What are the best Cities Skylines mods? Colossal Order’s city builder is a prospective civil engineer’s dream come true. It’s been a staple of the genre for many years, and the modding community has flourished in that time. Today, thousands of Cities Skylines mods are available on the game’s Steam Workshop page, making it understandably daunting to find the best ones.
Luckily, you have us. We’ve handpicked a suite of the best Cities Skylines mods that are guaranteed to breathe new life into the building game. Whether you’re a casual builder or a hardcore city planner, you’re sure to find something to tickle your fancy, so without further ado, here are the best mods for Cities Skylines.
The 22 best Cities Skylines mods and maps right now are:
Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited
This one is for those hardcore players who really take their cities seriously. The Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited mod from algernon and Chamëleon TBN overhauls the game’s aging, immigration, and lifecycle system to give players more realistic results.
In the base game, children immediately went to school after being born. In real life, you might struggle to put newborns through the education system, but now with this mod, they will only go to school when they reach the age of six, and that age is customizable too. Check out the mod to find out all the upgrades made to the lifecycle system as there are far too many to list here.
Prop and Tree Anarchy
If you’re the type of player that wants absolute control over their city, then you’re going to want to download the Prop and Tree Anarchy mod by BloodyPenguin. This mod does exactly what it says, it allows you to cause anarchy by giving you the ability to place props and trees wherever you like. Of course, if you’re careful about where you place these objects, you can make your city look much nicer without causing any issues.
Movable Bridge Mod
The Movable Bridge Mod allows you to build various kinds of dynamic bridges that actually move. It may appear to be a purely aesthetic choice, but having a non-static water crossing could breathe a bit of life into your city and give it a sense of dynamism that it may have been missing.
Move It
As you can probably guess from the name, the Move It mod is an incredibly useful mod that allows you to pick up and move anything. By simply left-clicking on an item, you can move it anywhere, as demonstrated by the video above. Want to move multiple things at the same time? Simply shift-click them all before moving. Every tiny detail of your city can be placed with utter perfection with this mod.
Extra Landscaping Tools
If you’ve ever wanted more precise landscaping tools, then the Extra Landscaping Tools mod could be the perfect addition to your city-building exploits. This mod has configurable pencils that allow you to make incredibly specific tree, bush, prop, and even water stamps that you can then place around easily.
Change the size and shape of the area to be able to place multiple trees at once, and alter the strength of the brush to determine how dense the placement is. Extra Landscaping Tools make you work smarter, not harder.
Traffic Manager
Traffic is one of the most complex aspects of Cities Skylines. For a successful city to thrive, you naturally need your roads to be safe for drivers and pedestrians alike. Whether you’re a driver or not in real life, deciding how your roads and junctions should operate in Cities Skylines can be a complicated and time-consuming task, but the Traffic Manager mod helps make these decisions easier.
Simple switches allow you to test out and swap between traffic lights, timed traffic lights, and priority signs at busy junctions, letting you clearly see which works best. The speed limit option also allows you to easily switch between speeds on very specific sections of road, again testing out the results easily and quickly. Simply put, the Traffic Manager mod just streamlines anything to do with roads.
Electric Roads
Providing your city with power is an essential step to growth, and is often a foundational aspect of your infrastructure. The most common method to spread power, at least at first, is through the use of unsightly power lines. The Electric Roads mod allows you to ditch the power poles by making the roads themselves a conductor. It’s a brilliant quality-of-life mod that keeps your city beautiful and powered all at once.
Loading Screen Mod
As far as quality-of-life mods go, the Loading Screen Mod is dang near essential. Most notably, it cuts download times significantly. Installing several mods can bog down the simulation game’s performance, but the use of the Loading Screen Mod allows you can automatically load the assets present in your city. Many users have reported load times much faster than the base game’s notoriously slow load time, which makes this mod a fantastic addition to your arsenal.
Roundabout Builder
Traffic management is one of Cities: Skyline’s paramount challenges. Maintaining smooth flow through the use of one-way streets and freeway connections is almost a puzzle game in itself. Roundabouts are a fantastic way to alleviate heavy traffic, and this Roundabout Builder mod makes building them a breeze. A simple press of CTRL+O and all your traffic-related headaches will disappear.
Bulldoze It!
Sometimes buildings burn down and are abandoned, or otherwise become unsightly and undesirable. With Bulldoze It!, these buildings are automatically removed from the city without having to manually delete them yourself. It’s a great quality-of-life mod that lets you direct your focus to something other than abandoned buildings.
The Agricultural Field Collection
If Cities: Skylines isn’t agricultural enough for you, take a look at this Agricultural Field Collection mod collection’s suite of fields. There are five different fields to choose from, each lending a quaint countryside feel to your city. They don’t require any upkeep, and don’t attract any visitors — these are strictly visual eye candy meant to give some color to otherwise metropolitan cities.
Quad
Are you bored by a dumb ol’ regular city? Do you yearn for the dystopian skyline of Blade Runner? Download the Quad collection and your city will leap straight into the future. The collection also includes many modern buildings, but who wants to mess with those when you can have a near-future Los Angeles?
81 Tiles 2
If you’re looking to expand beyond the 25 tiles the base game allocates to you, then check out this 81 Tiles 2 mod. You’ll be able to unlock 81 tiles of a map, allowing you to build in any direction from the get-go. Keep in mind that this is an enormous area to cover, but a canvas that big is sure to produce some incredible art. If you’ve already downloaded 81 Tiles, we recommend picking this latest version, with better performance and few bug fixes.
Timboh’s Marvelous Interchange Emporium
Once your city grows large enough, you’re eventually going to have to address freeway connections and how they move drivers in and out of the city. Timboh’s Interchange Emporium comes complete with a host of prefabricated freeway interchanges, all based on real-life examples. Clovermills, turbines, diverging windmills — this Cities Skylines mod collection has it all. The best part is that not only are the interchanges very efficient, but they’re also a ton of fun to look at.
Canal Blocks
In vanilla Cities: Skylines, building a canal involves a great deal of terraforming and careful planning. With the Canal Blocks mod, though, putting together a canal network is a snap, literally. The collection includes many canal shapes and sizes that you can use to increase the value of adjacent homes — ideal for your Venice Beach or Amsterdam recreations.
Ultimate Skyscraper Collection
Have you ever wanted to add Die Hard’s Nakatomi Plaza to your city? How about the Avengers Tower? Now you can as this Ultimate Skyscraper collection provides you with access to a host of skyscrapers that put the skyline in Cities Skylines mods. It’s not just fictional buildings either: real-world locations like Sears Tower and Seattle’s Space Needle can be found in this impressive collection.
Real World Locations
The beauty of the modding community surrounding Cities: Skylines is its diversity. There are a ton of collections and mods that allow you to build based on your preference for architecture and your favorite cities worldwide. With these mods, you can model your city after Brooklyn, France, Russia, Central Europe, China, Japan, and more. The creativity of the Cities: Skylines player base is truly staggering.
Chirpy Exterminator
This Chirpy Exterminator mod does so little but changes so much. As the author puts it, Chirpy Exterminator “gets rid of Chirpy, the bird we all love to hate”. Alternatively, you can make Chirpy a little more useful by modding it so it reads out all the latest from your favorite sub-reddit.
Real World Cities Maps
Think you can do better than the real-world city planners of yore? This Real World Cities Maps collection lets you try your hand at redesigning one of hundreds of real cities, from Ancona, Italy to Zakopane, Poland.
Zion
This Zion mod is based on Zion National Park and challenges you to deface, debase, and disgrace one of the world’s natural treasures by turning it into a functioning city. With steep mountains, seasonal water flow changes, and very little flat ground, this is no mean feat.
Mission to Mars
You can either play this map as a scenario, where you’ll need to develop a human colony on the red planet and a space elevator. Or you can just download the Mission to Mars mod and enjoy your usual city planning deeds in an extraterrestrial setting.
Skyrim Map
If it’s a fictional setting you’re after, then why not try to build your dream city on Skyrim’s map with the Skyrim Map mod? We always felt that Whiterun could be improved by a spaghetti junction or landfill site.
What we’ve listed here is just a small sample of the thousands of Cities Skylines mods available on the Steam Workshop. Mods can drastically change the way we play single player games, and in the case of a simulation games like Cities Skylines, you’ll find plenty of mods to improve your gameplay experience. Speaking of cities, if you’ve moved to the sequel, check out our Cities Skylines 2 mods guide to enhance that game instead.