Growables vs. Ploppables in Cities: Skylines (Basic Guide)

The buildings in your cities appear in one of two ways: as growables or ploppables.

Growable buildings rise from your zoned land. While ploppable buildings are those that you manually place from the various build menus.

Let’s look at the different building types that fall into either categories, as well as some exceptions.

Growables: Your RICO Zones

Without the use of mods or the Industries DLC, all your RICO—residential, industrial, commercial, and office buildings—are going to be growable.

These buildings pay taxes, making up the bulk of your city’s income.

To have these in your city, you need to paint zones on the grids that appear along the roads. They will take some time to appear.

Zoning offices in a block.

Buildings will only grow in your zones if there is demand for them.

The demand bars. The green bars indicate demand for residential, blue for commercial, and orange for either industry or offices.

The appearance of each growable building is selected randomly among the game’s assets for each type of zoning. For example, low-density residential zoning will grow a variety of smaller homes, whereas your office zoning will grow taller buildings.

You can download additional building assets that you like from the Steam Workshop, so that they may grow randomly in your city when you zone the appropriate type.

Ploppables: Your Service Buildings, Parks, and Unique Buildings

Ploppable buildings are ones that you place manually from the various building menus.

Ploppables are ones you place manually from the various building menus.

Among the different ploppable buildings in the game are:

Service buildings (schools, fire department, police department, healthcare)
Parks and plazas
Unique buildings
Monuments

Each building has a specific purpose, and usually comes with a build cost.

And in contrast with your growable buildings which earn you tax money, ploppable buildings will usually cost you money to maintain.

Hovering over each ploppable building in the menu will tell you its function, as well as how much it will cost you to build and maintain.

Each of these buildings has a fixed appearance.

Service buildings like schools, fire department buildings, etc., can appear as their “vanilla” and European versions, depending on the map you’re on. These function in the exact same way; the difference is purely aesthetic.

You can also download various ploppables—such as a wide variety of parks and leisure establishments, and city service buildings—from the Steam Workshop. Each building has its own set of stats, as well as build and upkeep costs.

Ploppable Industry Buildings (Industries DLC)

If you have the Industries DLC, you can create four types of industry areas—farm, forestry, ore, and oil—that use ploppable buildings.

These ploppable industry buildings also have an upkeep cost, but can also generate a significant amount of income as they extract natural resources from your land and turn it into sellable goods.

A row of crop fields, an example of ploppable industry buildings from the Industries DLC.

Ploppable RICO Buildings On the Steam Workshop

As you browse for ploppable and growable assets on the Cities: Skylines Steam Workshop, you might encounter various assets that have “Ploppable RICO” in their description.

These particular RICO assets are made to work with mods that allow you to manually plop these buildings, yet have them function as their zoned counterparts.

However, be aware that many users of these mods have reported various bugs due to incompatibility issues with DLCs.

Ploppable RICO is the most well-known of these mods; at the time of this writing (version 1.15.0-f7; Plazas and Promenades) it has not been updated since 2018.

BACK TO THE MAIN GAME Cities: Skylines Full Strategy Guide

Guide Navigation

Cities: Skylines
- Growables vs. Ploppables in Cities: Skylines (Basic Guide)

Liz Villegas

174 articles

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.

View Writer's Posts →