Cities Skylines 2: How to Fix Lack of Entertainment

As it turns out, Cims can feel just as bored as we do when there’s nothing fun to do in their city. Leisure is just as important in Colossal Order’s city builder as is proper zoning and steady traffic flow. Here’s how to fix lack of entertainment in Cities Skylines 2.

How to Increase Entertainment in Cities Skylines 2

Luckily, lack of entertainment is one of the easier problems to fix in Cities: Skylines 2, especially when compared to a lack of labor or a lack of customers. That’s because it’s as simple as adding a few specific buildings to your city.

How to Check Entertainment and Leisure Levels

You can check your overall entertainment levels in the Info Views tab by clicking the Happiness icon. Here, you’ll find Happiness Factors, including points for entertainment, which comes from Leisure activities. It also includes how much overall leisure time your citizens have. You can also see a quick view of this by hovering over the face icons in the bottom right of the game’s toolbar.

When looking at this tab, you’ll see which areas lack entertainment, as well. If the streets are red, you should add more leisure opportunities in that location. If they’re green, then the citizens at that location are content with the leisure opportunities they have currently (but that could change).

To add more Leisure areas, you’ll need to place buildings in the Parks and Recreation menu, which becomes available at Milestone 4: Grand Village.

• Place smaller parks and sports parks for low density and medium density housing.
• Place larger parks and sports parks for high density zones.

You’ll need to unlock parks with Development Points in the progression menu before being able to place them, and it’s always a good idea to build a Park Maintenance Depot.

Leisure Buildings Stats and What They Mean

The stats that you’ll come across on Leisure and Tourist buildings are:

• Outdoor Recreation
• Summer Recreation
• Indoor Recreation
• Attractiveness

Outdoor Recreation means that your Cims benefit from those buildings when the weather is nice. If it’s raining or snowing, citizens are less likely to go to outdoor parks.

Summer Recreation is similar, except the benefits from these locations are limited to summer months. For the rest of the year, you won’t get the recreation boost from these locations. Large sports parks and landmarks like the Botanical Garden provide the most recreation in these categories. But they’re expensive ($1.6 million for the garden), so you might not get them until later in the game.

Indoor Recreation gives you recreation benefits year-round and in any type of weather (unless a natural disaster comes through and destroys it, of course). Landmarks like Notre Dame give you the most recreation here, but that specific building costs $5.6 million to build.

Then, we have Attractiveness. This shows how likely these buildings are to draw tourists to your city. A higher Attractiveness rating means that more tourists are likely to visit your city. As such, you can increase entertainment and revenue with high Attractiveness recreational buildings. Landmarks tend to have the most Attractiveness and Recreational value, meaning that you get a lot for your money when building them. Going back to Notre Dame, it gives you +125 Indoor Recreation and +175 Attractiveness.

Parks and Tourist Attractions

Parks and tourist buildings increase recreation, which then increases entertainment. This means that the best way to increase entertainment is through building parks in your city. I try to include a small park and a dog park every few streets to keep my amount of available leisure activities high.

I try to keep Park Management buildings spread throughout my cities, as well. This helps maintain your parks and entertainment zones. Once you build the Park Management buildings (after unlocking them with Development Points), you can upgrade them with extra garages and storage if you have a lot of locations to maintain.

Increase Entertainment with Cemeteries

However, you can also increase entertainment and handle Death Care simultaneously. When you build a Cemetery, you can immediately upgrade it with Temples and Mausoleums. The Cemetery alone adds +3 to indoor recreation, and adding Mausoleums turns it into a sight-seeing attraction. I use them to take care of the dead, increase entertainment, and build tourism all at once. Unlike a Crematorium, you don’t even add pollution by placing Cemeteries.

And that’s how to fix lack of entertainment in Cities Skylines 2. Here, parks and Cemeteries are the easiest options, but once you have steady revenue, you can start adding more tourist attractions like the Bronze Statue. From here, check out our CS2 guide hub for topics like how to export water or how to turn on Developer Mode.