Cities: Skylines is a very good video game, but in my review, I noted it had a few problems. I also noted, however, that most of those could probably be fixed with mods, and that’s exactly what’s already happening.
And no, I’m not talking about road porn. Or buildings (I’ll cover buildings and maps very soon). I’m talking about actual changes to the way the game’s systems operate, things that can not only alter the way a city works (to bend it more to your liking), but can just improve your overall experience.
You should subscribe to all of these mods in Steam’s Workshop, immediately. They will make the game better (provided they work 100% of the time…some of them don’t, so you might want to mess around first).
Also note that the use of mods disables achievements. Unless….
Traffic Report
One of the things people (myself included) are having trouble with is the game’s traffic system, which requires you to bend your city-planning to the game’s mechanics. This mod doesn’t fix this, but it does let you see more easily where you’re going wrong, providing detailed information on things like an individual vehicle’s route and the paths of vehicles going in or out of a selected building.
Dynamic Resolution
If you’ve got a decent PC, you might have noticed that the game looks a little…jankier than you’d be expecting. Anti-aliasing especially is pretty under-done. I’ll let the mod’s creator explain what this one does to address that:
For users with powerful GPUs, dynamic resolution allows downscaling from up to 5 times your native resolution. This antialiasing method called supersampling (or SSAA) while very computationally expensive gives the best results and the sharpest quality image of any AA method.
In short: it makes the game look a lot better.
Automatic Bulldoze
One of the most tedious things in the game is that, if you want to keep everything looking pretty and running smoothly, you need to manually scroll all over the map and bulldoze empty buildings yourself. That’s boring. Let this mod automatically bulldoze empty buildings for you (though be warned, it’s a little twitchy).
First-Person Camera
The game does a pretty good job of getting you down to street level by default, but sometimes, you just want to get closer. This mod drops you down into what’s essentially a first-person view, letting you check out your city from a pedestrian’s perspective.
All 25 Areas Purchasable
You may have noticed, the actual map you start on is huge! And while you can unlock nine city tiles to build on, which is a big amount, there are actually 25 there to open up. This mod opens them all up. Prepare for megalopolis.
Automatic Emptying
Next to bulldozing, the most annoying chore in Skylines is emptying all your dumps and cemetaries when they fill up. Automatic Emptying, which is actually made by the same guy who made the Automatic Bulldozing mod, attempts to do this for you, but be warned, it’s still a little buggy (make sure you’ve got plenty of crematoriums and incinerators to handle it).
Pedestrian Paths
I like this one a lot, because it dramatically alters the way you can approach the game. By designating pathways that are for pedestrians only, you can not only make huge and complex parks but also entire traffic-free neighbourhoods. What does this mean? It means instead of being tied down into building a modern metropolis, you could actually go and do something unique like building a network of old-fashioned European villages…
Mod Achievement Enabler
The use of mods is supposed to disable achievements in the game. Unless you use this mod, which re-enables achievements for people using mods. Mods are the best.
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Comments
6 responses to “The Best Cities: Skylines Mods”
So what you are saying is that there has been no additions to decent mods since about the 4 week mark after release?
Either thats really bad for the community or you missed anything more recent.
Agreed, I was hoping for something everyone didn’t already have.
EA must be shaking their heads at all the free mods, i mean they are just giving them away
“hmmm, what if we found some legal base to serve them with a C&D, then appropriated those ideas and released them as paid DLC?”
There are a plethora of mod’s for the game out on the workshop many of which significantly improve the game in many ways.
any the article missed to help out?