“I find a cul-de-sac and install multiple cemeteries”

Pip gives the city a name, as well as some peace and quiet

I blanketupgrade every single road in the main town

Idon’t really remember how to play Cities: Skylines, much less how to make a functional city with a vaguely healthy economy. But I did just install a whale from the Steam Workshop, so there will be at least one element I understand. (I do not understand where the whale will live yet.) Figuring all of that out can wait though, because Andy’s version of leaving the city in profit involves a $34,000 deficit. My initial inspection of the city also reveals that at least one building is on fire, and several buildings appear to be accumulating dead folk.

I plonk an emergency cemetery into the first chunk of available space I see and throw down a few fire stations to bring the fire hazard rating for swathes of the city back into a safe range.

I find myself doing similar crisis-management for all the city’s rating systems. It’s pretty straightforward for the first few, but noise pollution seems to be a huge problem. I blanket-upgrade every single road in the main town hub to ones lined with trees to dampen the noise of traffic. The impact is nowhere near what I’d hoped, though. I’ve also destroyed whatever one-way systems Andy and Phil might have set up.

Speaking of problems inherited from the last two governments, neither of my predecessors seem to have gotten round to naming the city. I christen the metropolis ‘Pipville’. This also doesn’t solve the noise pollution problem, so I try creating tunnels for the most congested routes; underground no one can hear you beep. I end up with one tunnel and one entirely missing segment of road which I accidentally upgraded into not existing.

It’s at this point I lose my temper. You know what’s noisy? Living people. You know what’s really quiet? A necropolis.

I find a cul-de-sac and install multiple graveyards. It is blissfully quiet. I can feel the stresses of the city ebbing away as I pick out new trees and bushes from the Steam Workshop to decorate Pipville’s necropolis. Soon, lovely hibiscus bushes and cherry blossom trees are hugging the graveyards.

Then I remember the whale. I mod the game to allow props and put a whale at the entrance of the necropolis. While adding additional whales (for company, of course) I notice their bodies hug the terrain. That means when I place them on the lip of a nearby crater they bend around the slope and look like they’re crawling out of the ground.

It’s a glorious diorama—a mysterious necropolis next to an equally mysterious whale-spewing crater. In case the next player somehow misses ‘Necropowhale Zone’, I also leave a trail of whales going from the crater to the edge of the city.

With my remaining months in power I build a canal in an attempt to fill the bottom of the whale crater with water. Ignoring the multiple instances of massive flooding across the city, this is a resounding success. I end my rule in profit by making taxes 10% across the board and hit save. Good luck making sense of any of this, Samuel!