Ultimate Guide to Services: How to make more profit and grow faster in Cities Skylines

This is everything you need to know about how to use services more effectively and efficiently. You'll know how services function, what are the benefits and how much you should spend on them. It'll help beginners and veterans to be more profitable and grow faster, especially in the early game when slight mismanagement can lead to a dead city or bankruptcy.

Introduction

Services are one of the most important parts of your city. Most of your expenses will come from services and in return, your zoned areas will grow buildings that will pay you taxes-your primary source of income.

Making a profitable city means giving services that will allow you to generate more taxes than they cost. As you get more profits, you'll be able to build more roads, zone more areas, provide them with services and earn even more profit. And, that is how you grow a city.

This is why knowing how services work and optimizing them is the key to the success.

As we'll see, services rely on roads and traffic in cities skylines. So, traffic jams will result in services being blocked and eventually killing your city. Traffic/road networks/transportation is an entire topic on its own and we will not discuss it in this guide.

This guide is meant to explain the basic functioning and logic of the services. There are a few key tips and suggestions, but you are free to experiment and improve. It is not meant to be a walkthrough for a brutally efficient city. Any feedback is welcome!

Utilities: Always on!

'Utilities' term is not native to Cities Skylines, but I am borrowing it from Simcity 4 to denote some services because of their nature. Utilities are a must-have and should always be available. Almost all buildings require them and they will start complaining immediately. Zoned buildings will get abandoned very fast if you do not provide all the utilities. Conversely, overdoing them will give you no benefits. I'll classify power, water/sewage and heating(Snowfall DLC only) as utilities.

Utilities are the first priority and you can do a few things to make sure they are always available to everyone.

• Keep some cash reserve or keep loans available to ensure you can build an emergency plant to keep up with the demand, especially when you are growing.
  
• Keep utilities at 100% budget. They are most cost-efficient at 100% budget. 150% budget will give you 125% output and 50% budget will give you just 25% output. You can also use the budget headroom to suddenly increase output in case you don't have the cash for the big plant or you want to wait a bit before putting next service building.
  
• There are some policies like 'power usage' and 'water usage' which reduces the demand for related utilities, but they are never cost-efficient and as such only use them in an emergency when you want to delay putting new plants.
  
• It is heavily recommended to connect all your power grids and pipe network because you do not have access to individual supply and demand data for different grids/networks. You will not be able to check if one of the grids/networks is overproducing and another one is underproducing.

Power:

There are a variety of power plants available in the game and they are unlocked with milestones. Their cost-efficiency and the initial cost are different, so look out for them. Their pollution profiles are also different, so you can pick according to your needs.

Distribution: Power jumps from any building to the nearby buildings and you can use powerlines if your areas are separated.

Building suggestions: Initially you will have wind turbines and coal power plants. Wind turbines have a lower running cost per unit of electricity, but they cost a lot to build and the benefit of the lower running costs will not be realized till quite some time. Use coal power plants in the beginning till you get other greener and cheaper choices that you like and you're in a good financial position to absorb the initial cost. You can put coal power plants in your industrial area because they pollute a lot and need access to coal which will be imported locally or from outside the map.

Tip: Power production from a hydroelectric dam will not be stable, always save the game before you try to make a dam.

Water/Sewage:

Distribution: Water and sewage requirements are always the same and use the same water pipe network.

The biggest issue you need to look out for is contamination in the water supply. If there's water pollution near any water pumping stations or ground pollution near any water towers, your entire water supply will be contaminated. Water contamination will make your citizens sick.

Important:

Your citizens are stupid, they'll keep drinking 'poop water' till they die. Your entire city will literally die in a blink of an eye if your water source is polluted. Don't take any risk with water contamination.

Building suggestions:

For Water:
Water pumping stations are cheap and simple. They're the best as long as they don't suck in polluted water. Water towers are expensive, but safer in the sense that they can only be contaminated by ground pollution which is much more predictable.

For Sewage:
You can use a drain pipe that does not process sewage and treatment plants that reduce 85% of the pollution.

If you have appropriate DLCs, you will get 'Eco', 'Inland' and 'Eco-Inland' versions for treatment plants and drainpipes (called outlet if it is inland). Eco version reduces pollution while inland version does not release water but causes ground pollution.

I prefer water pumps because they're cheap and inland outlets because they don’t release polluted water, so my water bodies look clean and I never get water contamination.

Tip: The water flow on the map changes if you change terrain, make dams or use pumps/drains(And of course natural disasters). If you make a dam, the river might dry up as the reservoir fills up and water might flow back. Keep this in mind and have a decent margin. I recommend always saving the game before trying anything related to the dam to check if adjusted water flow levels are not a complete disaster.

Heating (Snowfall DLC):

The heating requirement depends on the temperature and this simulation aspect is added with the snowfall DLC. There are two ways of providing heating. Electricity or Steam. The steam heating uses the pipe network for distribution, but they need to be upgraded.

There are two policies which force buildings in the district to use one or the other heating solutions and 'Extra insulation' policy reduces the heating requirement, but reduces the tax collection.

Garbage and Deathcare: Don't let it rot!

Garbage:

All your buildings generate garbage. If you do not take the garbage away in a reasonable amount of time; it will start to rot, make people sick and eventually, the buildings will be abandoned. Your job is to collect all the garbage produced in the city and process it.

You can process garbage either by recycling or by burning it up for energy. Incinerators will burn the garbage for some minor energy, Recycling centres (from Green cities DLC) will recycle them and give raw materials and the Waste processing complex (from Sunset harbour DLC) will both recycle and burn them. You can also use landfills or waste transfer facilities as buffers to collect the garbage and temporarily store it.

The garbage collection happens by the garbage trucks. They need road access and are subject to traffic conditions like many services we will see. Make sure your garbage trucks are able to reach all the buildings and traffic is under control.

Tips:

• Recycling centres are generally the best way to handle garbage. They are cheap to build/run, have a lot of trucks for collection and do not produce a lot of pollution. They are available from the start and you do not need any other buildings if you just make recycling centres.
  
• Incineration plants are unlocked a little later. If you don't have recycling centres, aim to grow faster or keep enough room for multiple landfills.
  
• Waste transfer facilities do not process trash, they just collect it like a landfill. The Waste processing complex will not collect garbage from individual buildings, they will only take the collected garbage from landfills or waste transfer facility. You need to pair waste transfer facilities and waste processing complex together for proper functioning.
  
• Your garbage processing buildings will operate at lower efficiency if your trucks can't collect the garbage.
  
• You will need extra processing capacity if you want to empty your landfills.
  
• Some of the policies reduce or increase garbage production. Use them as needed. They might not be the most cost efficient way of managing garbage.
  
• Education/levelled up buildings will massively reduce garbage generation, so educate your citizens for long term garbage management.
  
• Putting a few garbage facilities together would be a good idea because the pollution would be limited to a single area. Just make sure garbage trucks reach all nearby areas. If your city is big, make multiple garbage processing/storage areas around the city so trucks don’t have to travel too much. Waste transfer facilities are an exception to this because they are intended to be placed around the city.

Deathcare:

Everybody dies. And you need to take care of their dead bodies. Deathcare is very similar to garbage. You will need to process them all in crematoriums. Unlike real life, cemeteries will not last centuries and they’re not huge. So, you will need to treat them as buffer or temporary storage, not a permanent solution.

Just like garbage collection, if you don’t take away dead bodies in reasonable time, they’ll start rotting and people will abandon the building. Dead body collection happens by hearses(cars) and they are also subject to traffic conditions.

Deathwaves: Base game has all citizens living till the same age and they come to your city as uneducated people of the same age (Don’t ask!!). That means if 10,000 people come to live in one neighbourhood in two weeks, all of them will die naturally at the same time. That is called a death wave.

Tips:

• You can check the weekly death rate from statistics from the escape menu. Based on that, you can estimate the number of crematoriums needed. A single creamatorium can easily handle 200 dead bodies a week and they have practically unlimited amount of processing capacity. The bottleneck is always transportation because crematoriums have a limited number of cars.
  
• The cemeteries act like buffers and have a lot of hearses to collect the dead bodies. You should check the number of hearses used in cemeteries to figure out if you need more or less of them. The number of cemeteries needed will vary based on your city size, death wave intensity and local traffic conditions.
  
• To avoid death waves, avoid zoning a large amount of residential at the same time.
  
• Remember to empty the cemeteries or use ‘Empty it!’ mod. A full cemetery is unusable and emptying it in the middle of a death wave will only increase the load on other services.
  
• Crematoriums are unlocked a little later, so grow faster or be ready to use more cemeteries.

Childcare and Eldercare:

Childcare and Eldercare essentially dampen the death waves by increasing birth rates and making some citizens live longer respectively. They will help buildings to level up as well. They are not necessary but can be a good addition if your budget allows.

Post office (Industries DLC):

Luxury service that acts similar to garbage collection. Post vans are sent out to collect and deliver mails. It'll help buildings level up, but you'll not get any errors if you don't have it. 'Free Wi-Fi' policy reduces the amount of mail accumulation.

Emergency Services: Sirens on!

Police stations, firestations and hospitals act as emergency services. They serve two purposes.

1. Send out emergency vehicles when needed.
   
2. Reduce the probability of an emergency arising in nearby buildings and help them level up by raising land value.

It is easy to overspend on these services and end up bankrupt, so be conservative. As long as your service buildings are not running out of cars to send and response times are reasonable (no red complaints), you are okay.

Do not worry about coverage statistics unless you want to level up buildings. Never worry about the green road indicators that show up when you try to place buildings because emergency cars will go as far as needed to cover. At the same time, if you have traffic jams, services will not be effective.

Tips:

• Smaller versions of stations are almost always more cost-efficient.
  
• Keeping the budget at 101% will add one more emergency vehicle for all buildings which can be helpful. This will apply to garbage and deathcare services as well.

Police:

• Unemployment increases the crime rate.
  
• After dark DLC adds prisons and if your police stations run out of holding capacity, you’ll need to build them.
  
• There are a few policies that slightly increase or decrease crime, but crime is almost never an issue.
  
• Recreational use can be a very good policy because the increased happiness, reduced crime and more tourists at the cost of minor increase in police expenses.

Fire:

• Each building has natural fire probability based on its nature and service buildings will not work when they’re on fire.
  
• Smoke detectors policy can be a very good way of reducing fire incidents, especially in industrial areas.
  
• If you have Natural disasters DLC, you should use fire watchtowers to avoid wildfire and use fire helicopters.
  
• If you are struggling with massive fires that keep spreading, you can disable 'fire spreading' in the menu. It can get unrealistic at times.

Healthcare:

• Contaminated water source is the most dangerous source of sickness because it will affect your entire city very fast and will kill.
  
• Ground pollution or garbage pileup will also sicken people in residential buildings and can kill.
  
• Noise pollution near residential buildings will not kill, but they will keep complaining and require ambulance visits.
  
• The usual suspects for noise pollution are proximity to very loud buildings, traffic (especially highways) and high-density commercial. You can use trees or roads with trees/noise barriers to lower noise pollution to some extent.

Education: Everyone's a genius!

Education is somewhat optional, but very important service. All zones will require education to level up. High-density commercial and office zones will require educated workers even at the first level. You will want higher-level buildings because they pay more taxes, hold more residents/jobs and generate less garbage and pollution (for industries).

Education takes the longest to take effect and they do not use any vehicles to work. So, you don't have to worry about school buses stuck in traffic. Also, do not worry about green road indicators because they are ridiculously conservative. As long as your schools have student capacity and are somewhat accessible, schools will educate the students.

There are three levels of education buildings and four levels of education levels.

Uneducated person > (Elementary schools) > Educated person
Educated person > (High schools) > Well educated person
Well educated person > (College/university) > Highly educated person.

Library randomly promotes any person a level up.

Tips :

• Some zone and zone specialization require undereducated workers. Even though overeducated will work there if needed, they will not fill those jobs first and you can face worker issues.
  
• There are two important policies for education that allow you to balance education levels. ‘Education boost’ will encourage people to go to university instead of working and ‘Schools out’ policy will discourage people from going to university. Use them district-wide to ensure your low education jobs have workers and offices have workers.
  
• Campus DLC allows you to make campuses that need a lot of students to level up. Remove all generic universities and disable university boost if you have Hadron collider monument. Education boost policy will help a lot in getting more students.

Leisure: How was your weekend?

This is arguably the most underrated service. You will never get errors to indicate lack of leisure, but giving them will increase the land value and allow you to level up faster.

There are three types of entertainment buildings.

1. Park buildings:
   These are tiny parks that you can just plop. There is not much to them. They cost you some money and they provide some entertainment. A single park is not enough to fully satisfy entertainment requirements, so you will need a few overlapping.
   
   
2. Unique buildings:
   Unique buildings are expensive to build, expensive to maintain and for some reason no one works or lives in them. So, they might look good as a skyscraper or huge building, but you won't get more population or jobs. I'd say their main purpose is the aesthetics of the city and some minor tourists. Their entertainment value is similar to park buildings, but they can have a larger radius.
   
   
3. Parks from Parklife DLC.
   These parks are very powerful because you can be very creative with them, they can be custom shapes and they have a very powerful entertainment radius, especially the zoos. Best part? You can make a lot of money from them by just putting them in the middle of the city. Pedestrians will just pay the toll to walk through them.

Tips :

• There are policies for all parks which you can use. Parklife DLC's park areas have their own individual policies. These can help you get more leisure without having to waste zoning space. So, use them in high-density areas.
  
• Parklife DLC adds park maintenance building which increases the effectiveness of all parks.

[Margaret River]

Thanks heaps for this; your obvious knowledge and the effort to compile this for our benefit is really appreciated.

[sevenfourslide]

I just read the sewage bit, you could add how you could, if you want, kind of cheat the game by using a canal system and a ton of water treatment plants or even drain pipes with about 3x as many water pumping stations downstream with their own separate pipe systems so the pumps pick up all of the contaminated water in the canals so it never reaches the ocean, and doesn't flood. Flood walls are also useful just in case stuff explodes or something

[罗小布OvO]

very good,thank you！

[BoigasBurgers]

Very informative, thank you!

[mgsgt2001]

Excellent information...Mr. Noob (me) thanks you!