How To Unlock Government Offices in Cities: Skylines

Government Offices Unique Building (Cities:Skylines)
Government Offices
Cost to Build ₡85,000
Upkeep ₡960/week
Tourism Value 100
Entertainment Value 50
Noise Pollution 20

The Government Offices are a landmark unique building in Cities: Skylines. To unlock this building, you’ll need to have an average garbage piling of 40 in your city, averaged across all buildings.

The Government Offices building in the Landmarks tab of the Unique Buildings menu. / Cities: Skylines
The Government Offices building in the Landmarks tab of the Unique Buildings menu.

This landmark is available on maps that use the European theme. In the vanilla game (no DLCs) these maps are Cliffside Bay, Foggy Hills, and Grand River.

You can check the theme of each map at the start game screen. / Cities: Skylines
You can check the theme of each map at the start game screen.

Step 1: Unlock the Unique Buildings Menu

You’ll have to reach the Worthy Village milestone before you can unlock the Unique Buildings build tab and start your progress.

This can be anywhere from 240-950 population, depending on the map.

Step 2: Deny Access to Garbage Collection Services

Next, make sure garbage isn’t being collected in your city.

If you’ve already got any garbage service buildings operating (e.g., landfill site, recycling centers), click on each of those buildings then toggle them off.

Click on each garbage service building and click the on/off toggle. / Cities: Skylines
Click on each garbage service building and click the on/off toggle.

Then it’s just a matter of waiting for the progress bar to hit 40.

Once it does, don’t forget to toggle your garbage services back on.

Hovering over the Government Offices in the build menu before it’s unlocked will show you its progress bar. / Cities: Skylines
Hovering over the Government Offices in the build menu before it’s unlocked will show you its progress bar.

Although the government offices are easy to unlock early, it is a rather expensive building to build (₡85,000). So you likely will have to wait a while to earn the money for it.

Tip: Unlock Early or Use a Throwaway City

It’s advisable to try to unlock this building very early in your gameplay, as the average garbage piling up will hit 40 very quickly in small towns. It will also be much easier to recover from any negative effects (such as some people leaving) on a small scale.

However, if you’ve already got a large population and don’t want to risk the consequences of having garbage piling up in your big city and making so many citizens unhappy, consider using a throwaway city.

This is basically a save game that you create specifically for unlocking unique buildings that require unpleasant conditions to unlock (e.g., garbage, high crime rate, etc.)

Once you unlock a unique building in one save, it will stay unlocked across all your games unless you hit the ‘Reset Unique Buildings Unlock’ button in the game options.

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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