Cities: Skylines - How Imports and Exports Work

gamerant.com:

While Cities: Skylinessimplifies several aspects of city building, other aspects are very complex and detailed. For instance, while some city builders with construction zones allow industrial and commercial zones to operate on their own and only worry about worker commutes, Cities: Skylines won't let these buildings operate unless they have materials to process or sell.

To get these materials, commercial and industrial buildings can either ship products between themselves or they can import and export them using connections that go outside the city. Players can't touch this process directly, but the way they set up highway connections and cargo terminals can have a big impact on how successful this process is.

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In the base game of Cities: Skylines, there are five materials that industry and commercial buildings work with: oil products, ore products, forestry products, agricultural products, and goods. The Industries DLC adds more products to this list, but these additions still focus on oil, ore, forestry, and farming.

To make these products, players can create industrial districts and use the specialization tab to focus them on producing a raw material. Of course, the district will also need to contain the right resource, which players can check for on the map. The «generic» industry buildings will then take these products and turn them into finished goods. They can then ship these goods to commercial buildings that will go on to sell them to consumers.

If a commercial building can't get enough goods from industrial zones, or if an industrial building can't get enough raw materials from specialized zones, they'll import what they need instead. This import will spawn as a truck on