How to play

Getting started

You begin with a single parcel on an open meadow. From here your city grows entirely at your own pace – there is no countdown, no defeat and no penalty for taking a break.

The loop is simple: draw roads, zone districts, let buildings grow, collect taxes, buy more land. Each step builds on the last – and the better the parts work together, the more alive your city becomes.

Roads & networks

Buildings only grow and pay taxes when they sit on a road network. Draw a line with the road tool across your land – swipe on mobile, or a straight line on desktop.

One key trick: each road network shares workers, customers and goods only WITHIN itself. Two separate networks do not help each other. So connect your districts into one shared network, and everyone benefits from everyone else.

If a road is overloaded, upgrade it to a main road: simply drag over an existing road a second time. Main roads have 2.5× the capacity against jams – they cost more, but in the late game they are the most important lever against gridlock.

Zones: residential, commercial, industry

You don’t place individual houses – you zone areas, and buildings appear there automatically based on demand. Three zone types interlock:

🏠 Residential brings residents (and therefore workers). They need jobs and places to shop. 🏢 Commercial brings shops and jobs; it needs customers and goods. 🏭 Industry supplies goods and jobs; it needs workers.

Buy the land first (in cursor mode), then zone the area. No sector grows on its own – each one thrives only when its needs are met.

Demand & balance

The demand card in the HUD shows, for each sector, what’s needed right now: R (residential), C (commercial), I (industry). ▲ means “wants to grow” (▲▲ strongly demanded), ▼ shrinking, • balanced.

Build what’s currently in demand. Too much residential without jobs leads to unemployment; too much industry without residents finds no workers. Keep R · C · I loosely in balance, and the city grows most smoothly.

Why a building grows – and what holds it back

You do not build houses, you create conditions. Every connected building collects growth and rises level by level; with each level more people live or work there, and it pays more tax. A level 20 home is no longer a cottage – it is a residential tower.

Four brakes decide how fast that happens. The first is the DEMAND of its sector: with no jobs, housing grows slowly; with no customers, commerce stalls. The second is the AIR – fewer people want to live in a smoggy spot. The third is the COMMUTE: if work is very far away, the district loses its appeal. The fourth is CONGESTION.

Congestion is the harshest of them. If a home’s route is fully jammed, its level freezes completely – it will not grow an inch, no matter how good everything else looks. The building panel names the brake for you: tap a house and it tells you whether demand, air, commute or jam is the reason right now.

There is a ceiling, too. Until a city milestone, buildings grow to level 20. After that the ceiling rises to 30 and later to 40 – a deliberate rhythm, so a young city does not put up skyscrapers at once and a mature city still has something to reach for.

Money, taxes & land

Your income comes from taxes – but only connected buildings pay, and they only pay in full when their needs are met. The ⚡ symbol in the money card shows this tax efficiency: needs covered = full income.

With money you buy new land (tap empty land in cursor mode) and fund roads and zones. Net income per second sits under your balance – if it turns red, you’re spending more than you take in.

A good rhythm: bring one district into balance, collect taxes, then use the surplus to open up the next patch of land.

Location: why some houses pay more

Two houses of the same size do not bring in the same tax. Every building gets a location bonus from its neighbourhood – and you can build that on purpose. Housing values greenery and water, commerce values passing trade around it, industry values being near other industry.

Two special cases make this obvious. Put a home by the water in beautiful surroundings and it turns into a VILLA – paying many times what an ordinary house pays. And commerce high up in the mountains becomes a HOTEL that lives off the beauty around it. Both appear by themselves once the conditions are right; you only have to make them possible.

Parks are the strongest tool you hold: they clean the air, lift residential demand and upgrade EVERY kind of building around them. A few well-placed green spaces are often worth more than another row of apartment blocks.

The reverse is true as well: smog drags the location down, and so does a motorway right beside the villa quarter. It pays to keep industry and long-distance traffic deliberately away from the pretty corners instead of spreading everything evenly.

Traffic & jams

Turn on the traffic view to see how heavily your roads are used: teal free, amber tight, red jam. Jams slow the affected buildings – they deliver and earn less.

To fight jams: create alternative routes (more roads spread the traffic out), place homes and workplaces closer together (shorter trips), and upgrade your main axes to main roads. In the late game, the main-road upgrade is the strongest lever.

Motorways & junctions

From chapter 8 (or 15,000 residents) the motorway unlocks: one stroke with the motorway tool builds BOTH carriageways at once. Distance on the route doesn’t count towards the commute – distant districts feel right next to the job core, and through traffic leaves your residential streets by itself.

The motorway serves no buildings and couples ONLY at junctions: click the route with a main road right next to it. Plan your access points – too few junctions cause jams at the ramp. The route crosses streets via overpasses and water via twin bridges; living right next to it is a little less pretty, though (noise).

The railway: tracks and stations

From chapter 9 or 20,000 residents you will find two more tools in the road menu: track and station. You drag a track like a road, and a single tile carries both rails. Tracks may branch, cross, bridge over roads and cross water on a railway bridge.

A station goes on a track and needs a road right next to it. It is the ONLY crossing point between road and rail – without one, your line is just scenery. Two stations are the minimum for anyone to ride at all.

What you do NOT do: plan lines, set timetables or buy trains. As soon as two stations are connected, your commuters take the train by themselves – wherever it is shorter than the road. The game finds the route, you only build the track.

Two things are worth knowing first. The build price follows the ground, not the size of your city: across open land a line is cheap, straight through a dense quarter the same length costs several times as much – so routing is a real decision. And running it costs money continuously, per passenger. A line nobody uses costs you forever.

And honestly: the railway pays off over DISTANCE. If homes and jobs already sit close together, the short walk beats any change of transport – then the line is lovely to look at but does nothing. It shows its strength when two parts of your city lie far apart, or when a long detour sits between them.

Pollution & parks

Industry and dense traffic create smog. The smog view shows air pollution per tile (yellow light, orange noticeable, violet heavy). Where smog is thick, quality of life and location value drop – and with them the appeal for residents.

🌳 Parks are the antidote: they clean the air around them and raise the location value of every building nearby. A few well-placed parks between residential and industry work wonders.

Challenges & landmarks

Challenges give your city goals: complete build-focused tasks (like “connect 5 buildings” or “create 20 jobs”) and earn cash rewards. When one is done, the next moves up – a gentle thread running through the game.

Landmarks are the big late-game goal: ten world-famous monuments from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House. Each beautifies its surroundings over a wide radius and raises the location value there. The first costs 50M, each further one double – a monument for a full treasury. Choose the spot carefully: demolishing refunds nothing.

And when the treasury overflows? Invest in city prestige: each rank costs more than the last and raises your metropolis’ standing – an endless goal for surplus money, shown as a golden badge and a seal on your postcard.

When things stall: the usual causes

Nothing is growing? Check the connection first. A building only counts as connected if a road runs along one of its EDGES – touching at a corner is not enough. Without a connection nothing grows and no tax comes in.

Still nothing? Then it is usually two separate road networks. Workers, customers and goods only flow WITHIN one network. Two districts that do not touch help each other not at all – even if they sit right next to one another. In the traffic view you can see separate networks by their own outline.

Plenty of residents but no income? Look at the unemployed. Every unemployed resident costs you welfare continuously – a pure commuter town literally does not pay. Zone commerce and industry until the number comes down.

Money shrinking even though the city is growing? That is upkeep. Every building costs continuously, and the cost rises with its level. Growth alone does not help – it has to match demand, or you are buying upkeep without return.

A district stuck at the same level? Then it is almost always congestion or smog. Both are named in the building panel when you tap a house. Against jams, a main road (2.5× capacity) or a parallel route helps; against smog, distance from industry and parks.

Account, cloud & languages

You can play right away without an account – your save is stored locally and also lives in the cloud via a city code. With that code you can load your city on any device.

A free account (name + password, no email needed) ties the city to your account across devices. When you register you get a recovery code – keep it safe, it’s the only way to reset a forgotten password. You can delete your account yourself at any time.

Tildown comes in six languages (German, English, French, Italian, Danish, Spanish) and detects yours automatically. When signed in, you can switch it anytime from the menu.