Icefishing Pond Unlock Guide for Cities: Skylines

Icefishing Pond
DLC	Snowfall After Dark
Building Type	Unique Building
Level/Category	Tourism & Leisure
Build Cost	₡75,000
Upkeep Cost	₡1,120/week
Milestone Required	Busy Town
Entertainment Value	100
Noise Pollution	0
Visitor Capacity	150

The Sleigh Ride is a unique building that you can build if you have the Cities: Skylines Snowfall and After Dark DLCs. To unlock it, you need to do a few things:

Play on a winter map
Have 5,000 squares of tourism specialization built
Reach the Busy Town milestone (1,200 – 5,000 population, depending on the map)

Note: The Icefishing Pond building itself is from Snowfall, but the ability to create Tourism specialization requires the After Dark DLC.

Once you reach this target, you’ll be able to build the Icefishing Pond from the Tourism & Leisure tab of the Unique Buildings menu for ₡75,000.

Until it’s unlocked, you can hover over the silhouette of the Icefishing Pond in the menu to check your progress.

The Icefishing Pond’s silhouette in the Unique Buildings menu.

All Winter Maps

Snowfall comes with the following official winter maps:

Frosty Rivers
Icy Islands
Winter Hills
Frozenshire
Snowy Coast

The winter maps from Snowfall.

You can also find user-created winter maps on the Steam Workshop.

Creating Tourism Specialization

Tourism is a district specialization that you can apply to both low- and high-density commercial zoning.

Here’s how to create it:

Step 1: Use the Paint District tool from the Districts & Areas menu to define your desired area on the map.

Paint a district.

Step 2: Go to the Commercial Specializations tab, and select Tourism. Click on your district to apply the specialization.

Apply the Tourism commercial specialization.

Step 3: Build roads as needed, then paint commercial zoning (blue).

Paint commercial zoning.

Any commercial buildings that grow within that district will specialize in tourism.

Getting Demand for Tourism Specialization

In order to count towards unlocking your Icefishing Pond, the 5,000 squares of tourism specialized commercial zoning need to be built upon (i.e., cannot be empty).

This means you’ll need to have actual demand for commercial zoning, because buildings will only grow if there’s demand for that particular zone type.

And this is actually the challenging part of the unlock, since commercial tends to demand the least amount of zoning space compared to residential and industrial.

Getting demand for commercial zone basically happens as a result of growing your city population in general. And according to the Skylines wiki, there needs to be 1 commercial worker for every 8 residents of your city.

So if you’re lacking in commercial demand, you’ll have to grow your city (create residential zones), and make sure their needs are met.

Here’s some tips to help you out:

Tip #1: Zone Low-Density Commercial

The tourism specialization can apply to both low- and high-density commercial zoning.

However, for the purposes of this unlock, you may want to stick with low-density.

Because you’re trying to cover as many squares as possible with a limited amount of demand. (High density will take fewer squares to fulfill the same demand.)

Tip #2: Ensure Plenty of Police Coverage

Tourism specialized commercial areas generate more tax than generic commercial zones.

However, the trade off is that they tend to attract more crime. Make sure you address this by providing plenty of police department coverage near your tourism zones.

Tourism zones tend to have higher crime rates, so it’s a good idea to place a police station nearby.

Tip #3: Use the Infinite Demand Mod (Optional)

Here’s an option if growing your city for this unlock is too slow for your liking, and if you don’t mind using mods to get the job done quicker.

The Infinite Demand mod, as the name implies, will make it so that there’s always full demand for all zone types. This means any zoning you create will grow buildings, making it much easier to achieve your 5,000 tourism specialized squares.

Bear in mind that using any mods will automatically disable Steam achievements.

BACK TO THE MAIN GAME Cities: Skylines Full Strategy Guide

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Cities: Skylines
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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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