What’s What in the New Cities Skylines Concerts DLC

It seems like only yesterday that we were discussing the Cities: Skylines – Mass Transit DLC. But now Paradox Interactive is giving us yet another DLC for their smash-hit city building sim. The new Concerts DLC gives players the opportunity to host and manage their own outdoor concerts. With a new festival ground, festival management, and an in-game radio station, there is a lot of new content to keep you entertained.

We’ve drawn up this guide to show you whats what in the new DLC and how it all fits together with existing content.

How to Unlock the Festival Ground in Cities: Skylines – Concerts

It’s actually relatively easy to unlock the Festival Ground — you just need to do a bit of groundwork beforehand. The festival ground will become useable once you have reached a population of 1,000 people. So spend time at the beginning of your game building residential areas and work on drawing people into the city to live.

As with all unique buildings, the festival ground needs to be built next to a road and preferably away from too much residential construction, as residents may be affected by noise pollution.

You will find the festival ground build option in the first tab of the unique building menu.

How to Hold a Festival in Cities: Skylines – Concerts

Luckily, the festivals/concerts run automatically. There are three bands on the concert list, and all the game does is cycle through them. Even though it would be nice to constantly hold heavy metal concerts, for example, you have to think about the rest of the citizens of your city!

If you click on your festival ground, it will bring up a new menu. In this menu, you will be able to see the dates of future concerts, past concerts, how well they were received by your citizens, ticket prices, different kinds of budgeting sliders, and upgrade options for your festival ground.

Getting Your Concert to be a Success in Cities: Skylines – Concerts

There are a lot of different factors that you need to get take into consideration for your concerts to be a success. First of all, you need to make sure that your citizens can get to the venue. To do this, you need to make sure you have sufficient public transport in place. You could have a bus route that stops outside, a train station nearby, the venue could even be served by a metro line.

You need to make sure you keep an eye on an artists popularity. All the artists start at 50 popularity but, depending on the success of a concert, this can increase or decrease. Obviously, if an artist’s popularity increases, you don’t have to worry about people attending. But if it goes down, you need to figure out a way of getting people in. One way of doing this is to lower the ticket prices. Lower ticket prices will draw more to a concert and hopefully work on increasing how popular the artist is.

How to Upgrade Your Festival Area in Cities: Skylines – Concerts

While there aren’t is any other new buildings in the DLC apart from the festival area, you can still change its appearance, how many buildings are in the area, and its maximum capacity by upgrading the plot. These aren’t unlocked by getting to a certain level, but they do have certain criteria you need to fulfill.

2-Star Upgrade

The criteria you need to fulfill to upgrade your festival to a 2-star venue are:

• Held 6 concerts at the venue
• At least one band with a popularity of 70
• $90,000 to cover upgrade costs

3-Star Upgrade

The criteria you need to fulfill to upgrade your festival area to its maximum are:

• Held 18 concerts at the venue
• At least one band with a popularity of 85
• Had at least one sold out concert
• $120,000 to cover upgrade costs

The Cities: Skylines –  Concerts DLC is available now through Steam and requires no other expansion aside from the original game.

If you like this guide then you need to check out the rest of our Cities: Skylines guides for more tips and tricks that will make your city the best it can be!