You can create some truly beautiful creations in a game as powerful as Cities: Skylines. It is a fun city builder with a great difficulty curve and the option to play in sandbox mode. What more could you want? Well, lots apparently, according to the thriving modding community the game has.
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In addition to the many additional assets that you can find to download, the Steam Workshop is full of some great quality-of-life mods that will make your life easier. Whether they add useful tools or adjust some of the game's existing mechanics, they are well worth considering.
Updated June 13, 2023 by Ryan Bamsey: With the highly-anticipated sequel to Cities: Skylines coming in only a few months, we predict that the modding community will largely move over to the new game. That said, we still can't stop ourselves from pumping hour after hour into this classic. We've taken another look at this list to make sure our mod recommendations are sound and have ironically replaced a defunct sound-related mod with a great alternative.
15 Traffic Manager: President Edition
The traffic flow heatmap function of Cities: Skylines
One of the biggest challenges to deal with in Cities: Skylines is the flow of traffic through your city - you have some tools to help you sort things out, such as the overlay that shows you where your big roadblocks are, but sometimes you find that you've built yourself into a corner.
Traffic Manager: President Edition adds some very powerful new options to the game. It allows you to tweak parking and customize roads minutely, including adding the likes of stop signs, lane priority, and roundabout rules.
14 Network Extensions
More options are always appreciated when it comes to creating the megacity of your dreams. Network Extensions gives you a bunch of new roads to play around with, letting you further customize your cities with even greater specificity than usual.
Since traffic flow is such a big part of managing the efficiency of your cities, having more options is always a good thing - so this mod adds mechanical advantages, as well as aesthetic. Of particular note are the asymmetrical roads that offer minute control over traffic flow.
13 Move It
Many mods seem like they are built to cater to players who simply wish to make the city of their dreams. Move It is one of those mods. As the name implies, this mod allows you to move objects in the game exactly where you want them. This includes buildings, trees, props, decals, roads, and even surfaces.
It's a powerful tool for precision, and you only need to look at the mod's gallery to see what sorts of impressive things are possible using it. Note that in order to use this mod, you must also subscribe to Prop Precision and Prop Snapping to make it work.
12 Parking Lot Roads
Demonstration picture for the Parking Lot Roads mod for Cities Skylines that has the caption "Massive parking lots for your retail strips"
This mod is for those among you who like some convenience in their building and realism in their cities. This mod adds roads that function for parking that can be used to make full-sized parking lots. It does this by adding markers that are used to denote parking spaces.
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There is also a handy add-on mod created by yenyang and Superpancho that adds some auto-snapping to these parking lot roads called ParkingLotSnapping.
11 CameraGrid
Logo for the Camera Grid mod for Cities Skylines
Taking beautiful screenshots of your sprawling metropolis is one of the key pleasures of Cities: Skylines - being able to show off your gaming prowess online is really fun and this game does make for breathtaking vistas and, yes, skylines.
CameraGrid is a tool designed to make taking screenshots that much easier. At the press of a button, CameraGrid will add a grid to your UI to help you compose the perfect picture - it even has multiple setups to use.
10 Ambient Sounds Tuner
Cities: Skylines is a beautiful game, but quiet it is not. Some of the sound effects used in the game can be a bit repetitive and annoying, especially if you've been playing the game for a number of years.
Enter Ambient Sounds Tuner, a lightweight mod that lets you fine-tune the ambient noises that give your city life, allowing you to tone down some of the more annoying sound effects that the game (or even other sound packs!) uses. The cows' mooing comes to mind immediately. Silence, beef.
If Move It is the mod of choice for objects, then Extra Landscaping Tools is the mod of choice for terraforming. With this mod, any map can be edited with the game's powerful landscaping tools. Not only does the mod allow you to place rocks and other natural features, but it includes highly configurable brushes that allow you to place clusters of trees or adjust the water level as you wish.
This is another great mod for those who want to feel all-powerful when creating their cities. It will let you craft a perfect land to populate and make it look prettier than any of the default maps.
8 Realistic Population Revisited
If realism is the name of the game, and it quite often is for Cities: Skylines players, then Realistic Population Revisited is a great mod to have. The mod aims to address a particular problem that the vanilla game has, namely the weird way it populates its buildings. Small houses can somehow fit dozens of people while huge skyscrapers feel almost empty.
This mod makes it so that those small houses will have one family each, and the taller buildings have a more sensible number of families inside them. It also adjusts commercial and industrial buildings, meaning you'll be able to support more workers. This mod can affect game balance, but it makes the game feel better as a proper city simulator.
7 Building Themes
If you want distinct-looking neighborhoods without much effort, look no further than the great Building Themes mod. This tool adds a Themes option to the districts and policies panel which allows you to set a theme to each individual district. This will limit that district to a certain style and make for a cohesive area.
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With this mod, you can easily style your city. This could be to mimic certain periods of history or simply to satisfy a need for a certain aesthetic. Rather nicely, there are extra themes on the Workshop available to download, but make sure you read the instructions on how to install them on the main page.
6 Clouds & Fog Toggler
Sometimes the most impactful mods are the simple ones that only do one thing, but do it well. This is one of them: Clouds & Fog Toggler simply disables clouds and distance fog that appears when you zoom out too far. This can be annoyingly intrusive for players who just want to see their cities from a distance, so this mod is fantastic for them.
The mod also has a configurable option to disable industrial smog, something that came with the After Dark update. This is definitely the go-to mod for anyone who wants a clear game world.
5 Find It! 2
This is a powerful mod that adds a new tool to the game. Find It! 2 allows you to search for, investigate and then place any asset in the game. This includes both buildings and props and is great for decorating areas exactly to your taste.
Cities: Skylines is chock full of assets. and modders are likely to download even more, so installing a useful tool like this is a no-brainer. As long as you know what something is called, you will be able to find it almost instantly, without scrolling through endless menus.
4 All 25 Areas Purchasable
Each map in Cities: Skylines is made up of 25 squares. Usually, you would start in one square and as your settlement hits new milestones you'd unlock extra squares for purchase in order to build up a larger city. Normally, this would cap out at 9 squares after 13 milestones.
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All 25 Areas Purchasable recognizes the great waste of space that this means for the rest of the map and alters the final milestone. Instead, it will unlock the entire map for purchase. Note that this doesn't alter the rest of the milestones, so the game must be played largely normally until the final milestone.
3 Prop & Tree Anarchy
This is another great tool for anyone who wants to build their own perfect world. Prop & Tree Anarchy lets you place props and trees anywhere. This includes underwater, on top of roads, and even within an existing building's footprint.
This means that you can truly personalize your world. You could choose a house and give them the lushest garden ever, and then move onto their neighbor and fill their garden with garbage. You can make green areas that feel like modern conservation projects, or place entire districts underwater to give them a flooded city feeling. This mod expands your possibilities hugely.
2 Precision Engineering
This mod is utterly vital for any city builder who desires order in their creations. Precision Engineering does much of what it says in its name. It adds angle snapping, guidelines, and information about both angles and distance when placing roads, railways, pipelines, or power lines.
Whether you want symmetry to undertake a huge project where you build your city in the shape of something else or simply to have as much information as possible while you build, this mod is a must-have.
Prop Line Tool is a mod that adds a simple but powerful feature to Cities: Skylines. The titular tool allows you to drag out a line of props or trees that will get placed all at once. Gone are the days of manually rotating and placing 500 trees just so you can have a forested area -- this tool will simplify that process tenfold.
Definitely take a look at the different options that this mod adds, as it's not just straight lines that you can place. It will speed up fencing projects, road bollards, and anything else you can think to place.
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