Cities Skylines Beginner Guide: How to Start Your First City

Cities: Skylines dumps you on an empty highway with ₡70,000 and basically says "good luck." The first hour is where most new mayors quit, and it's almost never because their city looked bad. It's because the water got poisoned, the money ran out, or one road turned into a parking lot. All three of those are avoidable if you set the city up right at the start, and that's what this guide is for. Nothing here needs mods or DLC, just the base game and a little patience.

One tip before anything else: hit pause. Lay out your roads, zones, power, and water while the game is frozen, then unpause. Nothing decays and nothing costs you upkeep while time is stopped, so you can plan at your own speed instead of racing a clock.

Choosing a Starting Map and Tile

The map screen shows you a lot of useful stuff if you know what to read. Buildable percentage tells you how much land you can actually construct on. The little connection icons tell you whether the map has highway, rail, ship, and air links to the outside world. Both matter more than how pretty the map looks.

For a first city you want three things: flat land, a river with a current, and a highway running through the starting area. Flat terrain means cheap roads and no fighting hills. Moving water gives you somewhere to dump sewage and a place for water pumps. The highway is how citizens and goods arrive, so your first tile needs to touch it.

A few base game maps get recommended over and over for beginners:

• Two Rivers - mostly flat, tons of open space, and a river through the middle. The usual first pick. One catch: it's the only vanilla map with no ship connection, so no cargo harbor later. For a first city you won't miss it.
• Diamond Coast - about 69% buildable land with all four outside connections (highway, rail, sea, and air). Lots of forest, oil, and ore, but not much fertile farmland.
• Cliffside Bay - another one that shows up constantly in beginner threads. Coastal, decent space, forgiving layout.

Honestly, any of those three will treat you fine. Skip maps that are mostly mountains or islands for now. They're buildable, they're just kind of a pain while you're still learning where the buttons are.

Now the tile itself. You start with one square of land and buy more as you hit population milestones (up to nine in a normal game). Before you commit, look at where the highway enters and exits your tile, and picture your city growing along it. Also check the water direction - the game shows flow with little arrows on the surface. You need to know which way is downstream before you place a single pump, and it's a lot easier to see on the map screen than to figure out later the hard way.

One more thing worth checking: natural resources. Ore, oil, forest, and fertile land show up tinted on the map view. You don't need them for city number one, but having forest or ore a tile or two away gives you options once industry specialization unlocks.

Laying Out Your First Roads

Roads are the skeleton everything else hangs on, so a little planning here saves a lot of bulldozing later. At the start you only have a few types available, and the prices per cell look like this:

| Road | Cost per cell | Weekly upkeep | Speed | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Two-lane gravel | ₡20 | ₡0.19 | 30 km/h | | Two-lane road | ₡40 | ₡0.32 | 40 km/h | | Two-lane one-way | ₡40 | ₡0.32 | 40 km/h | | Four-lane road | ₡60 | ₡0.80 | 50 km/h | | Six-lane road | ₡80 | ₡0.96 | 60 km/h |

Start with a simple grid

The boring answer is the right one: rectangles. Blocks of two-lane road, maybe 8 to 12 cells per side, laid out next to your highway connection. Grids work because every building can reach the road, services can get anywhere fast, and you can extend the pattern in any direction when the city grows. Curvy roads look great in screenshots. Save them for city number three.

Two-lane roads are your workhorse early on. They're cheap, and intersections between two of them don't get traffic lights, so cars just flow through with a quick stop. Four-lane crossings do spawn traffic lights, which sounds like an upgrade but actually slows a small city down. Stick with two lanes until traffic tells you otherwise.

Connect to the highway the smart way

You get one shot at a first impression with the highway, and it's usually worth a short ramp road coming off it into a roundabout or a simple T. Avoid dragging a two-lane road straight into the highway with a ton of zones hanging off it. Every truck entering your city funnels through that one spot, and if it's also Main Street, you'll back traffic up onto the highway before you hit 2,000 people.

A roundabout where the highway meets your city is the classic beginner move and it works well. Later, once highway ramps unlock (at the Boom Town milestone), you can build proper slip roads and spread the load across two or three entry points.

Leave room to upgrade

Draw your grid with the upgrade tool in mind. Any road can be switched to a different type later without tearing down the whole network, though zoned buildings right on the road sometimes get demolished in the swap. Keeping a little breathing room between your grid and the highway means you can slide in a bigger road later without rebuilding half the city. Page Up and Page Down raise and lower roads while you draw, by the way, which is how you bridge a river or tunnel under something instead of routing around it.

Balancing Residential, Commercial, and Industrial Zones

Zoning is free. You paint the zone next to a road and buildings grow on their own as long as people want to live or shop there. Zones reach four cells deep from the road, so a block 8 cells wide gets fully built on both faces. That's why grid block size matters.

At the very start you only have three zone types: low-density residential, low-density commercial, and industrial. High-density and office zones unlock as your population climbs.

Reading the demand bar

Bottom right of the screen there's a three-bar meter, and it's the closest thing the game has to a tutorial. Green means people want homes, blue means they want shops, orange means they want jobs in industry or offices. When a bar fills, zone more of that type. When it empties, stop zoning it.

Don't just zone everything green forever, though. New residents need jobs, so the bars push back on each other. Zone a chunk of residential, let the orange bar climb as those people look for work, then answer it with industry. The city kind of teaches you the rhythm if you let it.

Keep industry away from homes

Industrial buildings throw off ground pollution and noise, and pollution makes people sick and lands sad. So put industry on its own side of the map, ideally downwind of where your homes will be, with commercial acting as a buffer between the two if space is tight. Commercial doesn't care much about ground pollution, so it makes a decent shock absorber.

Practical layout for city one: highway connection in the middle, industry near the highway on one side, residential a short drive away on the other, and a strip of commercial between them or at the edge of the residential area. Folks don't want to walk across the whole map for groceries, but they also don't want a lumber mill outside the bedroom window.

Rough numbers for a healthy mix

There's no magic ratio, but a first city around 1,000 to 2,000 people usually settles somewhere near this shape:

| Zone | Rough share | What it does for you | | --- | --- | --- | | Residential (low) | About half your zoned area | Tax income and population growth | | Industrial | About a third | Jobs, plus goods for your shops | | Commercial (low) | The remainder | Sells those goods, employs the less educated |

If you skip industry entirely, your shops import everything by truck, and that traffic piles onto the highway fast. Local factories mean local trucks on short trips, which is way easier on your roads. Commercial also mostly hires workers with little education early on, and fresh arrivals to your city don't have degrees yet, so it's a natural fit for a young town.

Setting Up Power, Water, and Sewage

Nothing gets built without power and water, and nothing makes people leave faster than drinking sewage. This is the section that saves your first city.

Power: turbines or coal

You start with two options, and they trade off in a way that surprises people.

| Building | Cost | Weekly upkeep | Output | Pollution | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Wind turbine | ₡6,000 | ₡80 | 0-8 MW, depends on wind | Noise only | | Coal power plant | ₡19,000 | ₡560 | A steady 40 MW | Heavy ground and noise |

Wind turbines are clean and cheap to run, but their output swings with the weather, and a turbine in a calm spot might make 2 MW instead of 8. When you pick the wind turbine, the game shows a wind map over the terrain - darker green means stronger wind. Put them on hills or open water-adjacent ground, well away from trees and houses, since they're loud.

Coal gives you a flat 40 MW for ₡19,000. Five turbines at full output would match that for ₡30,000, so coal is the cheaper buy upfront even though it costs more per week to run (₡560 vs ₡400 for those five turbines). For a first city, coal is usually the safer call: it's steady, and you can drop it far from homes so the pollution matters less. Whichever you pick, give yourself headroom, because a growing city burns through 40 MW faster than you'd think.

Power flows between buildings on its own over short distances, so you rarely need wires inside town. Power lines (₡20 per cell) are just for crossing gaps, like connecting a distant turbine to your grid. Don't wire the whole city, it's wasted money.

Water: pump upstream, drain downstream

This is the single most important placement rule in the game. Your water pumping station (₡2,500, plus ₡240 a week) sits on the shoreline and pulls in whatever is next to it. Your drain pipe (₡2,500, ₡320 a week) dumps raw sewage into that same river. Put the drain upstream of the pump and your citizens drink their own waste. They get sick, they leave, and the whole city stalls.

So: pump on the upstream side, drain on the downstream side, with real distance between them. Not next door - a good stretch of river apart. Water towers (₡3,500) are the alternative when there's no river, and they work anywhere, but only on clean ground. Never park one downwind of industry or on polluted soil, because the pollution comes right up through the water.

Later, at the Big City milestone, water treatment plants unlock. They clean about 85% of the pollution out before releasing, which buys you a lot of forgiveness.

Pipes, briefly

Water pipes run underground and carry fresh water and sewage in one network, so you don't lay two systems. They cost ₡20 per cell and buildings within 11 cells of a pipe get served. Running pipes under your roads is the normal move - you'd have to be pretty careless to overlap too much that way. One pump and one drain pipe is genuinely more capacity than a starting town needs, which becomes useful in the budget section below.

Managing Your First City Budget

You start with ₡70,000 and burn it faster than you'd believe. Roads, a power plant, water, and a couple of services later, you're staring at a shrinking number. Here's how to keep it positive.

Taxes first, always

Taxes unlock at the first milestone, Little Hamlet, which lands somewhere between roughly 120 and 500 people depending on the map. Until then you're spending pure savings, which is why the early game feels tight.

The default rate is 9% on every zone. Bump it to 11-12% right away. Citizens and businesses don't meaningfully complain in that range, and the extra few percent is real money in a small city. Push past 13-14% and hold it there too long, though, and people start protesting and moving out. The sliders go all the way to 29%; ignore that for now. A short spike to 13% is fine if you need cash for a milestone purchase, just bring it back down.

Trim the service budgets

Open the Economy panel and you'll find a budget slider for every service, from 50% to 150%. It's not linear: 50% budget buys you 25% of the service effect, and 150% only gets you 125%. Early on you have exactly one water pump, one drain, one power setup, and each is oversized for a town of 400 people. Sliding water and sewage down toward 50% saves a real chunk of weekly cash for zero visible pain. Nudge it back up as demand grows, and add a second pump rather than maxing the slider once 100% stops keeping up.

Two budget tricks worth knowing. Bumping garbage or healthcare to 101% hands you one extra truck or ambulance per building, which is usually the best value on the whole screen. And don't leave services at 150% out of habit - that last 5% of budget adds almost nothing.

Milestones, loans, and the bailout

Every population milestone pays a cash bonus. Little Hamlet and Worthy Village each hand you ₡20,000, and the numbers keep climbing from there. That's usually enough to fund your next round of services without borrowing.

If you do need more, loans exist. The first unlocks at Little Hamlet:

| Loan | Amount | Weekly payment | Total repayment | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Silver Sunset Bank | ₡20,000 | ₡403.85 over 52 weeks | ₡21,000 | | Global Credit Inc. | ₡60,000 | ₡253.85 over 260 weeks | ₡66,000 | | Pyramid Capital | ₡200,000 | ₡442.31 over 520 weeks | ₡230,000 |

You can hold three at once, and you can repay early at no penalty, which is worth doing whenever you're sitting on cash. The 60,000 loan is the sweet spot for a young city - the payments are lower than the small one per week of term, weirdly, and the lump sum funds a whole new district.

Last thing. If you drop below -₡10,000, the game offers a ₡50,000 bailout. Take it and your save is flagged as having taken a bailout, which locks you out of achievements for that city. It's a rescue, not a strategy. Between 11-12% taxes, trimmed water budgets, and letting the demand bar set your building pace, you shouldn't ever need it - a first city that grows a little slower than you planned beats one that grows fast and goes broke.