How to Start your Dream City in Cities Skylines 2 (2024) 

Was a bit sad to see the previous attempt aborted, but wow, that decision is definitely paying off. Even without mods or props, this is looking great already. The valley was an excellent addition.

hey I mentioned this on the last video but I’m reposting in the hopes that you might see it: I used to live in Marble Hill in the Bronx. it’s a super unique neighborhood, and I definitely recommend looking up info on it, as it might help with inspiration for this build… Marble Hill is on the mainland, directly across the Harlem River from Manhattan Island… but it’s actually technically part of Manhattan (ie. It has a Manhattan zip code and city services etc). About a century ago, as the city developed to the end of the island, the Harlem River was _rerouted_ so that this neighborhood was cut off from the island proper. It’s interesting because it shows how, not only do cities respond to the terrain as they grow, the terrain itself also adjusts to the city in turn.

I feel like the upcoming "beach properties" dlc might be perfect for a montauk Inspired area

29:34 There is a major highway known as the "Corridor" (I95), running between NYC and DC, linking important historical cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore. You can create a big diamond interchange on the Northern tip of "Staten island", so you got an easy link up between the main highway and "Staten Island"s downtown along the Southern end.

the SC4 music really brings me back, sorta miss the artstyle and funny quirks that Maxis included in their games

If you want better zoning for grids, you should consider turning most of the snapping options off. Just keep angle and length

turn off snapping to guidelines when building roads and only turn it on when you need it. same with snapping to grids. it helps with making good grids. (if your grids are perfect 90s everywhere anyways lol)

I can already imagine how much greater this game will become when useful mods and assets are ported to C:S2, it already looks great in vanilla!

I like how New Dollarton is progressing. I can already see three separate areas taking shape. There’s New Dimesburg with its wharves. New Nickelsville will arise along the river and the Newpenney District will be coming in on the plateau. 👍🏻

If you decide to run a train line below that 'old bridge', it should be a single track line IMHO (one of the first tracks build perhaps ?). It could even become an dead end track in an old harbour...

When you are making the cliffs I recommend going into street view on the 495 right before the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel in NJ above the baseball field and you can see all the way down to jersey city and the buildings that sit above the cliff and how they build around it

Would LOVE to see a train line heading under the other arch of that bridge. That would be Sweet. Cheers man all the best!

He dont miss on the soundtrack. Classic 2dollar20 quality

the sims city music in the background is so nostalgic

Are you going to use some mods in the next few episodes? You could have used “Historical Start” to get instant access to rail from the start. Also, “extended road tools” would let you create quay walls round those wharfs in a jiffy!!

As a midwest resident, the train tunnel reminds me of the Ft. Pitt tunnel in Pittsburgh, where you enter into a foliaged mountain and then exit straight out over the river, skyscrapers in front of you. I'd be excited if the New Dimesburg train tunnel will turn out the same way!

I haven't really been watching your videos for long but I always really enjoy watching you do your cities. Plus it's always great to see my fellow Australian doing well =D

Ik kind of had a feeling you bit off more than you could chew on the old new dollarton. Looking forward to see how this will evolve. Good to see you back!

I can't wait for this series. I love NYC and it's history and massive robust skyline, spanning from Brooklyn to Jersey City. I think this may be one of my favorite Cities:Skylines build ever. I can't wait to see how it grows!

Love the use of some of the Simcity 4 soundtrack! ❤ So nostalgic! 😊

for road layout - a lot of main roads in the nyc area were once trails and trade routes for native americans. it’s the reason broadway doesn’t conform to the grid of manhattan. a cool way to bring some irregularity into the grid which makes some of the east coast grid patterns different from other american cities. love the new start!

I live in NYC and this series is going to be amazing! I can’t wait until you getting going on transit and particularly the subway, commuter rail, and buses. The NYC subway alone has 440 stations, not including PATH, LIRR, MNRR, Amtrak, etc. New York really is an infrastructure monster.

The valley is an awesome idea, loving how the city looks so far, excited to see how it develops 👀

"The Infrastucturist" has a solution to make piers/docks in Vanilla : Remove water, place roads on edge, then open up to water back-again.

Southern of New Jersey's downtown there is an industrial zone with big oil tankers. I think you could place your industry in that place

I heard the simcity music and it brought back a wave of nostalgia, good choice of music two dollar

You need to turn off guide lines for the zoning to work better when placing roads

wow love this new attempt!!! that arch bridge is so amazing i wish i was watching this after the series had finished so i could binge every episode, cant wait for the next ep!!

I don't think I've ever seen a cemetery as large as the one in this game. Its nutty. That bridge needs either a train line or a an old Canal through the other archway. I hope you've seen the Clifton Suspension bridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in Bristol, UK. She's a magnificent bridge across an oddly large gorge for that part of the UK.

Lmao 9:33 turn off, turn back on lol. 13:31 good old helicopter field :D Fantastic episode mate! looking forward to this series for sure!

The main focus nearly always being trains here is what I love. i love trains.

Love this series. Thank you so much for doing this, and lend inspiration.

Are you planning on adding mods and devmode down the road or are you waiting for the official mods and dlcs for detailing?

Oooh what a fantastic first episode. Can’t wait for the next one!!! 😍

It’s my birthday A true bday treat I’ve been waiting for this for a while

I turn off the road guidelines when doing a grid, because it gets a lot of angles that are almost parallel to each other but they are slightly off. If you use the 90 degrees, length and zoning square snapping for grids. And turn off the cell snapping for avenues and wider roads so they match up better.

I loved this video SO MUCH. I am VERY inspired now. I always forget to make the landscape more dynamic before building.

Loving this! Excited to see more custom content for Cities Skylines 2. Looking good so far! Can't wait for official mod support and the asset/map editor!

One tip for zoning „perfect“ grids -> turn off snap to guidelines and your problem should disappear :)

Hey TwoDollarsTwenty! In regards to how to zone certain buildings facing certain directions, I’ve found that placing the zoning along the entire grid except for two zones (along the road you don’t want the buildings to face) will allow the buildings to be created along that roadway. For example, if you want row houses facing a certain road in a 20lx6w zone, zone the inner 18 grid zones and wait for them to be built before zoning the outer two zones. This makes them face the road you want them to face. Same applies for any other building really.

17:38 "i would like to create some wars" is what i first thought you said and i was very concerned

One thing I really wish you could do is select your bridge design and then manually select the road type you wanted on it and the bridge would scale to the road, similar to how upgrading roads already works

Native NYer who used to work in North Jersey here Just wanna tell you if you follow the terrain from Jersey City to Fort Lee where the George Washington Bridge is, it gets very hilly There are cliffs all along the Jersey side Hudson River (the Palisades are a prime example) Manhattan itself used to be very hilly, as well, until they leveled a good portion of it making the grid

Loved the SimCity4 soundtrack you used.

This is good. Hamilton Street and Robin Street feel real. I like all the forks and the split collector heading to the water.

the valley and the bridge kind of feels like Toronto and the don valley parkway, would be cool if a future high way ran through there

Coney Island would definitely be a great touch! You have to assume government housing projects to the bronx. Make it really feel like home (NY)

I'm truly loving this series of videos. Thank you for sharing your talent and skill with us, it's very much appreciated.

I love this new start, can't wait to see what you have in store for us!

This rules champ. Love the before and afters!

NJ resident here - a big part of Jersey City is Liberty State Park and the dockyard, would love to see a massive waterfront park with ammenities/bike trails/skyline views in the area!

I hope we'll get a return of that condemned raised railway viaduct. It is a notable landmark of Jersey City

I love your videos! They are so chill and great to watch in the evening :)

if u close the lines when building road it will fit perfectly 90 percent of the time !

you should call your version of Staten Island, "Straten island". own it 🗽

There seems to be a pretty good selection of mods already which let you surface paint, place props, grow trees, enable anarchy etc! @Infrastructurist here on yt uses a solid selection. Worth looking at unless you are making a point of it being a vanilla build. Excited for the new city!

12:00 I hate this problem so much lol 😂. Every time I record a video for my new cities skylines 2 series, whenever I place roads in a perfectly straight line there’s always a 50% chance that the grid gets fricked up..

You should try to utilize the cliff as a natural way to have a high bridge across the water.

31:53 perhaps you could base that area off of the morris canal basin, in Jersey City. It seems to be in the same sort of place that you carved out right here, especially with it's proximity to the city center.

Since the game still does not have the "Zone on one side of road" tool, I use sidewalks to force to build on one side of the grid

I live in Harlem. Check out Hoboken and the Palisades and the Lincoln Tunnel entrance from Jersey.

using the map editor in cities skylines remastered i made tje entire state of Rhode Island

im buying the game next month. im so happy

Did you use Sim city music for this? It sure sounded like it, and it was nostalgic as heck.

All hail new dollar ton! Also, can’t wait for all the series.

The boulevard leading to the wharf in the center of the city could be split because an old train line ran down to the coast through the middle.

i think it would be good to learn to use the slope tool, it is good for when you want a nice smooth sloped road

At 10:20 you should definitely be using the slope terrain tool. Will make your life a lot easier.

There is a bridge over I-95 in Fort Lee NJ that has an older style to its design but I think it’s concrete instead of metal but it does the same thing by crossing the valley below to two neighborhoods I would check it out.

I'm still trying to "START THE GAME".... Launch it! 😂

Man, I love Simcity 4 music so much!

It seems if I turn off the road guidelines and just go based off of distance, 90 degree angle, and the grid usually my grids work better.

snap to guidelines causes the grid to break most of the time just have 90 degree and zoning cell length and turn on snap to grid then off when you measure

Great map. Love this and looking forward to the next episode!

One of my top fun facts of NYC infrastructure? The southernmost/westernmost bridge from Staten Island to NJ is the Outerbridge Crossing. Not because it’s the outermost bridge from the five boroughs (which is it) but because it’s named after this guy who was the first chairman of the PANYNJ: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenius_Harvey_Outerbridge It’s right up there with DC renaming the Washington Convention Center after the first elected (& first African American) mayor of the city… Walter E Washington.

Its wild that one doesnt start with rail onlocked. Its not that the game is building a city from medieval times and forward. All buildings are modern and thus railways would have been there before car infrastructure

I am HYPED for this series

excited to see the NEC in cs2! are you going to be building newark? rail can get interesting there

SimCity soundtrack in Cities Skylines video. Nice!

Hope your heads in the right place. I think you've done a fine job so far on NDTv3

I think the original bridge to Stratton Island would have been across that smaller section of river rather than the large span

Turning off snap to zoning cells and snap to guidelines is making getting good grids wayyy easier

think you should be using alleyways for the warfs, looks a bit overbuilt using regular city streets

Me: what happened to dollartown? Tow coins: we don't talk about dollartown 😂

me playing CS2... okayyyy soooo.... 32 hours later -- alright, now I'm ready to start

Bula from Fiji, love the map well done

Let’s hop this map is better

11:42 You can get prefect grids very consistently if you know how to. If you started the road from the one on top you would have had a perfect grid first go. Also when making perfect grids, ONLY turn on: - Snap to object - Grid length (or whatever its called) - Angle - Zoning grid (boxes 2, 3, 4 and 7) KEEP GUIDELINES ALWAYS OFF. It's 90% of why grids don't align. Only turn it on when you wanna align to a different road, but turn it off right after that mouse click. The reasons your grids aren't perfect is because they don't start at the right places. That is due to your road length snap being off. If you follow the above I guarantee you, you'll forget you ever had problems.

Hey this city is amazing already! I wanted to know how you make those before and afters!

37:20 Maybe it used to be a train line which was turned into a street.

As always, great build 😊 I do have an issue with the game and I hope you can answer my question... Every time I build an ore industry and rock mine, they run fine for a bit, then they suddenly gets abandoned and collapse... I've tried to build on flat lands, on hilly terrain and on ore deposits, nothing helps... Is that something you have experienced or is there something I have missed?

Maybe you could even make Penny-sylvania, like Pennsylvania

In the video where your officially abandoned the last New Dollarton, you thought that there should be environment points like the development points. bc that clearly didn't make the base game i think that would be a really cool dlc

two dollars plz if u dont have assets for nyc and I mean good custom assets, dont build it yet cause vanilla nyc would just not be it if yk what I mean, NYC CS2 project could be mega if its built with realistic assets and mods to accompany them

Love the sim city ish music

Great Video! Any chance of a tutorial on how to install the map? Tried following he steps on the link but the map does not show in game. Thanks

Lovely video, very inspiring!

pls add some small mods like adult trees and the one that lest you build easy the different road variants ( key , cut and fill,..)

you should rename statin island to Stanley island

Ay if you really do wanna control the aesthetic as much as it sounds like you do, have you considered trying devmode? Cuz then you really can control so much more of how your city looks. But i know you're kinda trying to go by the book and play legit it seems which i respect too