How To Expand Your City Limits in Cities: Skylines

At the start of each game, you get a single tile of land.

Before you can buy your first additional tile, you’ll need to reach the “Worthy Village” milestone.

The required population to reach milestones can vary depending on the map.

For a lot of maps, however, ‘Worthy Village’ is unlocked at a population of 1,000.

Once you unlock the milestone, access the ‘Areas’ screen by clicking on the globe at the bottom left corner.

Now you’ll see four adjacent tiles that are available for purchase.

Clicking each of the tiles will display information about that piece of land, such as the amount of land you can build on, natural resources (fertile land, ore, oil, etc.) and existing outside connections such as rails and highways.

The popup will also show the price of that particular tile. Each tile can have a slightly different price.

Click the ‘Purchase’ button once you’ve made your choice and enjoy your larger city!

Getting All 9 Tiles

The base Cities: Skylines game, without mods, allows you to have up to 9 tiles for each game.

But just like with your first additional tile, you’ll need to reach further population milestones to keep expanding.

How To Choose Tiles Wisely

Without mods, each map gives you 25 tiles to choose from.

However, since you can only purchase 9 in total — and one at a time at that — it’s important to be strategic!

As your city grows larger, take note of the following:

• You can only buy a tile that is adjacent to one you already own.
• The more tiles you’ve bought, the more expensive additional ones are to purchase.
• Before the ‘Big Town’ milestone, which unlocks your 4th tile, you only have access to low-density residential and commercial zones. So when choosing your 2nd and 3rd tiles, it may be a good idea to prioritize the amount of suitable building space.
• Existing transport connections are an important consideration for your economy, as they allow tourists to come in and your industry to export goods.

Going Beyond 9 Tiles

Mods are available on the Steam Workshop if you want to expand even beyond the 9 tiles that the game normally allows.

A popular one is BigCity by sankai, which lets you unlock all 25 tiles on each map.

Here’s the BigCity mod page if you wanna try it out for yourself.

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Liz Villegas

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Liz is a writer and photographer with a love for building and strategy games. Her spare time is often split between lifting, reading, drawing, annoying her dog Mr. Porky Butt, and squinting at stat tables on the wiki pages of whatever game she's currently playing.

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