The Best Cities: Skylines Mods
One of the best things about Colossal Order’s excellent Cities: Skylines is just how easy it is, thanks mainly to the Steam Workshop, to jam it full of mods, new buildings, and a shedload of other fun stuff. It’s almost as if catering to the modding community and allowing players some freedom to mess around with their game is a good idea!
We’ve trawled through the massive library of community-created add-ons to find some of the very best content available. From illustrious world regions to beautiful buildings to make your megalopolis proud, we’ve dug through the depths to bring some of the most beautiful additions on the market right now. That’s not all. We’ve also gone the distance to pull the mechanical fixes, additions, and tweaks that make playing the game even more responsive and fun than it already is. Let us begin.
Updated 12.03.2016
Ploppable RICO / Created by AJ3D
Want to be able to build yourself a building or several that can function in several different ways at once like some sort of wonderful catch-all? Then you’re in for a treat with this mod. It allows you to plop buildings that function as residential, industrial, commercial, and office all at once. It might be a bit of a short cut, but it’s certainly a little something to help alleviate city planning at crucial and jam-packed junctures as well.
Foxwoods theater / Created by Darf
Bring another piece of leisure to your city planning based on classic American architecture. The Foxwoods Theater is based on the Apollo Theater which stood proud on 43nd Street in Manhattan, New York from its initial construction in 1920 until 1996 when it was demolished. The Foxwoods is nod to gone-but-not-forgotten piece of entertainment history.
Local-Only Transport Stations / Created by boformer
Do you find yourself bogged down in tedium when it comes to separating your railway systems? Then check this mod out. It allows you to use place passenger stations so that they will only accept local traffic, meaning no passengers from other cities. What’s more, this is a stackable mod that works well with many other ease-of-access transport mods.
Water Pipe Upgrader 1.0.0 / Created by DontCryJustDie
When you’ve got the Snowfall DLC installed and you’re a wealthy city planner, you’ll be happy have this mod during the big freeze. Once in place, it allows you to upgrade all your water pipes to heated water pipes in one fell swoop. What would otherwise be a long and painful process will now be a single button click, provided you have the money.
The Trident - North Dark Theme / Created by flippityfloo
Enjoy a brand new additional map to build on. The trident is a verdant green land covered in a thick forest with both flat and hilly terrain. There are winding rivers that converge in the map and the starting tile has one of the rivers running right through it. Additionally, there’s an unfinished highway to play around with in the area. Enjoy the numerous possibilities and abundant resources of this scenic and gorgeous starting area.
Fire Spread / Created by BloodyPenguin
There’s a simple rationale behind this mod. Fire spreads. Simple logic really, but it doesn’t exist in Cities: Skylines for some reason. At least, it doesn’t exist without this mod yet. When a building catches fire, there’s a chance of that fire spreading to surrounding buildings. Make sure you’ve got the emergency staff on deck to properly respond!
Transport Lines Manager / Created by S. Klytel
Almost a must-have in ease-of-access gameplay mods, this lovely mod adds a new system from which you can manage all transport lines. Whether it’s plane, train, or automobile, you’ll get a window with color codes of all transport lines with corresponding colored lines in your city. This makes seeing where everything is going and how a breeze and stacks greatly with other transport line mods.
Ship Line Tool / Created by S. Klyte
Another lovely mod for ease-of-access. If you find yourself a bit tangled with your sea shipping, this is a good mod to have. It allows you to create ferry lines to move your ships in a more orderly manner. It’s also a good mod to put together with the Transport Lines Manager in order to keep better track of your shipping lines.
Skyes Zurich Switzerland / Created by xskyestormex
Looking for a lovely starter to take advantage of that Snowfall DLC you just got your hands on? Why not take a trip to Switzerland and take up a region styled after the illustrious city of Zurich? This is a 1:1 scale map complete with the lakes, rivers, highway, and train connections that belong to the region. Build Zurich the way it is today or take the region and mold it in your own imagination.
Mini Garbage Incinerator / Created by niis-ku
Annoyed with the massive amount of space and pollution that the vanilla garbage incinerators in Cities: Skylines put out? This mod might just alleviate your problems a bit. It provides a 2x2 mini garbage incinerator with reduced stats in all categories. It takes in less trash obviously, but it puts out less pollution and runs on less resources, making it an ideal alternative to the large and somewhat cumbersome vanilla incinerators.
81 Tiles / Created by BloodyPenguin
A must-have mod for the most ambitious of city planners, this mod will allow the creation of the mega city you deserve. It raises the number of tiles that can be unlocked for construction from a vanilla 25 to a whopping 81. It’s been updated quite a bit over a long period of time and is compatible with all Cities DLC at this time. With this mod, a city’s limit will be yours to push to your heart’s content.
KVB Building - 4x4 Lvl3 Office / Created by tony_r_68 (Zed68)
A massive capital of industry and progress deserves a massive skyscraper that will serve as a glorious highlight in the skyline. This 4x4 office building is a growable behemoth that will light up the night of your office district and provide you with a great workflow. Add to your city with architecture they can be proud of, day or night.
Map Editor: Tunnel Pieces / Created by agusingnavy
Mountains and hills: they sure are pretty to look at, but they can be just as tedious to build around can’t they? Not anymore. This mod allows you to lay tunnels that can connect between different ends of an elevated area. You can run your tunnels straight or curved as well. Truthfully, it’s kind of silly that this isn’t already a normal feature in the game anyways.
Elevated Stops Enabler / Created by BloodyPenguin
A rather simple yet useful mod. Do you find yourself with a city packed full of elevated roadways and find yourself wishing you had a way to utilize bus stops on them? Then this might be what you’re looking for. It allows your buses to take in and release passengers on elevated roads, adding just a little bit of extra versatility to your route planning.
Monaco with Provence Theme / Created by MrMiyagi
Are you ready to build the second smallest country and one of the most illustrious microstates in the world? You’re going to be. This isn’t just a new starter map, there are a ton of retextures and terrain set-ups here to ensure that your Monaco can be as close to the real thing as you want it to be. From the sandy beaches to the verdant cliffs to the built-in route for you to create the Grand Prix de Monaco, you’ll find all the tools you need in this mod.
City Vitals Watch / Created by UndergroundHero
For the most part Cities: Skylines does an excellent job of telling you exactly how efficiently you’re running your ramshackle metropolis into the ground, but there’s always room for improvement. This little tweak adds a handy panel that lets you check out all your key statistics at a glance.
Automatic Bulldoze / Created by mexahuk
A nice and simple addition to your cities functionality. This mod automatically bulldozes any rundown, fire-damaged or abandoned buildings. Once you’ve got a relatively large city on the go, you’ll quickly realize how essential this relatively minor addition is.
Dynamic Resolution / Created by nlight
Cities: Skylines’ anti-aliasing is a little off, resulting in some jagged edges and an odd blurring effect. This fix renders the game at a higher resolution that it supports. It then downscales everything a cleaner, sharper image to fit your native resolution. The end result will allow players with beefy gaming setups to run the game at 4K or higher.
Tree Brush / Created by Destroyer
This is another really simple little tweak that makes a big difference. Planting trees one by one is really annoying and tedious. This mod circumvents the pain by allowing you to use a paint tool to draw woods and forests onto your city map. It’s the difference between using a tiny arts and crafts paint brush and using a big, thick paint roller. After all, why the heck should it be so hard to get that verdant forest you want near your lovely city?
First-Person Camera / Created by nlight
Once you’ve created your lovely city, packed full of activity, industry, and commercialism, you’ll want to take a good look at it, right? This mod gives you total control over the camera, letting you get down and intimate in the streets of your urban sprawl. Combine this with the Dynamic Resolution mod for some awesome sightseeing.
Chirpy Exterminator / Created by simssi
I had nothing against Skyline’s mock social media app Chirpy the first few times I played the game, but after a while I began to fantasize about feeding him beak-first into one of my city’s efficiently-run garbage compactors. This mod removes Chirpy and his social media buzz from the game, saving you and I the trouble.
Traffic Report Tool / Created by LisaLionheart
At first, you can get way with some slapdash traffic management in Skylines, but the bigger your city becomes the harder it is to prevent backed-up roads and clogged intersections. This mod doesn’t stop that happening, but it does allow you to trace the source of a traffic jam, making it easier to employ a quick fix.
CitizenTracker / Created by CNightwing
Certainly, we as humans are civilized creatures. When folks complain, coming to a reasonable solution is the logical course of action. When folks complain a little too much, it’s time to remind them who runs the city. This mod allows players to tag a citizens as a person of interest. Then you can track their movements. It makes for a useful statistic when a citizen of dissenting opinion goes to work and returns to find their home demolished and a landfill built in its place.
And there you have it for now. Granted, there are mountains of free additions available for Cities: Skylines, but we took the liberty to pick, choose, and peruse the latest and greatest that is available for your city-building enjoyment at this time. It’s always worth popping back to the game’s Steam Workshop page every now and then, though. That said, we hope you’ll enjoy what we picked out and invite you to return as we continue to update this page with the best and the brightest mods available.
