Things like harbors, power plants, and modes of transportation contribute significantly to your city’s increasing pollution in Cities Skylines. While there is no way to stop these intoxicants from ruining the environment, there are certain ways to prevent them from spreading.
Pollution is divided into three categories: air and ground pollution, water pollution, and noise pollution. In this guide, we’ll discuss the sources of each type of pollution and how best to deal with them.
How to reduce noise pollution in Cities Skylines?
Noise pollution primarily manifests through transportation like trains, buses, metros, and cars along commercial zones and leisure buildings like arcades and restaurants in Cities Skylines. Fortunately, there are a handful of things you can use to reduce noise pollution from accumulating in the city.
First and foremost, the buildings that create loud noises should be relocated away from residential and commercial areas. Furthermore, you can always create a large gap in the street to reduce the amount of accumulative noise.
Unless you are forced to do so, always relocate metro stations and bus depots a couple of blocks away from the commercial and residential zones. Additionally, always try to build parks in residential zones, as they essentially act as buffer zones to reduce pollution.
In addition to building parks, try creating a tree lane alongside the main highways and roads to reduce vehicle noise. Do note that you need to plant a significant number of trees before you see any results.
You can also plant grass instead of trees and it should work just as fine. Lastly, for highways use sound barriers to further reduce noise pollution. Sound barriers can be combined with trees to doubly decrease noise pollution.
Lastly, you can also reduce the number of vehicles on your roads as all vehicles have a noise rating. Generally, larger vehicles like trucks and trains cause more noise pollution while smaller vehicles work in the exact opposite way.
How to reduce water pollution?
Water is the source of life, and letting your citizens drink contaminated water is an open invitation to waterborne diseases, which can lead to their demise. Therefore, it is extremely important to keep the water clean and safe for drinking purposes.
Almost all buildings produce sewage that can easily be managed through water drain pipes connected to a water treatment plant.
A potential cause of water pollution is when you put your sewage upstream and water pumps downstream. As a general rule of thumb, there is no way you should ever do this – water pumps should always be placed upstream of the river and sewage on the downstream side.
Additionally, you can also use a Floating Garbage Collector that cleans any body of water it is deployed to.
How to reduce ground and air pollution in Cities Skylines?
Similar to illnesses caused by water pollution, both ground pollution and air pollution can also cause your citizens to fall victim to potential illnesses and eventual death. Ground pollution is mainly caused by industries like Ore and Oil and the use of fossil fuels which includes power stations.
As we mentioned earlier, there is hardly any way to prevent these intoxicants from spreading, but you can always relocate polluting buildings away from residential and commercial areas.
In addition to this, you can always try to move to the forestry and farming industries, as these industries cause little to no pollution compared to the dirty industries mentioned above.
The most effective way to manage ground and air pollution is to increase your education. As your education increases, your industries become higher-tech and reduce the amount of pollution they produce. This allows you to place more industries all over your city without having to worry about increasing pollution.
With the Campus DLC installed, if you build a School of Science building on a university campus, you’ll significantly reduce the amount of total pollution in your city.
Best City Skylines pollution mod
While managing pollution is a significant part of the core gameplay loop of Cities Skylines, it may prevent you from creating your perfect city. If you’d rather not deal with this problem, you can use mods that take out this mechanic entirely.
The Pollution, Death, Garbage, and Crime Remover Mod lets you turn off all or certain types of pollution from infesting your cities. You can also turn off death and crime, further simplifying the game and allowing you to focus solely on creating the perfect city.
