All road types except highways allow you to create zones on either side. The first thing you should do is place roads.Cities: Skylines uses a dynamic traffic system that can make or break your prospective city.

Vehicles enter your city from beyond the edges of the map either by highway, railway, or later by sea and air. In Cities: Skylines, the most important aspect of your city planning should be where your roads are going to be. The controls are as good as they can be with a gamepad, and after a little practice you'll be whizzing through its systems in no time.

Experiment! Try out all the menus and use all the tools.

Pressing 'X' while painting zones will make them blank in case you want to switch a residential zone to a commercial, zone, for example.

The top 'Y' radial menu is also how you buy additional plots of land for building, by selecting 'Areas.'.

This allows you to see your power grid, traffic status, water supply, and more. On the top menu, use 'Y' to access the 'Info Views' frequently. This allows you to set taxation policies for specific districts, rather than globally.

Use the district painter to set up districts, then use the inspector tool (furthest left), then press 'Y' to change it to the district inspector tool.

Press the 'View' button to hide the UI (great for screenshots) and press the 'Menu' button to save your game and access options.

The right and left bumpers are generally used to switch between tabs within a menu, such as types of roads and types of decorations.

Pressing the right stick shows tooltips for each menu item, which can be incredibly useful to help learn the game.

Pressing the left stick pauses the flow of time, this can be useful in a crisis.

The left and right triggers zoom in and out of the map.

This can be handy for removing specific elements from complex, layered infrastructure setups. You can use this to remove any object at the top level, but while in any of the specific menus (building roads or train tracks) it will become contextually bound to the current building type.

It will allow you to cycle backward through menus and cancel current tools. This is useful for making curved roads, for example. While within a build menu, it allows you to change the brush type. At the top level, this gives quick access to things like budgets and info views. You can also use up and down on the D-pad to build roads and railways into underground tunnels or create bridges, by changing the elevation.

This is where you select buildings, road designs, and so on.

The D-pad lets you navigate across the main menu at the bottom.

It is your selection button globally throughout the game.

Cities skylines industrial layout