How to fix Death waves and Cims dying at the same time

This guide explains the reasons why huge Death waves happend, and increase in size, why they act like a domino effect that destroyes cities and how to prevent them from happening.

Why Death waves happen

Just like every other player of Cities: Skylines you have experienced the dreaded Death wave happening in your city. And then another, and then another even larger one. You city is falling apart, and it's only getting worse.


Welcome to this guide, and don't worry your city will recover!

To be able to implement the solution, and play without getting new Death waves, you should first read this part, which is about the reasons and causes behind Death waves in Cities: Skylines.

The main three components that set up and make Death waves inevitable are:
1. Each Cim age group(children, young adults and adults) come into the city at the same age, and they will all die at the same age
2. Large scale zoning and moving into of Residential areas at the same time
3. Traffic jams slowing down collection of dead bodies by hearses

(the pictures used in this guide are from my city of Bedrock in which I went from 0 to 1 million and it was only possible because of the fixes I implement to stop death waves from happening)

First cause

The first cause is totally not your fault. The developers of the game, programmed the starting age of your Cim population, when it enters your city. Every child, young adult and adults are the exact same age, in their group, and they all age at the same rate, naturally. But what isn't natural, is that all seniors, who came into the city, many years ago, at the same time, will also die at the same time, same year, same month same day. And this results, in A LOT of dead bodies, all waiting for pickup at the same time.

Second cause

The second cause was, unfortunately, your fault. Because, for there to be a large influx of new Cims, each the same age inside his group, who will later die at the same time, you have to invite them into the city, by zoning residential areas. At the start of a city, this isn't a problem, because the zones you can make, are small. But in later stages, you end up zoning larger and larger R zones, at the same time. And this invites hundreds, if not thousands, of Cims to head to your city at the same time. This just means that a certain number of years later, you will have that many Cims dying, at the same time.

Third cause

The third cause of Death waves, is in fact several combined elements, but it boils down to the inability of hearses, spawned by the cemeteries or crematoriums, to service all R buildings that have a dead body in them. This is the final stage of a Dead wave in which traffic jams, or even more simply the lack of hearses, leads to dead bodies staying in the R buildings for too long, which in turn means the abandonment of those R buildings, and spells doom for the entire city.

This is where the Domino effect comes into play.

If you would rather watch a video, then read the rest of the guide, then you can do so, by clicking on this video.

More Death waves and the Domino effect

As your city starts to suffer from repeating, and ever growing Dead waves, because you zoned larger and larger R areas as the city grew, the city starts to fall apart when Residential buildings start getting abandoned, due to dead bodies not being picked up.

And as Residential buildings become abandoned, they stop providing workers for other buildings, while they will no longer pass along electricity. This spreads the effect of a death wave, to your entire city, and Industry and Commercial buildings, start to get problems, with not having enough workers, and not selling enough goods. Which are reasons enough for them, to also go abandoned.

If an area of the map stops getting electricity passed along to it, because the buildings which did this are now abandoned, it too suffers, and can quickly become abandoned, due to power outage. This is the last stage, and the domino effect of a Death wave.


Now, lets go over to the last part of this guide, and the solution, which will prevent this, from ever happening to your city. And, even if it has happened, don't lose hope, this solution will get it back on track.

My other guides if you are interested:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1884687120

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1831101257

How to prevent and fix Death waves

The solution and prevention of Death waves can consists of up to three steps, but the number of steps, deepens on the population, and the size of the city your are fixing, or just doing prevention in, before building it.

In the Best case scenario

In case you are just starting a new city, from 0, you have the easiest job. Go to Steam workshop and subscribe to this mod: Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited 1.4.2, link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2027161563

What it does is make Death waves practically impossible, because:
1. It increases the life span of Cims by three times
2. Adds early death of Cims as a possibility, and a probability
3. Increases the likelihood of Cims getting sick and dyeing
and, most importantly:
4. Enables people with a wide range of ages to move into the city

This means that even when you create huge new Residential zones, and even ones of high density, and then populate them with new Cims, they won't all have seniors dying at the same time, setting off the first death wave.

In the Normal case scenario

Now for those of you who already have developing cities below 50,000 population, and are heading to a potential death wave, enabling this mod won't stop that first death wave. But, as you probably zoned small sections of the city at a time, and used low density zoning for the most part, you just need to make sure not to zone more large areas of the map, for about 10 more in game years.

You can even just simply dezone homes, where your seniors are the majority, brown on the population overlay, and zone new areas there, once the previous Cims are move out. Do this for 20-30% of your R zones and repopulate them, before adding completely new R zones.

In the Worst case scenario

Your city is above 100k, 200k, 300k population, and you are already suffering the effects of your first, or maybe even third dead wave. They just keep growing in size, and your city is a mess of Residential buildings with red flashing sculls above them. The streets are filled with vehicles, and hearses can't even get to buildings, so they go abandoned before your eyes.

Take a breath, save the game, and take a walk if you need to clear your head. Then come back, subscribe to the mentioned mod, and load up your city once again. Now, as this mod is not a magic wand, and it effects only new Cims, it's important to manage the city, and reduce the effects of the current death waves, before things get even worse.

Step one

First the painful part. Pause the game, click on the bulldoze tool and tare down each and every building that has a dead body in it. Then, disable the cemeteries and the crematoriums. No... I am not out of my mind, please keep reading.

Now go over to your Industry and Commercial areas, and tare down the same number of buildings in this proportion: 65% of Industry and 35% of Commercial zones to equal to the total number of Residential buildings you just tore down. This is because Commercial zones employ fewer Cims per building then Industrial zones. Unless you have Industry 2.0 district policy turned on in those Industrial areas, then use a 50/50 split.

Step two

Now, you can resume the game. Turning off the cemeteries and the crematoriums might seem counter-intuitive, but the fact is that they(hearses) are only making the traffic worse, while not doing their job. This is crisis management, and it's ultimately for the best. Once your traffic starts to clear up, your building count is down, your population numbers are down, the balance of workers and goods is leveled out, you will have a few more dead bodies pop up in the tail end of that last death wave. Turn the cemeteries and crematoriums back on, and check around the city to see if you need to add any power lines to avoid power outages.

Step three

It is the time to once again have a low number of unemployed, below 7% and this will allow of new Cims to move in. These cims, because of the mod, won't produce future death waves. But most of the Cims you already have in your city might. This is why it is crucial to unzone areas where you have empty R zones, where you bulldozed the buildings, and expand your city to new areas.

The empty spots will help reduce traffic in those areas. Same with Industry and Commercial zones. You want to develop new, healthy, zones and districts while leaving the old ones more breathing room, for the inevitable relapse of death waves, which will clean out the old type of Cims.

Eventually you won't get new dead waves, and you can rezone the empty plots of land, in those original zones, filling in the spots which stood as a memorial for your past troubles.

Bedrock at 1,000,013 population thanks to this mod and fixes used. This is a save file of that city in the Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1999109245

And that would be it. I would like to thank you for reading, and ask you to remember and add your comment and also rate this guide, because it might be of use to the next person reading it.

Happy gaming fellow mayors!

[hderoos]

Thanks this sounds logical so will follow yoirr guide

[Hallo]

2

[Spector]

@Beltneck
Thank you for sharing your ideas and experience with this! That was both funny and educational to read.

[Spector]

@kiwanji
If the mod caused it, then it will go back to normal after that spike.

If you have some other problem, like factories poisoning a water tower than you have a different situation.

[kiwanji]

I added the Lifecycle Rebalance mod and it seems to be doing the trick (although not a whole lot of in-game time has passed). However, I now notice that the total number of sick citizens has skyrocketed and the Medical Center monument is no longer able to handle all of my sick citizens. I'm not sure if this is a bad thing though. My city has 225K people and I deleted all of my hospitals and clinics when I added the Medical Center. And now the info panel shows 2,722 sick people with the 1,000 heal capacity of the Med Ctr so my Healthcare Availability is deep in the red. Should I be concerned?

[giant rat]

Elder Care centers combat death waves a little bit, because they split up that big wave of newborn people into those that get to live a long life and those that die early, thus creating 2 smaller death waves that your hearses can actually deal with.
Glad they added those to the game.

[Spector]

@pemmons1 Hi, this info is a bit old, but I haven't noticed that it has been changed in the game. "The life span of a Cim it is approximately the number 255 spread across 2 in-game years. That would mean of 104 weeks in 2 years and each week being about 2.45 units on the life meter and 1 life unit being ~ 2.85 days. Thus, given the 2-year lifespan and a max age of 255, a person gets a year older every 2.85 game days or so."

But you have to have a certain number of Cims for the death waves to become really problematic with many Cims of the same age dying at the same time. After 100k you can have death waves if you play slow, and if you play fast then at 200k and 300k.

[pemmons1]

At tow many game years should we expect the first death wave?

[Spector]

@aelahmann Only friends can be set as contributors.

[aelahmann]

Could you please attribute me for the fix?