This guide deals with how to balance out the production chain of the new industrial areas, so that extractors aren't complaining about no customers, processors aren't complaining about missing resources despite full storages right next to them and the finished goods reach your commercial instead of getting exported, while commercial imports.

The secret to all of this is storage - whether it's the specialised storage for each industry raw material or warehouses, which can be placed anywhere, balancing out the storage space of your city will make your production chain flow smooth.

This whole guide is based on full vanilla play, so this is how things work with no mods. Keep in mind that mods which change the AI of traffic and buildings might interfere with how things should actually work - especially since minor issues can exist in mods that cause unintended behaviour.

Extractor - a building that produces a raw resource, such as a field, a plantation, an oil pump or a mine.
Processor - a building that turns raw resources into another resource used later in the production chain.
Intermediate resource - these are produced by the processors and used by unique factories, example are animal products, paper, plastic and metal.

The DLC is full of new storage buildings, all of which work almost the same. There are the specific ones, which are found under each industry area tab. They store only the raw resource of each area - that's crops for farming, logs for forestry, oil for oil industry and ore for ore industry and there are 4 sizes for each area type.

Besides them are the warehouses, which can store a range of different things. They can store any intermediate resource (the ones produced in your industry areas - like animal products, paper, plastic and metal), luxury goods (the end result of the new production chain) as well as the goods and resources produced and used by the zoned industry. Once placed you select the type of goods they should store and they can only store that one type.



Common for all the storage buildings are 3 different settings - Empty, Balanced and Fill. Understanding how these change the behaviour of your storage facilities and using them correctly is important to get the production chain flowing.

This setting aims to have the storage building 0-20% full. When there's more goods or resources in a storage building with this setting than its target range, it will export until it is again in the target range. It will also empty to other storage buildings of the same type if any have space. Consider this setting as an "Always Export" setting as in most cases it will almost always send out all trucks to export.

This setting aims to have the storage building 40-60% full. If below that it will import if possible (the intermediate resources can't be imported) and if above it, it will send out trucks to export. If any buildings in your city require the resource or goods stored in the building, it will deliver to them - if there are any available trucks. This is the setting to use when you want the storage building to deliver around your city - and the one you'll use the most.

This setting aims to have the storage building 80-100% full. If below that it will import if possible (the intermediate resources can't be imported). It will never export with this setting, though in some situations it will send out trucks delivering to your factories (this only happened for me when I had enough storage, when I produced way more than I could store, they would never send out trucks). In ideal conditions this is a "local delivery only" setting, though I had problems achieving this all the time.

Now that you understand the basics of storage buildings and when to use the different settings for them, let's look at how they work in your city with your other buildings.

Storage buildings do not pick up resources to fill up. Most of the time they will fill up automatically as your extractors need to empty their own small storage. If they import they will send out an order for a resource, which will be delivered to them. Storage buildings' own trucks are only used for delivering or exporting stuff.

Extractor --> Storage --> Processor --> Storage --> Unique factory --> Storage --> Commercial/export

Without storage buildings in your city, your extractors will slowly fill up their internal storage and once that reaches a certain limit, they will send out a truck. If you're lucky there's a processor in your city needing that resource at just that moment and the truck will go there, but most of the time things don't line up that nicely. When it doesn't line up, your extractor will complain about not enough buyers of its product. It's the same situation that causes your processor to complain about not enough resources - it simply sent out the request just a little too late or early for an extractor to be ready. A waiting demand will eventually be fulfilled by an extractor, which will then be happy for a moment, but a lot of the time you'll have both sets of buildings complain at you.

This is where storage comes in to act as a buffer. When there are storage buildings to drop off the resources at and to order the resources from, then it doesn't matter that extractors and processors don't line up their timing perfectly. This is what makes storage so valuable - also for the zoned industry and commercial as they work the exact same where there with the zoned goods.

Don't worry, I've had that too. It's very normal and caused by not having enough storage space. You might produce so much of a resource that all your storage buildings are more or less full. If this is the case, you will also see that all trucks are in use almost constantly - the storage buildings are trying to bring the amount of resources down to their target range.




If your extractors are complaining about not enough buyers while you have storage buildings, the storage buildings simply can't keep up with your production. They are exporting as fast as they can, but your extractors are just producing more than you are exporting and using.

If your processors are complaining it's because they don't get any deliveries from storage buildings. When they are full, all trucks are exporting and that leaves no trucks free to accept the requests from processors.

The solution to both problems is more storage. I don't have a magic number of this much storage for a certain production, but I do have a rule of thumb that will help you find your way to the right amount of storage for your production.

Always have at least one storage building of a given resource have at least 5 trucks not in use.

That normally happens once a storage building is able to stay around its target range - so for balanced that would be a building that fluctuates around 50-75%. I find it the easiest to keep an eye on truck usage though.

Storage buildings come with a lot of traffic, so it's important to consider their placement and be ready to move them around or change roads as needed. Keep in mind that you will have deliveries to the storage building from either outside connections (when importing), extractors (for raw materials), processors (for intermediate resources) and unique factories (for luxury goods), as well as delivery trucks from the storage buildings to processors (for raw materials), unique factories (for intermediate resources) and commercial or outside connections (for luxury goods).

Having your storage centralised can have some benefits and some drawbacks. You'll always know where buildings are ordering their resources from and delivering their resources too, but you will also have all of that traffic in one place. For a raw resource in an industrial area it would be smaller than one for all intermediate resources in your city, and since the buildings for storing raw resources have to be in industrial areas you are forced to have at least 5 central storages (assuming you have all industries in your city). I would consider how good you are at handling high volumes of traffic and no matter what you choose, be prepared to change it.

You can never be sure where a factory orders its resources from - there might be a storage building right next to it with the resource it needs and trucks available for delivery, but the order might end up going to a storage building across your city. This is just how services work (you've likely seen a fire close to a fire station, only for the fire truck to come from the other side of the city) and there isn't anything we can do about it (well, outside of mods ofc). That said I have had a great benefit from placing smaller storage buildings near unique factories, which contained all the resources they needed. If you have problems with a unique factory lacking resources, I think it's definitely worth doing. It won't work all the time, but in my experience it does help.

Since traffic is going to be pretty heavy as soon as you have a few storage buildings together, I suggest giving some thought to the roads on which you place them. Avoid any that allow for crossing the middle, it simply just stops too much traffic when a truck crosses to the opposite side of the road to drop off something or a truck spawns and crosses the road to get out. One way roads or roads with medians are a good choice here.

So how do all of these new buildings fit in with the zoned buildings? Actually there are a lot of areas that overlap, which can be beneficial to our cities. And if you've ever struggled with a commercial or industrial area collapsing because they never got deliveries, storage can help you there as well. This is the same problem that extractors and processors have without storage as well - the order goes out when the commercial building needs goods and at that time a factory might not be ready and then the goods might not reach the commercial building in time - especially not if there's traffic.

The same rules as for other storage still apply. The warehouse needs to have trucks available all the time, but I find it much easier to balance than the whole production chain. Of course this depends on the amount of zoned goods you produce locally - if you have a large zoned industry you might need a good amount of storage before trucks are available.

Let's talk about the old specialised zones first. Are they even needed now? Not really, but if you like them or some of their buildings, you can totally use them together. The old districts can be painted on top of the new Industry Areas, so you can have a mix of the new DLC buildings and the old zoned buildings. And it won't just be for show. The raw materials extracted by the zoned extractors and the new DLC extractors are the same. Raw oil is raw oil, so you could have a zoned oil district and use the new oil storage buildings with all the benefits of storage.

When it comes to the processors there's a difference though. The new DLC buildings produce specific things like metal or plastic, where the old zoned ones produce non-specific things. These are the options you see on warehouses like "Zoned Industry - Forestry" and they are only used by generic industry or exported. They won't benefit your unique factories in any ways, but having storages for these near your generic industry can help keep them supplied without them stealing specific resources from your unique factories.

Their main purpose of supplying commercial with goods hasn't changed. While commercial will also sell unique goods produced by all your unique factories, which often isn't enough to supply them. Luckily generic industry isn't picky and will use whatever resources are available - this includes not only the old "Zoned Industry" types of goods, but also all the new specific resources like metal, plastic, animal products, paper and so on.

That means a generic industry area will likely get supplies from your warehouses that you intended for unique factories - it might be worth to have warehouses with the older types near them or at least keep on top of traffic in those areas. Also keep in mind that you can store what they produce in warehouses - that's the "Zoned Industry - Goods" option.

Commercial sells both the "Zoned Industry - Goods" and "Unique Goods", both of which can be stored in warehouses. A warehouse near your commercial area or halfway between your commercial and industry can help you avoid those upset commercial buildings. Industry will deliver to the warehouse instead of having to find a commercial building that wants goods, and commercial can have their orders fill instantly from the warehouse instead of waiting for production to finish. Of course traffic can still trip you up or commercial might order from a warehouse on the other side of your city, but the fact that the order can be responded to instantly will help.

Nefai found the optimal ratio for industrial areas so you can produce just enough and have almost no import or export of raw products. See their awesome work over on reddit.

If things aren't working like they should, this section can hopefully shed some light on why that's the case.

If you're having problems with trucks not spawning from storage buildings, there are a few things to look at. First you should check if they can spawn by setting the building to Empty - if they're above 25% full they should always send out trucks right away on Empty. If they are not, get the CSL Show More Limits mod and check if you're close to the vehicle limit. If you're using TMPE you can also further confirm this by clearing traffic.

If setting it to Empty causes trucks to spawn, the building likely working like it should, deliveries are simply coming from another place than you expect. Remember that deliveries never consider distance when a storage building is picked, so the closest storage will not always be the one responding.

This is a general issue, which usually happens because part of the city can't be reached. The game doesn't do well with split up cities, so make sure all of your storage buildings can reach all buildings, which might want a delivery from them as well as at least one outside connection, so they can export.

I've seen this complaint pop up a few times and this is not an issue in an unmodded game. As far as I know the mod(s) causing this hasn't been found yet, but if you're seeing this, disabling mods until things work correctly is the way to go. Also keep in mind that the DLC buildings are pretty large, so your demand might simply be so high that the jobs each building offers doesn't do much to lower demand. Or your commercial is struggling to get goods, which is keeping the demand high until their needs are satisfied.

This is not so much an issue as something to keep in mind. Like I have mentioned before, the game does not consider distance when sending out trucks, which means if you have two industry areas of the same type, trucks will almost certainly go between the two districts. The best way to deal with this would be to keep them somewhat close to each other or at least have a somewhat central storage. That would mean trucks from an area would have to go further to drop off their products and deliveries to them will take longer, but it's still better than having them cross the full distance.

If you're having other problems or not seeing the behaviour described in this guide, it's most likely a mod interfering. First thing to do is check this list of broken and incompatible mods[docs.google.com] to make sure you don't have a mod known to be broken. If that doesn't help, you'll need to disable mods until the problem disappears. Make sure to let the game run for a little while, so that vehicles aren't still doing what they were while affected by mods.

If you think you have found a bug in the game, disable all mods (can be done with the -noWorkshop and -disableMods launch options), start a new city and try to replicate it there. Mods are the reasons for most issues, so it's very important to exclude them first. If you find one, reports should go in the official support and bug forum[forum.paradoxplaza.com] so the developers will see them - this is also a good place to post if you're having issues and can't find the cause. While the support staff can't help much with mod problems, there's a bunch of super helpful players checking posts regularly on there too.

If you're using mods to unlock all 25 tiles or even 81 tiles, then I recommend you get Rebalanced Industries. Among other things the mod increases capacity of buildings and trucks, so the game does fewer but larger shipments of goods. When you have trucks travelling further than the developers intended (by having a larger map to work with), you will likely have more complaints when goods don't arrive in time and be more likely to hit the vehicle limit (and all the problems that comes with hitting the limit).