The long-awaited Cities Skylines 2 brings with it an entirely new league of realistic and immersive city-building, as well as an abundant variety of environmental elements to incorporate and contend with.
As you build your dream metropolis, you of course need to pay attention to what can directly affect its safety and livelihood, namely the weather. It can procure Natural Disasters, which can literally uproot your progress if you’re not careful.
If you’re wondering what all you can face, here is our handy guide for all Cities Skylines 2 Natural Disasters and how to prepare for them.
All Natural Disasters in City Skylines 2
So far, there are 3 main different types of natural disasters in Cities Skylines 2 that can and likely will occur fairly regularly in the vicinity of your city. They each function differently with various environmental consequences that can devastate your hand-constructed utopia if you’re not well-prepared. Thankfully, there are effective ways to handle each of them, to help mitigate the odds of losing what you’ve built.
Also note that you don’t have to contend with these natural disasters if you don’t want to. When starting a brand new city with new save file, there is a toggle option to disable natural disasters, so that they’ll never occur at any point.
It’s located right below Theme selection and the “Left-Hand Traffic” option. However, be advised that if you leave it selected during this intro menu, you won’t be able to turn them off later.
Tornadoes
Tornadoes are hands down the biggest and most devastating of the game’s natural disasters, as there’s obviously not really any way to combat them. Rather, it’s about having sanctuary in the form of underground Emergency Shelters.
In the event of an incoming tornado, your city’s citizens can escape to safety in these shelters to wait out the storm, though the infrastructure damage to buildings and cars is inevitable.
Once the tornado has passed, you can focus on rebuilding the damaged areas as quickly as possible, so that your citizens can stay and have somewhere to live and work.
Forest Fires
You’ll notice as you build your dream city that there are wild forests on the horizon, sometimes in almost every direction depending on your locale. Unfortunately, this beautiful scenery is prone to another natural disaster: Forest Fires.
Most often triggered during hot, dry weather, they typically start in one small area, which you can spot thanks to an animated fire symbol that will pop up on your screen to denote the location.
If left unchecked, they’ll spread not only across entire forests, but into your city and potentially burn buildings and homes down. This obviously puts any citizens in the vicinity at huge risk as well.
To help prevent and mitigate any damage, you’ll need to construct Fire Watch Towers on the outskirts of your city along any tree lines, as well as Firefighting Departments in close enough proximity to quickly reach the fires and put them out.
Hailstorm
The last major natural disaster to contend with is Hailstorms. Predictably, these most often occur during colder periods of weather, and like Tornadoes there isn’t really anything you can do to prevent them.
Rather, it’s about staying safe and sheltered until it passes, and as long as citizens are indoors in their homes, that’s all you need to immediately worry about. Especially because the hail can and will likely freeze some roads, which will lead to traffic accidents.
Afterward, you can use your allocated resources and funds to help fix damaged buildings as soon as possible.
That concludes our guide to all Cities Skylines 2 natural disasters and how to prepare for them. We hope you found this helpful, and let us know how if you prefer to have the natural disaster element in your game or not.
Be sure to check out all of our other guides for Cities Skylines 2, as well as our official review of the game.
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