Space Elevator Monument Unlock Guide (Cities: Skylines)

The Space Elevator is a monument that you can build in Cities: Skylines.

To unlock the Space Elevator, you need to complete all of these tasks:

• Unlock and construct 6 specific unique buildings: Statue of Wealth, Transport Tower, Grand Mall, Opera House, Expo Center, and Stadium.
• Reach the Megalopolis milestone
• Unlock all 9 map tiles

Once those buildings are unlocked and built, you will be able to build the Space Elevator from the Monuments menu for ₡1,500,000.

And the great thing about unlocking the Space Elevator is that the unlock paths for the 6 buildings generally just require good city management and development (unlike other unique buildings that require detrimental situations!)

What Are Monuments?

Monuments are late-game buildings that can take a long time to unlock, as each one requires a particular set of 6 unique buildings (one from each of the 6 levels) to be unlocked and built beforehand.

Each monument also has a unique city-wide benefit.

The Space Elevator’s benefit is that it will increase the number of tourists that flock to your city.

Unlocking: Statue of Wealth

To unlock the Statue of Wealth, you’ll need to have ₡500,000 in your bank account.

Most likely, you’ll just accumulate this cash over the course of playing the game unless your city struggles to maintain a positive weekly income.

However if that’s the case, here are two things you should try:

Tip #1: Raise Your Taxes

By default, tax rates for all zones (residential, industrial, commercial, and office) are set to 9%.

As long as your citizens are happy with their access to utilities, city services, and leisure, you’re usually safe to raise taxes up to 12%.

Tip #2: Lower Budgets for Services in the Early Game

Early in the game, your city income is quite small, and so is the capacity required for services.

Oftentimes the first power and water facilities you build will produce way more than your city currently needs.

The productivity of these facilities is directly connected to the weekly budget for each service.

This means, for example, if your facilities are currently producing more electricity than your city needs, you can drop the budget temporarily below 100% to cut down on weekly spending.

Unlocking: Transport Tower

To unlock the Transport Tower, you’ll need to have 1,000 public transport passengers in a week.

Tip #1: Use Metros

Buses are the first mass transport option you unlock.

However, as each bus only carries a maximum of 30 people, you’ll need lots of buses and bus lines to achieve the 1,000 weekly target.

Instead it might be worth it to wait until you can unlock and afford metros, which transport much larger numbers of people at a time.

Unlike buses, metros do not contribute to road traffic and instead can help reduce it.

Tip #2: Enact the Free Public Transport policy

If you go to the City Planning tab of your Policies panel, you’ll see the “Free Public Transport” policy.

You’ll lose out on some income, but it will help encourage more people to take your public transport.

Unlocking: Grand Mall

Unlocking the Grand Mall only requires you to build an Airport – this costs ₡150,000.

Although level 3 unique buildings usually only require the Boom Town milestone, you’ll need to reach Metropolis in order to unlock the airport in the base game.

Option 1: Placing the vanilla airport

Step 1: Go to the Transport menu and click on the Air Transport tab

Step 2: Find a large, flat area to build on.

Step 3: Place the airport.

Step 4: Connect it to your road network, power grid, and water pipes.

Option 2: Airports DLC

If you have the Airports DLC, you have the option of creating an airport area instead (our Grand Mall guide has the steps for making a basic functioning airport area).

This can be built much earlier in the game, as airport areas are unlocked at the Boom Town milestone.

Unlocking: Opera House

To unlock the Opera House, you’ll need to extract a total of 3,000 units of natural resources.

In the base game, this is accomplished by zoning the specialized industry that corresponds to the natural resource in that area.

Step 1: Find out what natural resources your map has by going to the Resources view in the info views panel.

• Light green – fertile land (farming)
• Dark green – forestry
• Light bluish grey – ore
• Dark grey to black – oil

Step 2: Go to Districts and Areas, select the Paint District tool, and paint over the resource-rich land you want to build on.

Step 3: Go to the Industrial Specializations tab. Select the industry type that corresponds to the natural resource you want to extract.

Step 4: Click on the district again to apply the specialization.

Step 5: Build roads within the district and paint industrial zoning (yellow).

Any industrial buildings that grow within that zone will be specialized, and will extract that resource.

Unlocking: Expo Center

To unlock the Expo Center, you’ll need to have 2,000 tourists come into your city. Here’s a couple tips to help you reach this goal quickly:

Tip #1: Give them reasons to come and visit

Tourists come into a city for the following reasons:

• Unique buildings
• Monuments
• Parks & plazas
• Park areas (Parklife DLC)
• Commercial zones (where they spend money like citizens would)

Although many unique buildings can be expensive and difficult to unlock, there are more affordable and accessible options.

Have a look at the Level 1 and 2 tabs to see if there are unique buildings you can easily build without breaking the bank.

Tip #2: Boost your outside connections

Initially, tourists will need to drive into your city individually to visit.

However, once you unlock your intercity transport options, tourists can start arriving in larger groups.

Your first available option is the Intercity Bus, which is unlocked at the Big Town milestone.

Later in the game, trains, cruise ships and airports can bring tourists in even greater numbers.

Unlocking: Stadium

To unlock the Stadium, your city will need to produce 1,000 units of goods.

In the game, goods are produced by:

• Generic and specialized industry (base game)
• Industry areas and factories (Industries DLC)
• Fishing areas (Sunset Harbor DLC)
• IT Cluster (Green Cities DLC)

Your city will need at least some industry to supply your commercial buildings.

This means the 1,000 unit target is something you’ll accomplish over time just by playing the game as you normally would.

You can check your progress by hovering over the Stadium’s silhouette in the Unique Buildings menu.

Reaching the Megalopolis Milestone

All monuments can only be built once you’ve reached the Megalopolis milestone.

Depending on the map, this can be anywhere from 20,000 to 90,000 citizens. Usually the more buildable land a map has, the greater the required number of citizens per milestone.

Unlocking 9 Tiles

Without mods, the game starts with a single tile and allows you to expand to 9.

You unlock each of the 8 remaining tiles at different milestones:

Each time you hit one of these milestones, you can choose a new tile to purchase by going to the Areas panel.

Note: You may only purchase a tile that is adjacent to any of the ones you already own.

Each succeeding tile is also more expensive than the previous one.

Tile prices can also vary depending on the map and the amount of buildable land.

General Tips for Unlocking the Space Elevator

Tip #1: The Airport helps unlock the Transport Tower and Expo Center

Unless you really want to build the Transport Tower early, you can delay trying to unlock it until you’ve built either an airport or airport area for the Grand Mall.

That’s because airports can massively boost your weekly passenger count.

And since a lot of the people coming in from outside the city are tourists, this will also help you towards unlocking the Expo Center.

Tip #2: Mind the upkeep costs

The unique buildings required for the Space Elevator are quite attractive ones, but are rather expensive in terms of weekly upkeep.

The Stadium alone will set you back ₡4,000 per week!

Make sure you can afford the weekly expense before you build them.

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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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