I usually play Cities Skylines II in a speedrun fashion anyway, so I decided to do an actual speedrun. This run was my 4th attempt, it is the speedrun.com world record for 1k population as of the time I'm submitting it. I didn't use any sort of timer, i just cropped the clip to when the run starts and stops and used the file video length as the length of the speedrun. The file length is 8m 44s 866ms, starting when the map appears on screen, and ending when i hit 1,000 population. My main stragedies where place residential as fast as possible, and keep citizen happiness as high as I could. To deal with money, I used reaching milestones to gain money rather than rely on taxes. You can just place coal power plants to gain milestones, which grants millions of money. Since the run is real time, you have to close popups as fast as possible to minimize paused time.