Editor’s Note: If you picked up Cities: SKylines on the cheap during the Steam Summer Sale, here are some mods you should definitely check out.
If you watched our stream last Wednesday, you saw me being really bad at Paradox’s new city-builder, Cities: Skylines. Thanks to some help from our awesome community, I made it through, but now I’m looking to amp up that experience, and that means mods. There are already a ridiculous number of mods for Cities: Skylines, but these eight are some of my favorites so far. You should be aware that using any mods in the game will turn off achievements, unless you install the mod that turns them back on (Seriously, mods are awesome).
Have a favorite of your own that’s not here? Tell us in the comments!
Automatic Bulldoze
From time to time in Cities: Skylines, someone will decidew that they’ve had their fill of your quaint little city, and they’ll depart. While someone can move in and build a new building in the place of the abandoned one, having that empty building sitting there lowers happiness around it, has a higher crime rate, and is a much larger fire hazard. This can even make other areas around it harder to develop. The best way to avoid that is to manually bulldoze each abandoned building, but in a large city, that can be a lot of work. The automatic bulldoze mod takes care of that for you, as it will automatically destroy any abandoned or burned buildings.
Check it out on the Steam Workshop
Dynamic Resolution
If you’d like to get more out of your top of the line video card in Cities: Skylines, or if you’d like to play the game but your GPU isn’t quite up to the task, the Dynamic Resolution mod is exactly what you’re looking for. Basically, it lets you upscale or downscale the game’s graphics from a higher or lower native resolution. In effect, it turns the game’s anti-aliasing into SSAA, or supersampling. That means the game runs at a higher resolution, and then scales down to fit your monitor’s native resolution. Conversely, you can scale up from a lower resolution if your card is less beefy.
Check it out on the Steam Workshop
All Spaces Unlockable
If your city gets large enough, you’ll get the option to purchase more land to expand your city. You can buy up to eight additional plots of land this way, giving you nine total. But what if you need more space? That’s where the All Spaces Unlockable mod comes in. Install this one, and you can purchase a total of 25 spaces to expand your city (assuming your PC can handle it).
Check it out on the Steam Workshop
Traffic Report Tool 1.4
One of the hardest things for me to get right in Cities: Skylines is traffic. No matter how hard I try, I always create some seriously snarled routes. If this sounds like you, give the Traffic Report Tool 1.4 mod a try. Not only will it let you see the paths of vehicles passing through any stretch of road, it will also let you see the routes used to access buildings, or the planned routes of specific vehicles. It’s easy to use and really helpful.
Check it out on the Steam Workshop
Isometric Camera
So you think you might like Cities: Skylines, but you much prefer the old isometric camera of games like Sim City 4? If that sounds familiar, this mod is for you. It’s nothing complicated, just a switch that changes from the current dynamic camera to a classic-looking isometric view.
Check it out on the Steam Workshop
Chirpy Exterminator
Instead of advisors, Cities: Skylines has “Chirpy,” a Twitter-like feed that features short messages from your citizens. You can click on the message to see who sent it, but after seeing the same disgruntled message about the ore mining you just encouraged, you might be ready to shut the thing off for good. That’s where Chirpy Exterminator comes in. Not only does it shut off the messages, it removes the little blue bird icon from the top center of the screen, where it’s usually just in the way.
Check it out on the Steam Workshop
Bordered Skylines
What if you could build a city that looked like something out of a comic book, or maybe something our of Borderlands? The Bordered Skylines mod does exactly that, adding comic book style outlines to basically everything in the game. It’s not as in-your-face as the outlines in Borderlands, but it certainly gives your city a unique look.
Check it out on the Steam Workshop
Fire Spread
One of the things that Cities: Skylines doesn’t have (yet) is natural disasters. In SimCity games over the years, you could unleash everything from a tornado to a giant alien on your city. The Fire Spread mod doesn’t replicate that, but it does bring an element of danger to the game. If a building catches fire, there is a chance (you can adjust the modifier) that the fire will spread to a nearby building. If you don’t have adequate fire coverage, you could lose whole lines of building to the flames. I’d recommend building some fire stations before installing this one.
Check it out on the Steam Workshop
