How to combat & treat death waves

A death wave is colloquial for a phenomenon in which, every now and then tons of people start dying at the same time and residential demand is at a high. Deathwaves challenge you to quickly remedy the situation, even though literally everyone's dead.

Fortunately, death waves aren't usually your fault. Technically speaking, cims have a short lifespan of about 6 years, and their life cycle is completely relative to the time the cim moved in. This means an old grandpa will naturally die around the same time as a newborn child, if they moved in at the same time.

This means that if you zoned in a thousand houses at the same time, then everyone in those houses will die pretty much at the same time. However, it's not fully uniform, where everyone abruptly meets their end in the blink of a second, but it's more like a scatter plot, for realism (even though the life cycle in this game is not realistic at all).

Another reason death waves happen are because the city does not efficiently utilize deathcare. It turns out that emptying cemeteries will slow down the rate at which crematoriums cremate bodies. This does not mean you shouldn't ever use cemeteries after unlocking crematoriums, as it will still hold a considerable amount of bodies. Emptying cemeteries without crematoriums in the city will cause some bodies to leak over into other cemeteries, basically making the whole system inefficient. That is why it is essential to place crematoriums in the city, as it unclogs a huge bottleneck during death waves.

With that being said, you should also place crematoriums next to cemeteries, so bodies can be transported there faster and not to other cemeteries.

In the vanilla game, death waves cannot be cured. The guide teaches you how exactly you can loosen the severity of death waves but not fully stop them from ever happening again. A simple, and reliable fix is to gradually zone residential, instead of bucket filling a whole suburb while the game is paused. This means, while unpaused, you should zone one block and do something else. Then, come back and zone another block, do something else, and repeat the process. It will be a long way to zone housing, but it's a fix that makes death waves significantly less severe. As mentioned before, the technical aspect of deathcare is pretty intricate, and not utilizing it effectively may strain your city. For the record, elder care is completely useless. It will not help old people live longer nor will it significantly boost their health. Although its good to put a few in your city, do not rely on them to fix the problem.

That being said, healthcare does (sorta) matter. Make sure your citizens arent sick. This guide below I made tells you how to fix citizens being sick. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3407102199

In some cases, citizens being sick can cause a death wave in itself, as not enough sewage impacting the entire city might just cause everyone to die, which is significantly worse than normal death waves, killing off tens of thousands of cims, which you do not want.

Death waves will get exponentially worse the larger your population gets, which makes it very important to tackle them early on. Before you know it, untreated death waves will cause loss of hundreds to even thousands of people in a routinely fashion. Why do all of that work when one mod can just do it all for you? Just download the Lifecycle Balance Revisited mod and it'll fully eliminate death waves completely, and do the grunt work while you can kick back.https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2027161563

After a death wave has ended, you may have accumulated a lot of residential demand. It is essential not to immediately use it all up, as that is how death waves occur, and you're just restarting the death wave cycle. Recovering from a death wave will take time, but make sure population growth isn't too high, keep it around ~200 cims a week or less, so the same death wave won't happen again.

Use this time between now and the next death wave to develop deathcare as well, if you haven't already.

So, that should help you deal with death waves. In the vanilla game, death waves will fade away after some time, but still, it's better to deal with it before it ravages your city. Let's also hope the game devs will fix the stupid life cycle bug for the vanilla game.