Highrise City Beginner’s Guide: Tips for a Successful City

by Mike Alexander / Articles, Misc. Guides / 04 Jan 2023

Games like SimCity offer a full city-building simulation, where every facet of your metropolis must be carefully planned out. As the populations and its needs grow, you must adapt the already established layout to contend with brand new problems and more people. Resource management games, on the other hand, are quite different. Most will put you into an already established city and ask you to direct its economy towards success. The successful collection of materials, production of goods, and the selling of those goods are the goals of those games.

A new game, called Highrise City, combines aspects of both of these genres while adding its own personal twist. The result is a fascinating, complex game where you must build a city from the ground up, and then build its economy into a self-sustaining money machine. Whether you’re familiar with city-builders or resource management games, Highrise City is elaborate enough that you might need some help. I have a few tips in this Highrise City Beginner’s Guide that just might help you build the best city you possibly can.

The Road To Success

When you first start the game, you will be presented with a blank patch of land. In order to begin your Highrise City adventure, you’re going to need to start laying down your roads. They are important to have for your early workers, and every building you put down will need to be adjacent to a road. Also, the farm building you’ll have to create early on will need a large area to use as a field for planting. This is done by enclosing a large space with roads on all 4 sides and placing the farm along one of those roads. Don’t get too caught up in planning everything to be perfect for a massive city down the road; just build for what you need right now.

Turn The Lights On

With your first few buildings down, you’ll need to begin setting up the infrastructure for your city. At the time of publishing, the early access version of Highrise City is extremely lenient in its implementation of power sources. You can build a wind turbine anywhere on the patch of land you are presented with, even if it’s far away from your first roads and buildings, and it will still deliver power to everything just fine. This may be changed later on, but you don’t have to worry about routing power right now.

To get water delivered throughout your city, you will need to build a water tower. This similarly doesn’t need to be by a water source, as it seems to just produce water by existing at the moment. Then, you will need to run pipes through your starting area. The pipes’ serviceable area will be shown in blue, and it’s a pretty wide area so you won’t be needing many pipes at first. The final piece of your infrastructure puzzle at the beginning will be transport carriers, which can be placed anywhere along a road. You’ll just need to make sure it is within your building’s serviceable range.

Welcome Your First Citizens

You can build residential areas with your zone tool on the far left of your toolbar. This will build several homes that will house your first citizens and potential workers. The more houses you have, the bigger your potential workforce is. In order to put them to work, you’ll need to build office areas. Each industry you build will need its own number of office buildings, so you’ll need to keep building offices as you expand your different industries. Just make sure you have room!

Masters Of Industry

Speaking of industries, you can begin to build them out at this point. Your earliest available industry will be a brickyard. In order to build bricks though, you’ll need a steady supply of clay. To get this, you can build a clay pit on top of a clay deposit, and then a brickyard close by. Something to note, brickyards produce a high level of air pollution, which will be shown with a yellow shaded area around the building when you are placing it down. You’ll want to build this as far away from your residential areas as possible to prevent them from getting sick and unhappy.

Trader Pros

With your industries set up, you can now trade with other cities that might need what you’re producing. You’ll need to build a port, which will need to be connected to both a road and a body of water. With that done, you can open the trade menu by clicking the trade button on the right side of the top toolbar. In this menu, you will be able to set a specific number of items you wish to buy and sell, and the game will handle those transactions on its own. This is a great way to make sure that you always have the materials you need while also selling the goods you’re producing after a certain amount is reached for your own use.

Conclusion

These few tips should be enough to start your city in the right direction. I hope you found this guide helpful, and that you are enjoying Highrise City. Good luck with maintaining your mega metropolis!

Mike Alexander

Mike has been playing video games since he was able to hold a controller, having been fascinated by Sonic 2 on his mom’s Sega Genesis. That fascination and passion for the art form has grown exponentially nearly 30 years later, and he doesn’t see that fading away anytime soon.
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