Welcome to Cities: Skylines! While the bustling metropolis of your dreams is but a few hours away, you've got to crawl before you can walk, and this is what this guide is for: Giving you an idea of the absolute basics necessary to keep your city operational and ensure that you can attain a positive cash flow as soon as possible in order to fund all the other services and features that your city will need.

Do note that when I say absolute basics, I mean that as sincerely as possible - this guide will not teach you how to keep citizens educated and healthy, let alone how to create the multi-faceted economy of a megacity. This guide simply covers the first few steps that confuse many new players - ensuring that people want to live and work in your city, and keeping your cash flow in the green.

Welcome to glorious Springdale, USA!



Okay, yes, it may not look like much to begin with - just lush, pristine, untouched wilderness - but with your help it can become the basis of a bustling metropolis.

The first thing you'll need to do is get your roads set up. The most important thing to remember - ALWAYS ensure your city, district or suburb has a highway connection! Without it, citizens can't reach their new homes, industries can't receive and deliver goods, and your buildings will be little more than demonstration models. Most maps will offer you a small two-lane highway exit to trail your starting city off from, but some will offer a full highway right through the centre of the map - I prefer these, since they let you develop your city more naturally. Regardless, later on you can expand your borders and start building next to the highways, or just slice your own right through the existing area.

While I've decided to build directly onto the highway here, this is generally not a good idea - the traffic flow will result in perpetual congestion. I've just done it here to simplify the demonstration. If you must connect directly onto highways, only do so in scarcely trafficked areas, and upgrade to ramps as soon as practical.



I've decided to set up the initial streets in a basic grid formation close to a river. Note that this isn't necessarily the best way to develop your city, or even necessarily to start - I've just done it to better demonstrate certain features. In any case, this layout does the job - it provides relatively easy access to the different districts and quick access to the regional highway.



You'll get the bulk of your buildings developed automatically by zoning for different districts - residential, commercial, office and industrial. Some of these zones can be sub-zoned for different purposes later in the game, but that's not available at the moment. There are 'ploppable' buildings such as emergency services, schools and medical clinics, but you'll be placing those based on zoning anyway. So, let's get some residential housing down, as well as some industrial zoning to ensure they have jobs.



Success! Houses are starting to go up. But there's no power to the buildings, and population is still zero. What's gone wrong?

The single most important utility in your city is electricity. Without power, people won't even bother to move into your suburbs, let alone complain about them. So let's get some juice flowing.



Here we can see the electricity spread. The blue blotches indicate areas which are covered by the subterranean grid. Power will jump from building to building here, eliminating the need for power lines. Over larger distances, however, you'll need to place some cables. The vertical pillar of blue indicates my power plant - I've dropped it in my industrial district to keep all the pollution in one place.

You've got two main routes for power generation - green and fuel-dependent. Green sources, such as wind turbines, hydroelectric dams and solar power can provide better value with optimal placement, and don't produce pollution. Fuel-dependent sources, such as coal, oil and nuclear, require fuel to be imported or manufactured, and produce pollution. These facilities are much more compact, however, and can be placed virtually anywhere while producing the same amount of energy.



Success! Our power grid is fully connected and the lights are finally going on. But it seems our citizens have found something new to whine about.

Electricity is but one part of the 'holy trinity' of utilities that a city needs to function basically. The second of these is water, though more accurately this utility should be referred to as plumbing, since, well, what goes up must come down. Both these services can be covered by the same pipe network, so it's just a matter of placing the in and out points.



Water and sewage points can be placed quite close to each other to begin with, but there's one very important bugbear to remember - water flow.



NEVER place your sewage outlet upstream from a water intake!

Flow direction can be determined from the arrows in waterways. Intakes and outlets can be placed quite close together in a fast-flowing river like this one, but be careful of placing too many water pumps near the sewage outlet on a relatively still river - pumps can slowly alter the direction in which a river flows, potentially causing sewage to get sucked into the water supply.

Remember that water intakes and sewage outlets need to be powered as well - you may need to extend a second power line to your pumps.



Once you've got your intakes and outlets working, it's time to ensure these services reach the city. Unlike eletricity, pipes don't jump from building to building in developed areas, so you'll have to place your own pipes. Thankfully, these are all underground and have reasonable reach, so you won't have to hook up each building manually. Don't forget to build new pipes as you expand your districts!

Finally, everybody is happy, or at least begrudging, in living in the city. Unfortunately, our zoning seems to have reached its limits, and no more people are moving in - that's where demand comes in.



Demand is largely determined by an algorithm based on what you already have, and the extent to which you can influence it is limited - so just go with the flow and build what it tells you. In this case, if you look at the three vertical bars at the bottom of the screen, we can see there is big demand for residential and commercial zones. So let's get some set up.



It almost goes without saying, but as your city expands, so will your road network. I won't go into traffic management in this guide, because it's quite buggy and illogical at the moment and you'd need an entire index for a guide on it in any case, but generally try to expand off existing roads to minimize the number of intersections to keep your traffic flowing smoothly.



Two for one! We're finally making money, and our city has levelled up. City leveling will occur at certain population thresholds, and grants access to new service categories, as well as different city policies and the ability to expand your city limits. While the first milestone gives us quite a few important basics, we'll be focusing on just one more - the third and final utility.

Trash is a relatively late-coming utility, but equally important - without it, your citizens will complain, get sick and land value will fall. So you should place a garbage dump as soon as it becomes available.



This placement and road extension is obviously a bit unrealistic, but I'll be using it to demonstrate a minor point that needs to be considered when placing most later services - coverage. Coverage is determined by the ability to access the service by road, with further areas having more trouble reaching the building, and even further areas being unable to benefit from it at all. This may require the construction of additional facilities to provide more vehicles, or building another facility closer to that area.

Obviously there's a lot that hasn't been covered in this guide - services like schools, hospitals and emergency response, transportation management and financial planning. But hopefully, with this guide, you'll be able to deliver the basics to your city, get people moving in, and start turning a positive cash flow to starting expanding your services.



Good luck, and try not to be a tyrant!