Cities: Skylines Beginners Guide – Common Issues And How To Fix Them
Cities: Skylines is one of the best recent city-building sandbox games and since it’s initial 2015 launch, the game, which was published by Paradox Interactive, has seen numerous expansion packs which had only added to the game’s core mechanics, intruding disasters, park creation, in-depth industrial and educational management, and plenty more.
For a first-timer, the game can be overly complicated and difficult to grasp. In fact, most people new and old to the game run into frequent problems relating to their city management, and while you wrack your brains over how to best solve the issue there’s likely a simple way to resolve them.
That’s why we’ve put together out Cities: Skylines beginners guide, to help you spend less time solving annoying issues and more time enjoying the game.
Cities: Skylines Not Enough Goods To Sell
In Cities: Skylines, one of the most common issues you’ll come across is when commercial properties in the game do not have enough good to sell. When this happens, it’s usually because commercial buildings aren’t getting enough goods from industrial zones. When this happens, you’ll see the “Not enough goods to sell” notification and if the commercial property doesn’t receive goods within a certain amount of time it will become abandoned.
Generally speaking, zoning more generic industry will help but in some cases, this may not. The main reason for this is because your industrial zoning is too far from your commercial zoning, which means moving your zoning closer together or before zoning anything, ensuring that all zones aren’t far from one another and creating enough public transport to allow your cims to move swiftly between them.
However, the main culprit is traffic. Too much traffic via trains, road, boats, and more can all prevent your goods from reaching your commercial properties. Fixing traffic flow between your industrial and commercial zoning or placing your industrial zoning close to your commercial will help solve this issue and within minutes, your city should be in tip-top shape again and business booming.
Not Enough Workers
Another common problem you’ll have when playing Cities: Skylines is not having enough workers. When this usually happens, you’ll find that you may have a semi-high unemployment percentage according to the game’s info services but also a large number of available jobs. This can cause some confusion, but the reason there are so many unemployed cims includes:
- Cims have too high an education, making them ineligible for low-skilled work
- Highly educated cims reject multiple low-level jobs before accepting something more suitable
- The journey between a cim’s home and their prospective job may be too far or difficult
- There may be too much traffic between a cim’s home and their job, causing them to despawn
There are several things you can do to resolve this issue. For example, you can zone more commercial and office closer to residential properties to limit the journey distance and you can check traffic flow to fix any major slow-downs. Alternatively, you can wait out and hope that your unemployed cims eventually select a job, build better transport links around your city to improve transportation and make it easier for your cims to travel to their jobs, or try to enforce lower-educated cims by enforcing the ‘Schools Out’ policy which forces cims to leave education early for low-educational jobs.
Too Few Services
Another common problem you’ll run into when playing Cities: Skylines is having too few services. When this happens, you’ll usually see a notification pop up above various buildings, and due to its vagueness can often be frustrating to deal with. However, it’s actually pretty simple, as it simply means the buildings affected aren’t receiving any of the following services;
- Water
- Sewage
- Police and Fire services
- Healthcare
- Electricity
- Rubbish collection
It can also mean that there isn’t enough public transportation to the zone or that there’s low-land value, meaning you’ll need to place down some parks or monuments to improve the local area.
With the above in mind, it’s simple to fix as you’ll need to check your city’s coverage for all the services and plop down the relevant buildings or improve land value. Once you’ve done that, you’ll find that the notification should disappear. In some cases, however, you’ll find that heavy traffic may be effecting service coverage and, like always, that will need to be addressed and resolved first.
Cities: Skylines Death Wave
The dreaded death wave is one of the most frustrating issues you’ll run into when playing Cities: Skylines. In short, a death wave is when a huge number of deaths occur within your city almost simultaneously. These deaths put a strain on your healthcare coverage and can potentially lead to illness in your cims and, if not addressed, more deaths.
The reason for death waves is because cims in the game have short lifespans. When you’re first starting your city, fast expansion causes adults of the same age to move in and they eventually all age up and begin dying off all at the same time, hence the death wave.
While there isn’t a surefire way of dealing with death waves, the best way to resolve this issue is by ensuring that you expand your city gradually rather than quickly, by providing more healthcare coverage particularly when it comes to services that revolve around death, and bulldozing any abandoned buildings or those with corpses to prevent further death. In time, the death wave will slow and eventually stop – just remember to expand gradually!
Abandoned Buildings
Abandoned buildings are another problem you’ll frequently run into when playing Cities: Skylines. Abandoned buildings are rather easy to address but they should not be left alone as they decrease land value and can make nearby residents unhappy, leading them to become ill or potentially move out, causing a chain reaction in which they’re building has now become abandoned.
There are a number of reasons why buildings can become abandoned, and it’s usually due to a lack of services. All you need to do is ensure that your buildings all have efficient service coverage and that they don’t have low land value. Other reasons include high noise pollution, high crime rates, high pollution, and too high tax rates.
Also, a great of ensuring that additional buildings don’t become abandoned is by bulldozing them as quickly as possible and addressing the issue that’s causing the buildings to be left.
Not Enough Raw Materials
In Cities: Skylines there are several types of natural resources which are used by industrial zones. They are; forest, fertile land, ore, and oil. Each type of natural resource has its own colour which can be seen via your city’s information centre, they are:
- Forests: Green
- Fertile Land: Yellow
- Ore: Blue
- Oil: Black
The darker the shade of colour, the more of that resource there is for you to extract. Now, if you trigger the “Not enough raw materials” notification in the game, it generally means your buildings aren’t receiving the resources. When this happens, you’ll typically need to create additional ways of transporting your resources including cargo hubs, freight trains, and more.
Not Enough Buyers For Products
Similarly to not having enough goods to sell, one issue you’ll encounter in Cities: Skylines is when you don’t have enough buyers for products. In the game, your industrial zoning produces goods for your commercial zones. Within the game, the commercial zoning is considered the buyer and you’ll trigger this notification if you do not have enough commercial zones purchasing said goods from your industrial zoning. You may also trigger this notification if there is heavy traffic affecting your exportation of goods.
To resolve this, you’ll basically need to create more commercial, crackdown on your traffic flow to ensure trucks and lorries can reach commercial zoning with ease, or you’ll need to optimise your exporting services. Once you apply these fixes, everything should be working smoothly.
Image Credit: Cities: Skylines, Paradox Interactive
