Cities: Skylines Festival Area Guide (How To Unlock + Upgrade)

Festival Area
DLC	Concerts
Building Type	Unique Building
Level/Category	Concerts
Build Cost	₡60,000
Upkeep Cost	₡400/week
Milestone Required	Tiny Town
Entertainment Value	150
Noise Pollution	100
Visitor Capacity	varies

The Festival Area is a unique building that comes with the Cities: Skylines Concerts mini-expansion.

It is the most important of the four buildings that come with the expansion, as this is where the concert gameplay mechanic plays out.

The three other unique buildings from the Concerts DLC also synergize well with it:

Building a Festival Area

Before you can make your own Festival Area, you’ll first need to reach the Tiny Town milestone (360 – 1,600 population, depending on the map).

Once you hit that milestone, you can build a Festival Area from the Concerts tab of the Unique Buildings menu.

It costs ₡60,000 to build and ₡400 a week in upkeep.

When placing the Festival Area, pay attention to the red noise radius.

Note: This is a noisy unique building (100 noise pollution), so keep it away from residences.

How Concerts Work

Once you’ve built your Festival Area, bands will start playing there.

You don’t have to do anything or change any settings to get bands to play. A concert should happen roughly every 6 months in-game, and each concert lasts about 1 month.

Animations of different performers will appear when concerts are held.

After each concert, the performer can either gain or lose popularity points.

This process seems to be random; unfortunately, as of this writing, there isn’t any official word from the game’s developers on how the popularity mechanic works.

Clicking on the Festival Area will bring up its info panel, which has info on past and upcoming concerts.

Leveling Up Your Festival Area (All Upgrades)

The festival area can be upgraded twice. For each upgrade, you’ll need:

To have held a certain number of concerts
To have at least one performer hit a certain popularity value

Here’s a full list of every Festival Area level and its requirements:

SCROLL

Level	Requirements	Cost to Build/Upgrade	Upkeep	Visitor Capacity
1	n/a	₡60,000	₡400/week	300
2	6 concerts held At least 1 band with a popularity of 70	₡90,000	₡800/week	500
3	18 concerts held At least 1 band with a popularity of 85	₡120,000	₡1600/week	1000

As concerts only happen twice a year, it will take a fairly long time to upgrade your festival area to level 3.

You can hover over the two- and three-star buttons to see your progress towards unlocking the upgrades.

The Festival Area’s in-game model also changes with each upgrade.

The Festival Area upgraded to two stars.

The Festival Area upgraded to 3 stars.

Tips for Successful Concerts

Here are a few things you can do to boost visitor turnout at your concerts, as well as to help your festival area level up faster.

Tip 1: Provide Public Transport

Have a metro station or monorail station nearby, or add a bus/tram stop right next to your festival area.

A metro station directly next to a Festival Area.

Tip 2: Spend on Advertisement Campaigns and Premium Studios

Towards the bottom of your Festival Area info panel, you’ll find two toggleable items: the advertisement campaign and premium studio.

Enabling these two options can boost your chances of concert success, but at a high weekly cost.

When active, the ad campaign will cost you ₡9,000 per week and will attract more concert-goers.

Running an ad campaign for a whole month will raise the popularity points of each band by +1.

This will allow you to gradually and consistently increase the bands’ popularity in order to level up (provided you have no problem with the hefty ₡9,000/week cost).

The premium studio, on the other hand, supposedly increases the likelihood of successful concerts by allowing bands to practice in high-quality facilities.

The premium studio will cost you ₡3,000 for each week it is active.

Tip 3: Build a Fan Zone Park

The Fan Zone Park supposedly is where fans who can’t fit into the main venue can watch the concert on large screens.

Building one increases the likelihood of a successful concert by 5%.

The fan zone park also functions as a typical unique building, providing entertainment and accommodating visitors.

The Fan Zone Park next to the Festival Area.

The Fan Zone Park, Music Club, and Media Broadcast Building can be found in the Concerts tab along with the Festival Area.

Tip 4: Build a Media Broadcast Building

The Media Broadcast Building is a unique building that makes your active ad campaigns 20% more effective.

This means it’ll take a little less than a month for your bands to go up by +1 popularity point while an ad campaign is active.

Take note that the Media Broadcast Building costs ₡800/week in upkeep.

It also functions as a regular unique building in that it has its own entertainment value and visitor capacity.

The Media Broadcast Building

Tip 5: Build a Music Club

Lastly, the Music Club increases the ticket sales of your concerts by 10%.

You’ll need to have at least 7,500 squares of commercial zoning built in order to unlock it, so it may be a little out of reach if your city is still small.

The Music Club may be worth it if you’re trying to level up your Festival Area (as it could help you towards getting one sold-out concert).

In the long run it won’t really save you money though, since concerts only happen once every 6 months, and the Music Club costs ₡480/week in upkeep.

Of course, you can also just keep the Music Club if you like it as a unique building.

The Music Club

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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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