When players of Cities: Skylines reach the Boom Town milestone, they unlock several advanced healthcare facilities. While the medical clinic from the Little Hamlet milestone can handle general healthcare needs, the game also tracks elder care, childcare, and death care.
Death care is specifically about what happens to citizens after they die. Citizens in Cities: Skylines live an average of six in-game years, though this number can go up or down depending on the state of healthcare. Still, every citizen will pass away eventually, and players will need to use death care buildings to handle what comes next.
How Death Works
When a citizen dies in the game, a hearse will leave a death care facility, drive to the body's location, and bring it back. If no one picks up a body for some time, a special icon will appear over the building to make players aware of the problem. If a hearse still doesn't reach the body after several more in-game days, then the building will become abandoned. In this sense, the death-care mechanics are identical to the trash-collection mechanics.
Another way the mechanics are similar is in how the two main facilities work. Just like the garbage dump, the cemetery unlocked at the Boom Town milestone can accept bodies but will eventually fill up. On the other hand, the crematorium unlocked by the Big City milestone can accept any number of bodies, and players can set cemeteries to empty out and send their bodies to other cemeteries or crematoriums.
There are also several other death care facilities available in DLC expansions. These facilities unlock at the same time as the crematorium, and they work in similar ways by accepting an unlimited number of bodies.
Death Care Tips
- The cemetery has 10 hearses while the crematorium has 7, and the crematorium's upkeep cost is much higher. This is balanced by the cemetery's limited capacity, but secretly a crematorium can process a lot more bodies than its hearses can collect. This means the most cost-efficient setup is to mix cemeteries and crematoriums together and set the cemeteries to empty out once they're full. Unlike with landfills, this won't cause a service disruption in the city's death care.
- Before starting this cycle up, players should keep in mind that the Plaza of the Dead needs three full cemeteries to unlock. However, this unique building will remain unlocked in current and future playthroughs even after the cemeteries start emptying.
- Hearses are road vehicles, and so bad traffic can keep them from reaching a body even if there are enough death care facilities in the city.
- Dead bodies can turn up in any zoned building, not just in residences. Players don't need healthcare facilities for industrial or commercial districts, but a crematorium or two can come in handy.
Cities: Skylines is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One, and it's available on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S as of February 15.