Cities Skylines 2: How to Connect Sewer Pipes

There are countless services to manage when building a city. One of the most important is wastewater. Understandably, Cims don’t want to live in filth, so you’ll need to make sure it’s routed away from your town properly. Here’s how to connect sewer pipes in Cities: Skylines 2.

How Wastewater Management Works in Cities Skylines 2

One of the first systems you get access to in Cities: Skylines 2 is water and sewage management. Alongside electricity, it’s the very basic foundation of your city.

Turning the water on is easy enough. You place either a Groundwater Pumping Station, which requires underground aquifers found across the map, or a Water Pumping Station, which is placed along rivers or lake shores. These supply drinking water to your Cims.

The side of this coin is removing wastewater from residential, commercial, and industrial zones. This requires a separate system. And it can be fickle if you don’t know how it works.

How to Connect Sewer Pipes in CS2

To remove brown water from your city and dump it in your pristine rivers, you’ll need to build a Sewage Outlet for $25,000. Unlike pumps, these don’t require roads. They should always be built downstream of your pumps to avoid contaminating drinking water.

In a change from Cities: Skylines 1, water pipe and sewer pipes are separate assets here. Water pipes snap just fine to other pipes and roads should you need to place them manually. But because roads come with water and sewer pipes attached to them, the only real need I’ve found for manually placing water lines is when I’m exporting water. However, poop pipes are different.

A Sewage Outlet will connect to roads automatically if you build a road up against them. However, you’re Sewage Outlet is probably away from an area with roads, so running a pipe makes more sense. In my experience, though — and yours, too, if you’re here — connecting two sewer pipes is almost impossible.

Here’s what to do:

• Choose the sewer pipe from the Water & Sewage menu.
• Move your cursor until the pipe node snaps underneath the Sewage Outlet node.
• Press LMB to “place” the sewer pipe.
• Connect the pipe to another sewage pipe, not another Outlet (it won’t work).
• Press RMB to exit the connection/build controls.

The Most Important Thing to Know About Connecting Sewer Pipes

The one thing you must remember about connecting sewer pipes is this: two vertical pipes must appear at both nodes, rising to connect to an Outlet or pipe system.

A pipe can be connected on one end and not another. A vertical pipe can appear and disappear if the terrain gets in the way. Flow may still appear if a pipe isn’t connected properly. The yellow pulsing sewer pipe symbol (warning you an Outlet isn’t attached) will disappear even if the pipe is connected incorrectly.

How to Delete Pipes

It’s super easy to place sewage pipes incorrectly. They’re like spaghetti noodles underground, and exiting the build controls is a pain. Here’s what to do:

• Select the Bulldozer.
• Press Pg Down or hit the House icon on the far right side of the tool bar.
• While underground, move your cursor up and down over the pipe you want to demolish.
• Press LMB when the pipe glows blue.

To delete pipes in Cities: Skylines 2 is to be patient. Sometimes, a pipe will glow blue instantly in a wide area. Other times, demolishing the connection requires pixel-perfect movement. I’ve had instances where nodes and pipes won’t delete no matter what I do.

You can only delete pipes that you’ve placed outside of your road network. To demolish any others, you must demolish the road they’re connected to.

But that’s how to connect sewer pipes in Cities: Skylines 2. It’s a frustrating system, for sure, and depending on the elevation and terrain, snapping nodes together (with vertical pipes!) can test anyone’s patience. It does mine. For more tips and strategies, head over to our CS2 guides hub, where you can find articles on how to build quays and fix high rent.