm also creating a fairly predictable development pattern so that uh when i do want to expand it's not difficult to do it's it's a fairly simple process the land uses are well laid out and predictable again i'll make a couple connections into this neighborhood i don't want to overdo it maybe even just one and then from there might have another frontage road and maybe keep it a little more interesting in this area why not have a trail going through here won't really serve a significant purpose decides to keep it interesting keep it a different kind of neighborhood than the others that we've created okay again with our junction the stop sign there this is again not a priority road again so it is what it is i suppose so let's look child cares okay elder care is fine death care we're okay health healthcare we could probably use some work here now so maybe we start to think about our major hospital and this road right here going down here is starting to look a heck of a lot like a collector we don't have any north south collectors i initially thought that this could be it but i think that right here might be a better option let's take a look at our traffic yeah you're even seeing the traffic pattern support that oh and i've placed a ton of buildings along this road so mistake [Music] so we will do a little bit of relocating if you watch my main series you'll know that i hate doing that but you know from a from a gameplay perspective it's not that big of a deal um your uh your sims will forgive you your citizen will thank you in the future for the the foresight that you have to create a nice a nice city and they'll appreciate that you're willing to take the take a difficult stance so okay let's again set our roadway priority so go into here make this a priority road modifier junctions you know it's interesting here we have signalized intersections basically everywhere except for where we want it okay that's gonna focus our traffic into these few areas that we want while still leaving a variety of pedestrian connections in other areas and we could start at this point thinking about our backbone um oh actually we don't have the ability in the vanilla game i was gonna put some bicycle connections but we don't have the availability of the bicycle network in the vanilla base game so we're not gonna do that all right so [Music] i do think it would be a good idea to continue to build out maybe we'll make a regional shopping destination over here i just kind of wanted to create a road that provides some other form of access to this new shopping area not entirely necessary but i think it's good to have redundancy you don't want to focus traffic too heavily in any one area and i find that that's something that you know it can be really attractive to people focusing all that traffic in one area having one big arterial going down or one collector and using bike paths or pedestrian connections everywhere else and you're really doing yourself a disservice when you do that having multiple connections is good planning and will mean that people take multiple routes especially in the game where they're taking a look at the shortest route that's that also happens to be the fastest so because i am who i am i am going to move these water lines as i would otherwise have to de-zone to keep the water pipes under the road not necessary again but i like to keep it real industrial again is our main city need so let's build it out you might have wondered why am i following the same grid pattern for this industrial area that i'm using for the rest of the city it's totally unnecessary and you're right it's it's not at all needed but i know that if i keep the same grid pattern if i get used to placing certain buildings or certain parks i can reuse this area in the future for other uses and that's what happens in cities buildings get reused land uses change over time and having a consistent block pattern means you have a predictable development pattern and that's really important to all cities so i like to mimic that here so we're just trying to get to that next milestone which is 7 000 sims so i am going to use my curved road tool to mimic the distance on this road i know already that i want to have roads that wrap around here in the future without making too many connections so i'll just make a nice clean curve there [Music] again this is all the freeform tool with road guidelines you it's it's the most powerful tool in the game in my mind if you if you learn how to use it it takes a bit of time but it'll so dramatically improve the look of your cities it's worth it's worth figuring it out [Music] so i'm going to deviate here i'm not going to have um perfect well no i'm going to i can't leave it like that it's going to get lazy and not connect this up at perfect 90s but it's just so much better i can't i can't leave it like that okay that's much better it's a safer intersection and as a planner that should should be the thing i'm always focused on safety [Music] so i've been patiently building out this little residential area i'm going a little bigger in this neighborhood than i have in previous neighborhoods so i'm going to zone a large area at once that said i want to take a look we have some high school needs and elementary school needs we're gonna have park needs let's take care of all this stuff right now especially because a lot of these uh you know there's a lot of synergy between these uses so it's plazas that work well in residential areas other parks we have this nice basketball court put that there and load this up with residential uses [Music] and right away get to big town so this is really important because it gives us some new options so we have a whole bunch of policies that open up to us taxation level five unique buildings high density residential commercial and office as well as fishing islands in the university and the incineration plants i talked about so a lot of different ways you could take your city at this point the most important place to take it in my mind is getting incineration plants i'm gonna actually place two of those and start emptying this landfill so i can eliminate it so you click on the landfill you hit this middle button here and it'll begin emptying this landfill into these incineration plants so i think that's huge we have a lot of money right now so there's no reason not to just bite the bullet there okay next up we need to start thinking about some higher density buildings so i think it might be neat to have a row of higher density buildings along the shore and i'm not really respecting the topography of the area probably should be um but i'm not so i'm just gonna continue to roll with that let's put some high density residential right along here and some higher density commercial as well you might wonder why i didn't place any offices there's one main reason for that that's we don't have universities without universities you can't build uh any office districts you have to have educated employees for that and one thing that's interesting about office districts is that offices are actually industrial in nature i didn't realize that for the longest time someone pointed that out to me in the comments and it blew my mind but we have a whole bunch of industrial zones right now we won't need as many of those if we start if we place a university and start building offices so that's precisely what we're going to do this is a large building so i'm going to place it in this residential district near near these collectors to provide a great deal of access and once we have that we'll start to see some sims going to school here now if you don't have sims going to your university it's because your pipeline is broken somewhere you have to have elementary students that are going to high school and high school students that go to the university if you're missing high school students you won't get anyone in your university libraries boost your education but don't they aren't totally necessary um and they're large buildings they're tough to place so sometimes i just skip it i'll put one here next to the university though it's it's a good location for it and uh i think it goes well with some of these other educational buildings that we've placed in this area i am going to speed the simulation up we did lose a lot of population with that series of choices so uh let's get that population back so i'm actually not going to place these residential uses directly adjacent to it they are not going to like the noise that's produced by either these pumps or the turbine so you should probably be aware of that so i'll use offices as a buffer in this particular location i'm also going to start up zoning some of these areas like i was before um been reusing these i wish that we could just up zone the buildings and have them naturally evolve over time but that's not in the cards here not in this game so we're just gonna have to kind of sweep in and do that ourselves and as we do this you'll notice that the demand for particular buildings just decreases and that's because of the availability of uh different zoning districts we've obviously by by up zoning this we're dramatically increasing the square footage of these different building types or square meters if uh if you're looking at metric and uh if you do that the demand is going to be met so that's what we're that's we're running into now not overly concerned about that [Music] okay so i think i've got most of what was here rezoned to a higher density zoning district so what you're going to see now as we go about this besides not having enough water is uh you're gonna see values going up significantly in these areas so let's take a look in just a moment so yeah as we place these higher density buildings the land value increases which makes total sense with higher land value you're going to see these buildings level up and as they level up our tax collections will go up as well so if we wanted to see how individual areas are doing we could create many districts within here i like to do this sometimes based on when i developed neighborhoods it's kind of a realistic way of of of approaching it so you could create a couple of different neighborhoods like this [Music] and you might wonder why i would do this well it's nice that i can go in and look at the values of individual neighborhoods and see what what neighborhoods are doing better obviously when i do this i can see that more square is significantly more valuable than the surrounding areas i can dig into this more and try to figure out what makes this such a great neighborhood to live in might be the park availability might be yeah it looks like it's it's kind of in the middle of all these parks it's got a poor school availability but it doesn't mind that so yeah there's a number of factors that go into that um but it's just something that you can be aware of by by doing this but you can also apply policies to individual areas so let's say that we wanted this area because it had educational problems include increase the education budget in this area for the one school that was here and really give that a boost we could also ban pets to reduce garbage accumulation in this area lower taxes or bad heavy traffic if that was a desire which in this area you might want to there's no commercial so why do you need heavy traffic in there you could also do a district over this industrial area you might wonder why i would consider that and i'll show you why momentarily so let's say you wanted to um change the job mix increase production and uh you had a lot of job availability you could put the industry in industry 4.0 policy on there this district right now will create many more products and it will serve uh in the job mix and these buildings will change so now when i click on a building here it needs a whole bunch of highly educated employees and no uneducated employees across the street the exact opposite mix uh and twice as many workers needed so um gives you some gives you some options there [Music] these two landfills are both full this one one percent full great once this empties we can eliminate that it looks like both of these are working okay processing not in an excellent spot this will improve once the landfills are gone though so we'll just have to sit tight things get too bad we'll have to build another [Music] another landfill although we're almost near the end of our tutorial so we might not get there i do want to take a look what's our traffic look like so we're at 89 percent there are some things we could certainly do to improve this let's do one of those things right now [Music] so i made sure that this is stop controlled and i think one of the things that might be good in this industrial area so we don't have a collector so let's place a collector through here ah small city and that gives us cargo train terminal hydroelectric power plant train station high tech housing industrial space planning which is one of those policies i like to enable citywide so some some good stuff so a citywide policy i haven't explained that yet you click on your policies menu and you don't have a specific district selected whatever policies you apply would be applied to the entire city so let's say i want the industrial space planning which doubles the amount of goodies amount of goods produced per building while increasing the upkeep i could just click on that and now every industrial district will have this policy applied to it from here on out and all of our old districts will as well okay let's finish this and get some zoning done [Music] and you're starting to see that we are having significant employment issues in this district over here and that is because we don't have enough um highly educated citizens yet that'll improve over time the time being it's going to be a problem and we are having garbage problems too and this is kind of where you can get stuck you have these needs you need to meet sometimes you gotta over build stuff to make it happen landfills are gonna be that thing that i am overbuilding because we're way out of whack in our garbage processing because we've been emptying these facilities and this will improve now that some of this is gone and you can see it already and once these both are done emptying we're going to be a great spot set up for the future [Music] so okay we are you know a little under 200 150 away from meeting our population threshold and as this garbage situation improves uh we're gonna we're gonna notice that the city just ends up in a much better spot i might actually just turn these off for the time being stop the emptying let the garbage situation remedy itself [Music] and uh hopefully have some more educated employees get pumped out of this university because we are struggling see need more schools you know as the city is densifying uh you're gonna need more of these core amenities available to you you just see that things are just lighting up bright red one of the things i didn't do over here was change the roadway priority that would be a very important thing to take a look at here as well especially with the density of trash facilities over here you're gonna wanna make sure that uh those trucks can leave quickly all right and i do see that we have passed our population threshold i just don't feel good leaving this area without some of this stuff being rectified so i'm going to continue to to go to show you that it is possible to recover from some of these issues you see that there are problems with noise let's eliminate this at this point this will make people happy also reduce some of our noise pollution by upgrading the roads which would make perfect sense in a now high density area and then uh we're gonna look at our healthcare right now we have one clinic it's not surprising that people would get sick and be kind of stuck so we'll build a proper hospital we have plenty of money for that and get our citizens health care back in line uh as far as death care goes we're okay there we're doing fine we could certainly stand to build up but you see our population's going up and now people want to live here again we've taken care of a number of the issues here garbage isn't a problem we could turn one of these out i think we just got a little bit too aggressive emptying this um it's a balancing act as you move further along these issues will stop being such big issues and you'll be able to just keep progressing forward so i think this is where we're going to end it i will place this save file online just in case you want to put around with it see where where you know how i've gotten to where i've gotten and you know maybe continue building on this yourself i hope you've enjoyed this video i know it was a long one but i wanted to really make sure i covered uh all of my bases make sure that i get you to high-density buildings make sure that uh you know this is a really comprehensive guide so i hope you've enjoyed this if this was helpful and you liked it please hit the like button if you are not yet subscribed to my channel please consider doing so hit the notification bell if you want to know when i release new videos i thank you so much for watching this and i'll see you in the next one take care bye [Music] hey [Music] you

Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 481,336

Rating: 4.9360266 out of 5

Keywords: cities skylines how to start your city, cities skylines beginners guide, cities skylines, cities:skylines, how to start a city in cities skylines, cities skylines tutorial, cities skylines how to start your first city, city planner plays cities skylines, how to play cities skylines, cities skylines beginners, cities skylines how to start a city, cities skylines tips, cities: skylines, cities skylines xbox one, Cities skylines ps4, cities skylines how to start your city 2021

Id: SWW8Nm4NbxI

Length: 88min 57sec (5337 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021