Cities: Skylines

This is one of the trickier Achievements in the game despite its simple description.

Happiness Explained

First, let's look at the description and work from there:
Happiness is one of the statistics you can find in the Info Panel on your main screen.

Happiness is broken down into 4 categories, one for each type of area you can zone land for.



A full breakdown and tips for Happiness can be found here: https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Happiness


"Happy Town" requires you to have more than 95% city Happiness for 5 years.

There is not a lot of information on this online but one can assume that this is the average Happiness value of a city.

We can view an approximation of average city Happiness in the City Info's Statistics menu, where you can access a number of line graphs:



You'll note that I said "approximation" when referring to this menu. The reason for this is that although you have your 4 Happiness values mentioned at the top of this Solution a straight average is not what decides the overall Happiness value. These values are weighted so some will have more importance to your city than others.

In any case this approximated value is a good reference point.


Reaching 95% Happiness

The best way to tackle this is to attempt the following:

> Get Residential Happiness to 100%
This is best achieved once you have access to Monuments.
Construct the Eden Project (maximum land value) and the Medical Center (maximum health efficiency) and this should be enough to hit 99-100% eventually.
If you need a top-up be sure to add many Service buildings, Metro Lines and Parks as these also bump up your overall score.

> Get Industrial Happiness to 100%
This is a little trickier than Residential. In addition to the above you will want a solid transport network and good traffic flow in and out of your industrial zones. Cargo Terminals are also important as they help create supply and demand for goods.
Easy access to your Commercial areas is also important in order to ensure goods get delivered quickly to stores.

> Get Commercial Happiness to the highest value possible.
This is notably trickier than the other two, as Commercial rarely seems to go above 85% no matter how well you play. Most of the above tips will apply here as well.

An alternative strategy is to build a city with only Residential and Office areas, thus negating the supply and demand issues of Commercial/Industrial. If you're going for this I would also suggest building the Hadron Collider Monument in addition to the 2 mentioned above.


Once all of this is done you simply need to maintain as high a score as possible for 5 years. What you need to do will vary, but typically you will be keeping an eye out for any icons that pop up and taking care of your citizens' issues as they arise.

One last tip I can give regarding this is to be ready for "death waves". These occur every few years as several citizens reach the end of their lifespan. The best way I have found of combating this is to create a "death squad" of 10 Crematoriums in the city centre (in addition to your regular deathcare solution) and setting the Health budget to 150%. This will add an additional 150 hearses to your city, capable of handling 1500 dead citizens. This puts a strain on your budget however so once the majority of death icons disappear I recommend turning off each of these Crematoriums until the next wave.


Finally, one thing to note is that you may earn this randomly while building a strong city for other Achievements. I wasn't building a "Happy Town" city at the time but my city was performing well enough to unlock it anyway. The screenshots in this Solution are from just after the Achievement unlocked, and here's a final one showing my overview:



Good luck.

I managed to unlock this achievement by creating a city with over 100,000 population then building all of the monuments in an area with lots of public services, cemetery's, hospitals, police stations, landfills, power stations and good transport links.

I then dezoned my entire city and then once the population had crashed I set up a new residential zone around the services and monuments.

I enabled recreational use, small business enthusiast, big business benefactor and enabled all tax relief policies.

Finally I reduced all taxes to minimum.

While my finances collapsed happiness stayed above 95% I just had to keep dismissing the bail out option as the game played through 5 years