How To Unlock the Cathedral in Cities: Skylines

Cathedral
Cost to Build	₡500,000
Upkeep	₡2,400/week
Tourism Value	150
Entertainment Value	150
Noise Pollution	50

The Cathedral is a Landmark unique building in Cities: Skylines. Unlocking it requires you to achieve two things:

Reach the Worthy Village population milestone
Have 2,000 abandoned buildings in your city & keep it that way for 4 weeks

You can hover over the Cathedral’s silhouette in the unique building Landmarks tab to see your progress. (Once you hit 2,000 abandoned buildings, it will start counting to 4 weeks.)

Once unlocked, you can build the Cathedral for ₡500,000.

The Cathedral is a landmark available only on European maps, unless European buildings are enabled on all maps. To do this, go to Content Manager > Styles, and check the European/Vanilla style.

Note: Do not confuse the Cathedral for the “Cathedral of Plenitude”, which is a level 6 unique building that requires the construction of 30 service buildings.

Different Methods of Getting People to Leave Your City

There are various ways you can go about making your city so unbearable that 2,000 buildings get vacated.

The choice is completely up to you and how nefarious you are feeling at the moment.

But your options are:

Switching off the power (perhaps the quickest and most straightforward way)
Switching off or disconnecting their water supply and sewage treatment
Turning taxes all the way up to the maximum
Turning off all health services, including deathcare, to allow disease to spread (the buildings will be abandoned when the dead bodies are not collected)
Turning off (or cutting the budget for) the fire, police, and garbage departments, and waiting until your city is overwhelmed by fires, crime, and garbage pile ups

You can also combine several of these methods at the same time to speed things up.

With a city-wide blackout and no working sewage system, it won’t be long before this city gets deserted.

Creating a Restore Point

In order to have 2,000 abandoned buildings, you’ll need a fairly large population to begin with.

Case in point: this city that started out with 30,000 citizens didn’t quite have enough buildings to reach 2,000.

This city that started out with around 60,000 citizens was down to under 8,000 by the time the Cathedral was unlocked.

This is a very destructive unlock requirement, and it’s understandable you won’t want to subject your flourishing city to such a downfall.

The way to work around this is to create a restore point before proceeding with unlocking.

Step 1: Save your game under a filename such as “before abandoned houses” or something to make it easy to identify. Then make sure you have autosave disabled.

Step 2: Proceed with your chosen method of getting your buildings abandoned until the Cathedral is unlocked.

Step 3: Exit your ruined city without saving.

Step 4: Reload the “before” file; you should be able to build the Cathedral there.

Creating a save point before trying to unlock.

This works because once you unlock a unique building in one save, it remains unlocked across your other save files (unless you purposely reset it in the game options).

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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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How To Unlock the Cathedral in Cities: Skylines

Different Methods of Getting People to Leave Your City

Creating a Restore Point

Liz Villegas

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