Most Basic Tutorial for How to Start Cities: Skylines in 2021 | Easy Beginner Tips for Dummies

so you've decided to get into city skylines but you're not quite sure what it's about or how to play longer than 10 minutes without running out of money and abandoning houses everywhere you search youtube and all you can find are advanced tips or most efficient starting design but those are above your level you've come to the right spot my friend i will show you the actual basics of the game i will explain like you are five this is part one hello world my name is tony and this is my super ultra basic tutorial for city skyline this is not advanced tips on road design to get the most efficient traffic this is not how to grow your city to x population in the shortest amount of time this is city skylines for dummies this video is part one so if you are just starting out your journey you're in the right spot parts two and three will be here soon if they are already posted i will put them in the description of this video city skylines is a simulation game where you build a city from zero people living into it to however many people live in it when you're done you place your own road layouts you choose what type of buildings go where what type of services people get and what type of recreation they can find around them i'll explain more as we go on but first let's just get into the game this screen will be the first thing that you see there's really not much that you need to do in here in order to show you how to play the game i'm going to play vanilla completely vanilla no mods later on in your life if you're playing on pc you can go to the steam workshop and add mods and assets but that's that's not what we're doing today there are some options that you can make sure that you have turned on to maybe help your beginner game you will want to keep show in-game guide pop-up slime just so you can read them it's smart to have autosave turned on and i like to have the notifications turned on for any of the dlcs that you may have purchased at least while you're getting started so you can keep track of what's going on in your city that's it for the options though everything else is absolutely personal preference to start a new game guess what guys you click the new game button these icons beside the map names just show which dlc they are from let's pick a very base game map as i click through them you can see things changing over here right for this demonstration we will use green planes and i'll just explain very briefly what these are these natural resources are exactly what you think they are the resources that are in the ground or on the map that are available for some industry some work that your citizens will will be able to do more light blue on the bar means there's more of this available on the map outside connections means how people from the outside world can get into your city if you hover over them you can see what each of them are we have highway train ship and air this map allows people to come in from all four options as an example two rivers down here there's no ship connections to the outside world so you won't have any tourists or people coming in via ships suitable area for building means what percentage of the map is easy to build on or capable of being built on 74 is pretty high to give you some comparison cliffslide bay here only has 53 these base themes and custom map theme aren't really important for beginning the game they're just about visuals let's name our city cs for dummies left-hand traffic would be something that people who live in the uk or other countries that drive on the left side of the road would click i'm canadian this is absolutely terrifying for me let's just dive in and get ready to play our new city it's normal for this loading screen to take a little while sometimes just let it be and it will load we are in are you ready to start playing city skylines no okay well that's what i'm here for first things first you will have these pop-ups come up as you play through the game i suggest that you do take the time to read them because they will re-affirm what i'm teaching you but for now i will be closing them as they pop up next some basic movement controls move your mouse it moves the arrow wsad on your keyboard goes forward backwards and left and right just like you're used to the scroll wheel on your mouse zooms out and zooms in and if you hold down the scroll wheel or your third mouse button and you move the camera around it moves like this in a way that is better if you try it than me trying to describe it when you zoom out you'll see something along these lines these dotted lines represent the area that you are able to build in as your city expands and you have more people moving in you can purchase more space to build in we'll get there for now you'll always have one road connection into your starting square and you might have other connections like the train in this map we do not and we only care about the roads to start before we actually start building a city we should talk about the point of this game what is the point of playing city skylines city skylines is whatever you make it to be i like making pretty cities that are visually appealing while mostly functional some people recreate real world cities one for one some people just want to build the biggest city with as many people in it as possible how you end up playing your city will grow on you you'll figure it out but to start the game does offer you some basic goals watch my mouse in the bottom left hand corner there is this milestones button click it and here is how we are going to be basing our structure today i'm going to get you to the first milestone of little hamlet each milestone is based on population and those numbers differ slightly just based on the map that you're playing on and how much buildable area there is as we click through you'll see that there are many milestones and each milestone you unlock new things and we will discuss those more in the next episode we just need to get you on your feet first as we click through you'll see that the last milestone that the game provides you is megalopolis this is where we're going to end up for now let's build a city let's zoom in and focus closer to our connection to the highway next please draw your attention down here to the gui where you'll see some blacked out options more of these options will become available as your game progresses but it's worth noting that your citizens need each of these to stay happy and stay in your city if they don't have these as they become available your citizens will abandon their houses and they'll leave and you'll eventually i guess fail the game right now our only option is roads let's click on it and then you have these options pop up same thing the black ones are options that you will unlock as you go along and right now i'm scrolling with my mouse wheel just to look through them for each of these pop-ups there's also often tabs here up at the top and they show you different types of what you've just clicked on so we're looking at roads in general and here are the more specific road items so we have small roads medium large highways and some other things that we will get to in the future for now to be able to unlock anything else we need to place one road a very common tactic for starting a new city is to just place the smallest road possible how do you place a road click on this guy and then you left click once anywhere on your map for now so i've left i've left clicked once and now as i move my mouse around i'm not clicking anymore this line comes up that blue line shows you where your road is going to go so i'm going to draw the smallest one possible see how i can draw it very long or very small note the construction cost as i go to build a bigger road it costs more pretty logical right but that introduces to us the concept of money we'll get to that in a second coming back let's just draw this 40 40 simoleon 40 euro road and look some things changed i drew that road by left clicking again by the way now however if i move my mouse around it wants me to continue drawing a road if you want to get out of this you can either press escape on your keyboard or you can right-click and right-click will exit the interface let's look at what we've unlocked we've unlocked one-way roads we've unlocked a gravel road and probably some others up here as well we've also unlocked some other very important things however zoning is how you tell the game where you want people to build buildings available to us right now are a residential zone for people to live in commercial zones for people to work in or visit to get food or other goods and industrial zone for people to work in to produce goods people that live in the residential zones will go to work at the commercial and the industrial zones and they will also go to consume goods at the commercial zones the industry zones will ship their goods to the commercial zones in order for those commercial zones to sell their goods to the residents this guy on the right this is just to de-zone something so like deleting the zone you can draw this zone in only attached to a road so before we talk more about them let's put some roads down in order to put new roads down though we need to get rid of this one it's in our way on the bottom right of your screen you'll see a bulldozer and it it does just that it bulldozes things which means delete them you can either click it or you can press b on your keyboard as a shortcut and anything that you want to delete you hover over and it highlights blue and because we have the game paused it will refund us thirty of the forty dollars that we spent to build the road the more time that passes between when you build something and when you delete it the less money you will get back to bulldoze something left click it with the mouse once it's highlighted and it's gone to exit the bulldozer mode press b on your keyboard again or click down here in the bottom right again see this horizontal line coming up and down that's the indication that you're in bulldozer mode while we're paying attention to the edges of the screen take a look at this red line this indicates that the game is paused along with you know nothing moving and if you're wanting to pause the game or unpause the game it's simply spacebar okay let's build some roads we've already built a standalone road well that doesn't help when people need to drive into the city from the outside does it when we have the road tab open you can see these arrows showing up on the highway roads those indicate that these are one ways and they indicate the direction that the traffic flows why don't we add some one-way roads to the one-way highway roads that already exist just to tidy these up and get them ready to meet our cities let's say main road we're going to click on the one way we're going to bring our mouse over here and do you see how the mouse appears to be kind of snapping to certain areas of the roads those areas indicated by the circles or the end of the road are called nodes you'll hear this terminology used a lot when playing city skylines nodes are just a point in the road the area in between two nodes so this area is called a segment let's start snapped onto this node press left click on our mouse and drag down to about here left click again and it's built now i need to right click to get out of this because i don't want to build another road right click and do you see how as i move around now these blue dotted lines show up that's indicating where you can snap to for your next roads and it's pretty logical to start where this road and this road meet up right so let's start here left click come to this road snap to it left click and it joins up so now these two are even and they're ready to connect to our main road now these small roads have basically two lanes each one going in each direction in this case and then the two going in one direction so for our more main road we're gonna move just up to a medium road because we don't want anything too crazy and that's that's a later reason why and we're gonna choose our four-lane road basic four-lane road click on it and i'm going to start by connecting this guy to this guy and then i'm just going to build let's say this far over here and this far over here that's it for now you'll notice one theme through this beginning video is that we want to keep everything small and compact because it will save us money which is our biggest limiting factor right now speaking of which i think it's important to build these first few steps with the game paused because as you build things in your city like roads or electricity when time is passing those things cost money per time do you see where it says upkeep 80 cents per week per cell that means as time goes on we're spending money maintaining this road and if we don't have to do that at the very beginning it's important that we don't do so next do you see this grid showing up beside the roads that is where we do the zoning that i mentioned earlier so just as a very quick example when i hover over you can see that it will allow me to paint the green in there but we're not going to do that quite yet we still need to build more roads to zone on and let me explain to you why we know that residential is where people live and there's nothing exciting for me to tell you about that yet commercial zones along with especially the high density commercial zones they produce sound and noise when you build them noise is not an extremely extremely important factor in the game but it's just something to remember a little bit later on industry however produces a factor of pollution and that is important right now pollution needs to be considered for two main things for one you don't want your industry immediately next to your residential because the people that will live here will be poisoned essentially by the pollution that this industry makes so that is a no-no so that means we need to build our industry away from our residential pollution also comes into play when we start getting into placing water down we'll get to that i promise and in case you're wondering the way that i deleted this residential you can either right-click anywhere and drag and let go and it de-zones it or you can use this tool and just left-click it a very common pattern for zoning that you will see is residential commercial industry so that's residential and industry away from each other with commercial separating them that's very common and an easy go-to we need to have a lot more than this zone though so that means we need more space however not too much space so that we don't run out of money i'm going to take some time now to build what i think is a reasonable road layout for a beginning city and a reasonable size as well with a map like this i'm going to plan to have my first industry over here and my first residential and commercial kind of take up this little area this is about as long as i would want any first main street to be you can see it costs hundred and 4440 dollars so in and around that size and you'll probably be pretty safe for the roads coming off of it though i'm going to come back to this two-lane road and let's get some things down for places for people to live as i'm building these note that i am instinctually just going to these circles the nodes when i build off of this main road and what that is doing conveniently is it's kind of maximizing our grid space don't feel like you have to do this but that's generally how i'm choosing where to build i'm also going to do a few roads off this way to get our first industry in and a couple down here as well this is as big as i'm comfortable building to start now i don't want to start zoning in right away because these people that i want to live here don't have what they need yet in order to live they need electricity and they need water let's start with electricity when you open the tab you have some options we'll use power lines in a second but we need buildings that produce electricity first the two options that are open to us are windmills and coal power plants take a look at the pop-up for the coal power plant it costs so much per week and it costs so much to plop down on the right hand side though it shows you the pollution that it produces and the noise pollution that it produces pollution's the more important of the two but they're both factors and on the bottom right you can see the power output now compare that to the wind turbine and you see the difference the wind turbine won't create any pollution which is really great but it produces so much less power so for today's example we're going to use the coal power plant because it produces pollution we're going to place it in the industrial area now as i hover over here do you see the purple circle around it that circle is where the pollution will affect so if i were to build houses within that area those people would get sick and they would leave or die placing down a building you have to do so beside a road and you can see it snaps to the road let's place this power plant down up here and you just left click to place it now do you see that blue area that came around it that is electricity we eventually want houses over here but they need electricity and that blue doesn't reach over here the way that we get the blue electricity to reach over here is with these power lines you just need to place your first one within the original blue area left click once and come over to where you want the power to travel to once we start building houses i'll show you why but for now trust that you only need to get it in the general area and it will spread through the houses through the zoning i'll show you in a quick sec one power plant is definitely enough to power your little starter town next your citizens need water water and sewage is an in and out system so you need to bring water in to your city via certain assets and you need to pump water out of your city in the form of sewage versus via other assets water can be brought into your city either by pumping it up out of a river or an ocean or by bringing it out of a water tower that can be placed essentially anywhere to be able to best teach you the basics of the game we're going to use the water pumping station so when i click on it notice this river becomes blue so it's showing that it's water and it has these arrows these arrows are the direction of water flow and that's very important so water will come in through this pumping station our city will use it and turn it into waste and then need to pump it out come down to this river you don't want your waste to be dumped out here only to travel downstream into where you're picking up water because then you're picking up waste you're literally picking up poop and feeding it to your citizens you don't want that so when you're taking water in and dumping it back out in the same general body of water pay very close attention to the arrows you want the water pumping to be up here so that the arrows flow away from it so that the water flows away from it as i move the pumping station around it snaps to the river edges and you just left click to place great that's water in now we need water out i'm going to do the simple water drain pipe and i'm just going to keep it far enough away from this guy so that i you know if i did it right here that would be bad it would this guy would suck up the waste even though it eventually goes downstream it kind of puddles around the drain first right so i'm going to place it down here so it's far enough away that it doesn't affect the water in but it's not so far away that we have to spend a lot of money moving the water that's right we need to move the water via piping sort of similar to how the electricity worked with the power lines we need to move the water through the city via these pipes and we'll start by connecting these two first as you move close to it it'll snap to the asset left click once and see it snaps to the other asset again and left click again there's your first water pipe that blue area around it is the area that will be covered for water but we don't need this area covered we just need these guys connected now we should come over here and get this area covered many people lay out their piping cleanly beautifully for the sake of this tutorial we're just going to put these down to be functional so i'm going to come all the way over here left click once i'm going to right click to exit and i'm going to draw enough lines down here so that all of my area that i want to build in is covered today from the future bringing you one last water tip if you're going to have your water source that comes into the city be a water tower don't put a water tower right next to buildings that produce pollution remember this coal power plant and it produces pollution if we were to put this water tower right here it would be soaking water up out of the ground that is polluted and feeding that polluted water to your civilians making them sick causing them to leave causing them to die great so you see all of that blue now everyone in here is is covered for water except these guys need power as well to operate buildings in this game need power to operate so how do we carry power down here guys do you remember we come back to our electricity tab we get our power line and we we can take power from this line and we can bring it over here i'm going to right click again to get out of this because that blue is where power is being carried and i'm going to come out the other side of it and i'm just gonna come within this blue now let's press escape to get out of this awful white screen and we're ready to start zoning so i just put down a bunch of residential and commercial however much i want right wrong look down here there are actually three bars here and you'll see all three of them in a second the leftmost is green tied into the residential the middle one will be blue and that's tied into the commercial needs and the rightmost will be orange and that's tied into the industry need you'll notice i said need the higher the bar is the more your city needs that type of zoning when you're beginning the game brand new your city needs only residential it needs people to live here so let's zone some in looking at these four buttons over here think of these as paint brushes like you would use an ms paint this one is fill so if i hover over it takes kind of all of an available grid and if i were to left-click it would fill all of that in the second one makes you draw the area you want yourself so i start in a corner i hold left click and i fill as much as i want and it can cross roads like this so i could do this if i wanted the next two are like a little paintbrush small and large and if i just left click it paints it in like that or if i go for the large brush it paints it in like this you'll figure out which ones you're more comfortable with it doesn't really matter for this tutorial i'm going to use the large brush and we're going to paint in our first houses remember when i said that you don't have to carry the power lines down like this here's why when you paint your first houses paint them near power lines because this house here will pick up power from that power line and once it's built it will carry power over to these houses here electricity jumps from building to building as long as they're close enough so we're going to paint in this area first and let these people move in are you ready to unpause the last thing we started the city with i think it was 70 thousand dollars we're down to 27 and some change if you're building along with me and you're around that amount of money you're probably in a pretty good spot let's unpause and see what happens i will press the space bar and we can watch what happens now the game has three speeds of play down here bottom left uh we are currently running in one speed you can go to two speed by pressing the number two or three speed by pressing the number three or back down to one by pressing one and that's where we'll stay this is what buildings look like as they move in and i think it's fun to watch them build up their little houses you can see our demand for residential is gone down slightly but we certainly need more let's zoom back out a little bit and let's paint in some more residential zoning you can see as we paint even people are moving in now as time passes in game typically the game will go from day to night what i'm going to do is press escape which brings us to our menu i'm going to go into options and i'm actually going to turn use day night cycle off and that will keep us in permanent visual day although for our sims day night will continue to happen keep watching the bottom left for the demand meter and you see the residential need is going down because we're bringing residents in but now they want somewhere to work and shop so why don't we start zoning some commercial as well let's zoom out a little and we'll put some shops along this road go to our zoning click on the blue commercial zone and i'm going to use the marquee tool this time instead just a personal preference and i'll show you something with the zoning i'm going to actually zone like this and i'm not going to bring in this last row of grid the reason i'm doing that is so that when these shops build in they only attach to this side road where the zoning meets the road and they won't build along this main road this is a really really simple traffic tip the purpose of this main road is to bring cars into the city along the main road and off onto these side roads where they then can go into the buildings that they want to go into be them houses are residential if you have a lot of houses and commercial built onto the main road like this cars will take their time turning into these driveways and they will hold up the cars behind them when you're in a town this small it really doesn't matter but it's just a force of habit for me to mark the zoning like that let's look at our demand meter some more we need a good amount more commercial and we also need some industry let's bring the commercial along this road as well and over here is where we're going to put our industry because remember we want the pollution to stay away from the residents let's zone a little bit of industry again i'm going to keep it from zoning on to the main road and i'm just going to zone it like that let's watch these guys move in [Music] see down here our money this red money indicates either an income if it were in fact green or a deficit each week so right now we are spending money every week to operate our city if we continue like that and our bank balance goes well below zero we will hit bankruptcy it's important to be finicky with money for these first few steps like only building the roads that you need and not building your water pumps so far away so that we can work to bring this number to a positive you'll always start as a negative don't stress about that but we're slowly getting it there into a positive one thing that helps make it a positive is industry as industry brings us income so let's build some more roads i'm going to continue this industry road and i want to come down here but it says out of city limits that's that dotted line that i was talking about so instead i'm going to just move over a little bit i'm going to come down at a 90 degree angle and keep it fairly small and then i'm going to press b to go to bulldozer and i'm just going to delete that little knob just to keep it clean and tidy come back to small roads and build some roads off of this main one for our industry and finally zone in the industry itself and i'm going to do that we also have a little bit of a residential demand let's just take care of that right away there we go remember when i said that electricity jumped between houses let's look at the electricity tab and see this blue line it's jumping between the houses i'm going to be curious ah there it does connect so the electricity hopped over this road so we don't need to build any more power lines and if you can build as few power lines as possible during the beginning steps you'll know that you're keeping your city small enough so that you're probably not very likely to go bankrupt bottom left you can see our milestones button is turning green the green area indicates how far away you are from your next milestone if you click on it you can see it this way as well we're well on our way to 500 people oh remember how we built these roads here they're now showing a problem indicator which is this little bubble that's coming up this problem indicator shows that they need water and so we just need to build more water piping over here to carry the water that we've already brought into the city over to them so let me just put these down the exact same way i did the other ones and now the blue area covers them so they're covered see how the bubbles start to go away as time passes this is a good time to look top left at these bars this is how much water is being brought into your city and this is how much water is being processed and put out of your city you want your arrows to always stay in the green part as we move on we'll take a look at when the arrows hit the yellow and the red that's future s problem though if you click on the electricity it's the same indicators so we have plenty of electricity to provide for the city we are producing 40 megawatts and currently we are only consuming seven i'm going to pause really quick for a second here because i don't want to hit that last milestone before i explain this to you our last icon that's lit up down here is the economy icon let's click on it and it brings this up there's a lot going on on this screen for this episode and maybe even next episode we're going to be ignoring this bottom half completely don't worry about it yet up top there are three tabs the only tab we have access to right now is the budget tab each row indicates a service for the city so we have road maintenance we have electricity and we have water sewage and heating if you're playing on a snowfall map on the right hand side you'll see how much money we are spending on that service every week and you can move these sliders to the left or the right to spend less money every week remember how i showed you with the electricity consumption up here we're producing way more than our city needs if you were in a tight spot for money down here with the weekly income you could come to the economy tab and let's produce about 75 of the electricity that we previously were as i unpause you'll see this number eventually come down and you'll also see our electricity production jump from 40 to 22. so now we're only spending this much money and we're producing less electricity if you tinker around with these at the beginning just make sure you don't forget about them but they're a great way to save money at the very beginning of the game when you're producing too much of something with only one building we're getting another problem icon over here if you don't know what this icon means click on the building that has it and it will tell you we don't have enough people to work here and that lines up with our demand meter where we need more zoning for people to move in i'm going to pause the city one last time and let's build some more roads out this way and this time i'm going to start connecting them together like so and we can zone in the last of our residential over here let's unpause and watch these people move in [Music] the number of citizens that we have in our city is slowly getting up there it's almost at 500 i think we're about to reach our first milestone and when you reach a milestone it will pop up congratulations everybody we've made it to little hamlet we've reached a population of 500 and we've learned the absolute basics of this game i'm going to end this part of the tutorial here in the next part we will go over what happens when you unlock these milestones what all these new buildings are and how you can move from little hamlet to megalopolis if you have any pressing questions about the game leave a comment below let me know i'm glad to help out i also stream city skylines over on twitch at twitch.tv slash toadywipeyq and i think i'm pretty good at explaining things like this in their simplest form give the video a thumbs up if you thought it was helpful subscribe if you want to see more city skylines content and i can't wait to move on to part two until then guys i will catch you next [Music] time

Channel: ToadieYPQ

Views: 26,307

Keywords: toadieypq, toadie, Most Basic Tutorial for How to Start Cities: Skylines, Cities: Skylines for Dummies, cities skylines beginner tips, cities skylines, cities skylines beginners guide, cities skylines tutorial, cities skylines tutorial pc, cities skylines basics, cities skylines basic controls, cities skylines basic road layout, cities skylines basic guide, cities skylines easy start, cities skylines easy road layout, cities skylines easy mode, cities skylines beginner guide 2021

Id: arcRm9lXdlc

Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/gckman915]

I'm pretty new to the game too. Thanks for sharing this.