One of the most important things to focus on in Cities Skylines 2 is the happiness of your population. If they’re not happy, it means that you’re not doing a good job in one way or another, one of which is likely the quality of the air in the city.
If you’re struggling to keep your city clean, here’s how to remove air pollution in Cities Skylines 2.
How Do You Get Rid of Air Pollution in Cities Skylines 2?
Air pollution comes from the power plants that you build, with the fossil fuel power plants being the worst of the bunch. If you’re able to, try to focus on building some of the more green energy options, just be aware of some of their limitations. For example, you can only generate power from a wind turbine if the weather is windy enough, so that’s going to depend on the size and sprawl of your city.
When it comes down to getting rid of air pollution in Cities Skylines 2, you’re not just going to be able to build something that cleans up the air for you. Instead, you’re going to have to change up your city’s layout to quell the complaints from the population. When you go to place a power plant that’ll pollute the air, the game displays arrows in the direction of the air flow to show you whether that plant will be blowing its pollution straight at your city.
If you’re going to use the dirtier forms of power, you’ve got to pay attention to where that smog is going. You want to try to build them downwind of your residential areas, otherwise all of the smoke is going to crowd around people’s homes and get them sick. Try to build these power plants far enough away where they aren’t going to be covering the city in a blanket of smog, but not so far that you can’t power anything.
How Do You Know if Your City Is Polluted?
You’ll be able to know whether or not the pollution in your city is a problem based on what the people are saying about the place. The game’s form of Twitter — Chirper — is your main medium of communication with your city’s population, so be sure to pay attention to the popups that you get from different residents to see what needs to be fixed.
Having too much air pollution will also begin to compound in your city’s medical system. People will start getting sick from the poor air quality and will need to go to the hospital. If you don’t have a good enough healthcare system in the city, not only are you going to start hearing about it on Chirper, but you’ll find that you need to build a cemetery right near that power plant for the people who didn’t make it.
It becomes easier to deal with air pollution once you’ve got your city spread wider and farther out. At that point, you’re going to have better options for where to put your power plants and better places to zone residential areas so that they’re not being bombarded with poor air quality. Having more space to choose from allows you to keep the locations of things like power plants in mind when developing your build plans.
That’s all there is to managing the air pollution in Cities Skylines 2. There are a lot of factors to try to keep in mind, so be sure to save your game every now and again in case you need to go back and fix something. If you need more guides like how to rotate buildings, be sure to check back here.