Winter Market Unlock Guide (Cities: Skylines)

Winter Market
DLC	none
Building Type	Unique Building
Level/Category	Landmark
Build Cost	₡150,000
Upkeep Cost	₡1,000/week
Milestone Required	Worthy Village
Entertainment Value	70
Noise Pollution	0
Visitor Capacity	300

The Winter Market is a Landmark unique building in Cities: Skylines. To unlock it, you just have to reach a population of 4,400 (or more).

This building also technically requires the Worthy Village milestone (240-950 population, depending on the map). But since you’ll naturally pass by that on your way to 4,400 population, it’s not really a requirement to worry about.

So once that population target is reached, you’ll be able to build the Winter Market from the Landmarks tab of the Unique Buildings menu for ₡150,000.

Note: By default, the Winter Market is only available on European themed maps. However, you can enable it on all maps by going to Content Manager > Styles, and enabling the “European/Vanilla” style.

Reaching Your First 4,400 Citizens

If you’re new to the game and are struggling to reach 4,400 without your city collapsing or going bankrupt, here are a few tips that can help!

Tip #1: Start Small

At the start of the game, be conservative when it comes to building and zoning.

Don’t build long stretches of road that span your entire first tile!

Upkeep for utilities like roads and power lines can really add up, and early in the game you don’t really have the tax income to sustain much.

So build only a few blocks at a time, and try to spend only as much as you really need on city service buildings.

Tip #2: Reduce Your Budget

You can also save money by going to the Budget tab of your Economy panel, and turning the sliders for the various services all the way down.

The budget for each service directly affects how effective it is (e.g., how much power is produced by a power facility, or how many garbage trucks a landfill sends out).

At the start of the game when your population is tiny, you likely won’t need these services at full efficiency, so you can safely reduce the budget.

You can use the sliders in the Budget tab of the Economy panel to reduce your spending.

Simply turn the budget back up gradually if you see the need for it (such as if you’re not getting enough power from your plant).

Tip #3: Zone a Little at a Time, and According to Demand

Pay attention to which type of zoning there’s demand for, as indicated by your demand bars.

Neglecting your zoning demands not only slows down your city’s growth, but can also lead to issues.

The zoning demand bars: green for residential, blue for commercial, and orange for industrial/office.

For example, if you zone a lot of industry or commercial then fail to fulfill a demand for residential, your new industrial buildings might run into the problem of not enough workers.

And then your industrial and commercial buildings can end up being abandoned if they are understaffed for too long.

So tldr:

Zone only a few blocks at a time, that way you can more easily observe and respond to demand.

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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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