Sometimes, when playing Cities Skylines 2, everyone will start dying. Seemingly out of nowhere, a death wave will strike citizens throughout your town, and once it gets going, things spiral quickly. Fortunately, there is a way to pull out of this mess, but you’ll have to act fast before the dying gets out of control.
Why are all my citizens dying in Cities Skylines 2?
There are a few things that can cause everyone to start dying in Cities Skylines 2:
- Garbage buildup
- Sewage backup
- Spending too much time near dead bodies
- Lack of medical coverage
- Loss of power
- Old age
As your city grows, it’ll need garbage haulers, more sewer treatment, and enough medical facilities to cover everyone. It’s easy to let one of these fall by the wayside by accident and not notice until a few citizens have already died. Unfortunately, this can create a death spiral like this:
- Garbage or sewage buildup causes overall health to drop, killing several citizens.
- Bad traffic or facility placement means it takes a while to pick up the corpse.
- Citizens get sick from being around the corpse and then die.
- More corpses make more people get sick and repeat.
The above cycle can quickly cause your already flawed health system to become completely overwhelmed, and you can (legitimately) do nothing but try to fix the issue that initially started the incident and let it run its course.
How to stop mass deaths in Cities Skylines 2
The best way to stop a death spiral in Cities Skylines 2 is to avoid it entirely. Here are a few preemptive measures you can take to prevent mass deaths in your town:
Build a cemetery early
Make sure you build a cemetery with good road access near your residential area as soon as it unlocks. That way, you’ll be ready for the inevitable.
Ensure uninterrupted water and power supplies
Expand power and water services as your city grows. You’ll be able to develop a decent-sized town with your initial plants, but the need for electricity, fresh water, and drainage will grow exponentially as your population expands.
Create public service districts
Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to make sure health services sticks to the area they’re meant to service in CS2. You can assign public services to a particular district, preventing a hospital clear across town from trying to dispatch an ambulance to a house directly next to a clinic. Now, your citizens don’t have to sit and die waiting for help to arrive.
Manage traffic before it gets out of control
You’ll also want to ensure you’re upgrading your road system as your city grows. Those two and four-lane roads you start with aren’t going to cut it forever. Keep an eye out for problem intersections and busy thoroughfares. These should be fixed ASAP, as one nasty stretch of road can cause turmoil throughout your town.
Ride it out
Even if you do everything right, you might find yourself a victim of a particularly tricky death wave in Cities Skylines 2. Sometimes, a good chunk of your first wave of immigrants will arrive at roughly the same age. As they grow older, they’ll start dying of natural causes around the same time. So, through no fault of your own, you’ll start to see bodies start to pile up despite your town being a happy and healthy place. If this is the case, your only choice is to ride it out. Fortunately, this should only happen once. The ages of the citizens born in your town should be random enough that you won’t get another wave.
Your last resort when facing a death wave in Cities Skylines 2 (or your first if you aren’t particularly bothered by a little gameplay mechanic abuse) is to bulldoze down every location containing a corpse. You’ll make some of your citizens mad in the long run, but you can potentially avoid a health catastrophe this way.
