Cities: Skylines Lazaret Plaza Unlock Guide (Get Health Below 20%)

Lazaret Plaza Details
Cost	₡17,500
Upkeep	₡192/week
Entertainment Value	80
Tourism Value	50
Noise Pollution	25

To unlock Lazaret Plaza, you need your citizen health rating to be below 20% for at least three weeks, and you’ll need to have reached the “Worthy Village” milestone (this happens around 500 population). Lazaret Plaza is located in tier 1 of the unique buildings category.

To achieve less than 20% citizen health, you’ll need to:

Disable/bulldoze medical facilities and crematoriums/graveyards
Pump polluted water into your city’s water supply
And place industrial zones or other buildings that pollute the ground next to your residential areas

But with that said, we’ll cover more details below on the best way to jeopardize your citizens’ health for the sake of a park.

Lazaret Plaza is found in the Level 1 tab of the Unique Buildings menu.

Best Method: Creating a Throwaway City

Without using mods, the most risk-free way to unlock Lazaret Plaza is by using a throwaway city. This basically means a save file that you don’t care about, made specifically for unlocking buildings.

This works because once you unlock a building in one save file, that building remains unlocked for the rest of your files.

Using a throwaway city allows you to go through the more unsavory paths towards unlocking certain buildings, without ruining your “good” playthroughs that you’ve put plenty of care into.

Start a small town as you would with any other game. Any map will do, but the river running through the middle of your starting square in Grand River makes this very easy.

Do not build a medical clinic upon unlocking the “Little Hamlet” milestone.

Keep growing your city until you reach the “Worthy Village” milestone, which unlocks the Unique Buildings build menu.

You’ll need to hit the Worthy Village milestone to unlock the Unique Buildings menu.

Next Step: Contaminating the Water Supply

So now you’ve got a nice little town started. Even without a medical clinic, a fresh new town will typically have its average health at around 50% or higher.

You can check their current health by clicking the heart icon on the info views panel.

There are several ways for the citizen health level to drop, such as:

Contaminated water
Malfunctioning sewage system
Ground pollution
Noise pollution

Of these, by far the most straightforward way of tanking that health rating down to below 20% is by contaminating their drinking water.

This basically means moving your water source to somewhere polluted.

Note that you will incur costs for moving facilities.

If your town gets its water supply from a water pumping station, move it so that it’s downstream of a wastewater drainage pipe.

Select your pumping station and click Relocate Building.

Place your pumping station downstream of the wastewater drain pipe.

On the other hand, if your town gets its water from one or more water towers, move that onto land that is polluted by nearby generic industry zones, garbage facilities, or coal or oil power plants.

Placing a water tower anywhere the ground is this ashy brown color will also contaminate the water.

Not long after you’ve done this, you’ll start getting notifications about people getting sick because of their contaminated water supply.

In a small city, you can expect the average health percentage to drop rapidly.

Keep track of how low the average health has gotten in the Health view. Once it dips below 20% (and it will, before long), open the Unique Buildings Level 1 menu and hover over the Lazaret Building.

You’ll see a progress bar letting you know how many weeks more to go.

And before long, you’ll have unlocked the Lazaret Plaza.

And you only gave several hundred people horrible diarrhea to get it!

How To Save The City

Now that you’ve unlocked Lazaret Plaza, you don’t really have a need for this throwaway city anymore.

But let’s say for one reason or another you want to keep that playthrough — perhaps you like the way you’d built it, or you want the challenge of building a flourishing city after such a rocky start.

The good news is that early in the game, it’s still quite salvageable.

The important thing is to immediately stop the water contamination as soon as you’re done with the required 3 weeks.

Move your water pumping station or water tower back to somewhere clean. Even doing just that will immediately resolve a lot of the sick citizen notifications.

Next, build a medical clinic to take care of your sick patients.

Expect a flurry of ambulances bringing patients to the clinic as they try to cope with the high number of ill people.

Each medical clinic only has 8 ambulances, but some of your citizens will be able to walk to the clinic on their own.

If the clinic is overwhelmed and there are still a lot of sick people notifications, build another one if you can afford it. You can turn it off later (to avoid upkeep costs) or relocate it to a different part of the city.

Health view will tell you the total number of sick patients and the healing capacity of all your medical facilities combined.

Before long you should see your town slowly start to recover financially and in terms of population.

What Happens If You Do This in a Good City?

Earlier we mentioned that using a throwaway city for this unlock is the most risk-free way to do it.

So you might be wondering:

What exactly are the risks of doing this in one of your good cities that you’ve been building for a while?

We present as a cautionary tale the prosperous city of Pemberley. Population 56,000 and climbing; economy consistently making a nice profit.

Adequate healthcare facilities keeps the average health comfortably above 70%.

As it’s a decently sized city, it produces a large amount of sewage, so the water where it drains out is quite polluted.

This is despite using some of the more eco-friendly water treatment options from the Green Cities DLC.

We moved several of the city’s water pumping stations downstream of it.

Sorry, citizens of Pemberley.

Within a matter of weeks, citizens were getting ill or dying from the water contamination. Still, the city’s health facilities managed to keep the average health from dipping drastically.

So we turned off the medical buildings.

The citizens are understandably upset. Trust us, doing this will feel bad.

People started abandoning the city en masse.

The demand for all zone types (residential, commercial, and industrial) went down to zero.

After all, who would want to live or work in such a city?

The economy was in shambles, losing tens of thousands every week.

By the time the city neared 20% health, it was about 6 in-game months later. Around 35,000 citizens had either left the horrible city or passed away.

Bottom line: unless you really feel like running the risk of an apocalyptic scenario (and feeling like a monster), unlock Lazaret Plaza by creating a throwaway save instead.

BACK TO THE MAIN GAME Cities: Skylines Full Strategy Guide

Guide Navigation

Cities: Skylines
- Cities: Skylines Lazaret Plaza Unlock Guide (Get Health Below 20%)

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 →