The following is a short tutorial in building your first city.

Change the speed of the game to 'Pause' while you carry out these steps.

Next build a couple of Industrial zones() and a couple of residential zones(). Keep them adjacent to each other to not require the use of powerlines to connect them.

At this point notice that all the buildings have little 'water' and 'lightning' strikes. This indicates that they are both unpowered and unwatered. We need to remedy this by supplying water and power.

Build a water pump to supply water to your people (). It must be touching the river to supply water.

Next build a power plant. It can be either a nuclear plant() or a fossil fuel plant(). You will need to connect the power plant to the water pump in order to supply electricity to pump the water to the houses. Use powerlines() to accomplish this, or simply build the powerplant touching the water pump.

Now we need to supply water and power to the houses and industrial areas. Select the water pipe() and draw a pipe from the water pump to the buildings.

Now draw a powerline() and draw it from the powerplant to the buildings.

Change the speed of the game to something other than pause and note the power and water is now flowing to the zones. They no longer have the lightning strikes or the water droplets indicating that they don't have power.