How To Get Glass in Cities: Skylines (And What It’s For)

Glass is one type of “special goods” that’s produced by the ore industry area in the Cities: Skylines Industries expansion.

In order to manufacture glass, you’ll need:

An ore industry area
A way to supply the raw material for it (ore)
A glass manufacturing plant

Step 1: Creating the Ore Industry Area

If you don’t have an existing ore industry area, create a new one by going to the Districts and Areas menu, then selecting “Paint Industry Area”.

The Paint Industry Area brush from the Districts and Areas menu.

While this is selected, the location of your natural resources will be highlighted on the map, as well as other existing districts and industries you’ve created.

A blue-gray color on the map indicates where ore is present.

(To see your natural resources without seeing the painted districts overlay, open the Natural Resources view from the Info Views menu instead.)

Use the Paint Industry Area brush to create the area on top of your ore resources.

Next, place an Ore Industry Main Building within that area. Doing this automatically assigns the ore industry specialization to that area.

To build the Ore Industry Main Building, go to the Garbage and Industry menu, then click the Ore Industry Tab.

Note that this main building does not need to be on top of ore-rich land; save those spots for your ore mines instead.

Step 2: Acquiring Ore

To extract ore from your land’s natural resources, you need to build ore mines.

You’ll find ore mines under Extractor Buildings, in the Ore Industry tab of the Garbage and Industry menu.

Build your mine on top of your ore resources. The darker the shade of blue-gray, the more resources are present and the more productive your ore mine will be.

When placing your ore mine on the map, a tooltip will indicate how productive it will be in that particular spot.

Note that by default, ore is a non-renewable resource so it will be depleted over time.

However, the game has a built-in mod called “Unlimited Oil and Ore” that you can enable in the Content Manager.

You can easily find it by searching for ‘unlimited’ in the mods section of the content manager.

Alternatively, if your map has no ore resources—or if you simply don’t want to have mines in your city—you can skip this step and your glass manufacturing plant will automatically import the ore it needs. It will, however, mean reduced profits.

If you decide to go this route, make sure your ore industry area has easy access to highways (ideally near the city limits) or a cargo train station. This way, the trucks bringing in ore from other cities will require less travel time, and are less likely to cause a traffic problem.

Step 3: Build a Glass Manufacturing Plant

You’ll find the glass manufacturing plant under Processing Buildings in the Ore Industry tab.

The glass manufacturing plant

Place it in your ore industry area (and like the main building, you don’t need to place this on top of ore-rich terrain).

Build it close to your ore mines so that the supply trucks can deliver the ore more efficiently.

It will take a while for your ore mines (or trucks from other cities, if you’re importing) to deliver the raw material to your plant. But once they do, you’ll see the manufacturing plant begin to produce glass.

What is Glass Used For?

In the Cities: Skylines Industries supply chains, raw materials are turned into special goods, which your unique factories can turn into luxury goods to be sold in your commercial zones or exported.

As you build your specialized industry buildings, you’ll see this panel with information about the supply chains.

Glass is one of these special goods. These are the unique factories that use glass, as well as the other special goods and industries they require:

Lemonade factory: glass, crops (agriculture industry)
Electronics factory: glass, metal (ore industry), plastic (oil industry)
Car factory: glass, metal, animal products (agriculture industry), plastic
Modular house factory: glass, metal, planed timber (forestry industry), plastic
Shipyard: glass, metal, planed timber, plastic

The electronics factory requires glass, plastics, and metals.

Glass, like other special goods, may not be imported and must be produced locally.

Most of the unique factories require special goods from multiple industries, so it does take some effort to set up the supply chains for them. However, once you do get them going, these can provide a substantial boost to your city’s income.

Apart from being used to make luxury goods, glass (and other special goods) can also be exported as-is for money.

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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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