Without a parks expansion, Fair Banks County gets a home-made nature reserve: landscaped hills, trees, a car park and a bookshop. The episode also densifies the transition blocks, adds a children's clinic, removes traffic lights at busy junctions, builds a small service area with a police station after a crime at a chicken farm, and adds slip lanes to take pressure off the highway exit.
What happens in this episode
The transition blocks from the last episode densify the area between the dense city and the rural land, with an industrial zone coming. The farmland stays marked so nothing is lost. The chicken farms look odd, with tiny lots on huge areas. The fuel plant sits by the cargo harbour on a one-lane one-way road. In Cities: Skylines II it’s as wide as a two-lane road, unlike the distinct narrow one in the first game. It’s the first one-way road I’ve used in this city apart from ramps, even though I used them constantly in the first game.
How it was built
Junction fixes
Some junctions still had traffic lights and crosswalks, which only made things harder for drivers. They’re gone now. An extra on- and off-ramp for this district is planned too.
A children’s clinic and a home-made nature reserve
Density increases slightly, and the extended elementary school gets a children’s clinic and a playground for future demand. Then the main project: without a parks expansion, I built my own nature reserve, recreating what I would have built in the first game: landscaped hills, trees and a car park. One car showed up straight away, although the road connection looked questionable. The automatic parking lots in Cities: Skylines II are great compared to the mods we needed in the first game, but this one didn’t line up, so I bulldozed it with the game paused and used a different one. Two small shops, including a bookstore, give people a reason to stop.
I’d love to build a typical North American mall district with a distinct look at some point, without mods. I’d tried a few, like Anarchy, but didn’t trust them before official mod support.
A crime at the chicken farm
A crime scene at a chicken farm, maybe someone run over by farm machinery, took the police a long time to reach. So a new police station goes in, creating a small service area. The elementary school is honestly too big; I wish there were a smaller version.
Slip lanes and the production deficit
New slip lanes let drivers leave the highway earlier. It’s not pretty, but it should take pressure off the main exit before the industry arrives. The production panel shows deficits in material goods and convenience food, plus too little grain and chicken. The existing industrial area has too many chimneys and doesn’t look industrial enough. Farming and industry, plus a proper train connection, are next. Nobody was using the reserve yet. It was raining.
Video chapters
- 00:00Recap: marked farmland and the fuel plant
- 04:29Removing crosswalks and traffic lights
- 11:51Children's clinic and a nature reserve
- 16:45Rebuilding the reserve's parking
- 20:50A crime at the chicken farm, a service area
- 32:08Slip lanes and the production deficit
Clicking a chapter starts the video above at that point.
FAQ
Can you build a nature reserve in vanilla Cities: Skylines 2?
Not as a game feature like the first game's Parklife, but you can fake one: landscape some hills, plant forest, add a small parking lot and a path. It reads as a nature reserve, even if few citizens visit at first.
Is the one-lane one-way road narrower than the two-lane?
In Cities: Skylines 2 it's about as wide as a two-lane road, unlike the first game's distinct narrow one-lane road. It still works well for industrial access.
Why remove traffic lights at highway junctions?
Lights and crosswalks on ramp junctions stop traffic for no reason. Without them, traffic flows freely — as long as pedestrians have another way across.