Cities: Skylines is a prospective civil engineer’s dream come true. It’s been a staple city-builder for a few years now, and in that time the modding community has turned its sharp eyes and impressive creativity to the city builder and management sim in a big way. Today, there are literally thousands and thousands of Cities: Skylines mods available on the game’s Steam Workshop page, which makes it understandably daunting to find the best ones.

Luckily, you have us. We’ve gone ahead and handpicked a suite of the best Cities: Skylines mods that will make any city better and help you manage your citizens efficiently. Below you’ll find a mixture of purely aesthetic mods, and quality of life tools that will make managing, creating, and destroying a breeze. Turns out there’s quite a lot you can do with the mod tools for this building game, including killing

No matter if you’re a casual builder or a hardcore city planner, you’re sure to find something appropriate in our Cities: Skylines mod list. So, without any more preamble, here are the best mods for Cities: Skylines.

Electric Roads

I'm subscribed to a bunch of mods, which DO show up in the 'Steam Workshop' area of my content manager menu - but the 'mods' spot only shows the three default mods. Most of the mods I'm subscribed to have been updated recently, so it's not a matter of them being too old to work with the game (like Traffic Manager: President Edition, which was.

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 down load times significantly. Installing several mods can bog down the game’s performance, but with 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, or 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.

More Beautification

For those among us with an eye for detail, the More Beautification mod by modding all-star BloodyPenguin is an absolute boon. Snap satellite dishes to the roofs of houses, billboards to the side of buildings, ventilation systems atop industrial buildings, and much more. More Beautification is a perfect way to add a personal touch to your city and tidy away any clutter.

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

If you’re looking to expand beyond the 25 tiles the base game allocates to you, then check out this 81 Tiles 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 absolutely enormous area to cover, but a canvas that big is sure to produce some incredible art.

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, they’re 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 a ton of different 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 by various

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 gives you 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 of 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.

North melbourne locomotive depot signalling diagram. North Melbourne Locomotive Depot was the main location for maintenance of the Victorian Railways steam locomotive fleet based in Melbourne. Located in the middle of the Melbourne Yard precinct in the suburb West Melbourne near North Melbourne station, the site is now occupied by the Melbourne Steel Terminal.

Advanced road anarchy

Roads and complex traffic solutions are great and all, but have you ever created a loop-the-loop highway that towers above your city? The Road Anarchy and Advanced Road Anarchy mods let you throw physics to the wind and create the roadways of your dreams.

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 favourite subreddit.

Real World Cities Maps

Think you can do better than the real-world city planners of yore? This collection of Real World Cities Maps lets you try your hand at redesigning one of hundreds of real cities, from Ancona,Italy to Zakopane, Poland.

Zion

This 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 as a map and enjoy all 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.

Related: The best management games on PC

What we’ve listed here is just a small sampling of the thousands of mods available on the Steam Workshop. By no means is this list defninitive or exhaustive, just what we like to play with ourselves. Browsing the Workshop is a ton of fun, and you never know when you might discover inspiration for your next city.

Broken assets cause lots of problems – crashes, laggy gameplay, broken transport, and graphics problems.

This guide shows you how to find and eliminate them.

1. Unsubscribe known broken stuff

If you have broken mods subscribed, they’ll cause so many additional problems that it will be very difficult to find broken assets.

So, before you do anything else, unsubscribe all broken mods:

• List of broken mods[docs.google.com]

At time of writing, there are over 100 broken mods on that list. If you have any subscribed, completely unsubscribe them.

Don’t just disable them, completely unsubscribe them.

After unsubscribing mods, exit to desktop to flush them from RAM.

TM:PE team maintain lists of known broken assets:

• Roads[github.com]
• Buildings[github.com]
• Props[github.com]
• Vehicles[github.com]
• District Styles[github.com]

2. Install these mods

To track down bad assets, you will need some tools which are provided by the following mods:

• Loading Screen Mod – it can scan for broken assets
• SafeNets – fixes game bug caused by missing road assets
• Mesh Info – highlights bloated assets
• Advanced Vehicle Options or Customize It Extended – allow you to inspect vehicle capacities

Subscribe those mods (click the green “Subscribe” button on mod workshop page), then enable them.

To enable mods: From the game Main Menu, choose Content Manager, then select “Mods” in the sidebar. Find the mod and enable it.

If the mods aren’t showing in the Content Manager, try the following one at a time:

• In Steam client, log out of your Steam account, and then log back in again
• Make sure you don’t have `-noMods` or `-noWorkshop` launch options (if you do, remove them)
• If it’s still not working, see this guide[github.com] for other things to try

3. Enable reports in Loading Screen Mod

In Content Manager > Mods, locate “Loading Screen Mod” then click its Options button.

You will see a screen like this:

In the “Reporting” section, enable all options (there are two at time of writing this guide, but if you see more enable those too).

For a more comprehensive guide on Loading Screen Mod, see Performance Tuning Guide.

4. Load your save game

Load your save game in the usual way.

Your loading screen should look something like this:

Pay particular attention to the RAM section above the blue loading spinner. If it turns orange or red, it’s indicating you are low on RAM or paging file.

If you are low on RAM:

• Unsubscribe any assets and mods that you never use (Kick your subscription addiction! )
• Windows/Linux: Increase paging file / swap file size (see Hardware > Swap/Page File section in Performance Tuning Guide)
• Use Mesh Info Mod (see later in this guide) to find bloated assets and remove them
• As a last resort, buy more RAM

It is common to see the blue horizontal progress bar stall a few times during loading process. That usually occurs at about 50% and 97%. The stall at 97% is usually much longer. However, if it’s been stuck for more than 10 minutes, something is wrong, force-quit the app to get back to desktop.

If the game does load successfully, exit to desktop.

It’s now time to start trawling the log files and asset reports…

5. Asset report

The report generated by Loading Screen Mod is the first place to look.

If the game crashed while loading your save game, skip this section.

The report we want to look at is called: your city name Assets Report data and time

Double click the report to open it in your browser.

Click the asset link to open its workshop page, then look at the “Required Items” in the right sidebar.

In particular, it’s usually ‘neworks’ (roads, rails, that sort of thing) that cause asset loading problems. Sometimes they will require mods, such as “Network Extensions 2” or “Metro Overhaul Mod”. Other stuff, such as props, can be ignored – assets will always load properly even if missing props.

Tip: If you scroll towards the bottom of the report, you’ll find a section “Assets that are missing” – which lists and categorises all the missing “Required Items”.

You have a choice here. If you want to use the asset, you need to also subscribe those missing items. Otherwise, unsubscribe the asset so it’s not generating errors.

These errors are usually much more serious, although some of them can be ignored if you don’t care about the consequences.

At time of writing this guide, the following errors are reported (click for details and then decide what to do):

• Invalid LOD texture size – this can break the LODs of other assets, causing them to turn black (game will still run, but things will look ugly when zoomed out)
• Asset naming conflict – indicates a possibly broken asset
• Name changed by author – sometimes harmless, sometimes problematic. If the issue relates to a network (road, rail, path, etc) then it could break your save.
• Asset uses private asset – a required item is not publicly available. If that item is a network (road, rails, path, etc) it could break your save game. If it’s a prop, however, just ignore it.
• Very large LOD mesh – The asset can cause performance issues when camera is zoomed out. Only an issue if you see bad frame rate when zoomed out. Assets which are more regularly used (roads, rails, vehicles, cims, etc) will cause bigger problems.
• Very large LOD texture – Can cause severe visual degradation of all LODs when camera is zoomed out.

Missing “Nets” (networks: roads, rails, paths, etc) can break save games. Either subscribe them, or unsubscribe the asset that requires them.

Missing “Props” can usually be ignored. I always unsubscribe unwanted props to save RAM, so my asset report is filled with hundreds of missing props lol. The game will just ignore missing props, it doesn’t cause any problems.

Missing “Trees” – same situation as missing “Props”, the game will just ignore them.

These do not usually cause a problem. Most commonly it will be pillars or other props used in networks (roads, rails, etc). For example, a road might use the same pillar for both the elevated and bridge designs – that’s very common and normal. You can generally ignore the things in this section.

Lists any assets used in the city that are not available via the Workshop. You might see this if you download a save game from the workshop, where the user who made it had some custom assets that they forgot to publish to workshop.

The game will generally ignore them, unless they are networks (roads, rail, etc) which might cause problems. But that’s why we subscribed the SafeNets mod earlier, it solves some of those problems 🙂

You can usually ignore this huge list. Any asset not on the map will be in the list.

However, if you are running low on RAM it’s worth reading through the list to see if there’s any assets you never use which could be unsubscribed to save RAM. Note, however, some assets are part of “asset packs” – a single workshop asset can contain multiple assets. If you don’t want to get rid of the whole pack, you can disable just specific bits of the pack via Main Menu > Content Manager > Assets screen.

6. Game log file

Locate your game log file and open it in a text editor.

Some text editors (like Windows Notepad) only search from current position in file. So, between each search, make sure you scroll back to top of file (Ctrl+Home or use scroll bar) and click the first line to ensure the next search will scan the whole file.

Also, copy and paste the search strings in to the Find or Search box in your text editor, don’t type them out manually – if you make a typing mistake the search will fail.

If game crashed while loading, there are some common errors (listed below) to search for.

Search for each of the following, and if you find one click the link to get more information about what the likely cause is. The links go to the relevant troubleshooting guide, usually in the TM:PE wiki on GitHub.

Common errors:

• Could not get memory for large allocation[github.com]
• Array index is out of range[github.com]
• Object reference not set[github.com]
• RoadBaseAI.CanEnableTrafficLights[github.com]
• The given key was not present in the dictionary[github.com]

Rare errors:

• ArgumentNullException[github.com]
• GetColors(): format not supported[github.com]
• Cannot cast from source type to destination type[github.com]
• TrafficManager.Geometry.Impl.SegmentGeometry[github.com]
• Could not load file or assembly ‘TrafficManager’[github.com]
• System.StackOverflowException[github.com]

If you are still struggling to get the game loading, share your log file and post a link to it in a new topic in the main discussion forum. Be sure to add some information about where the crash occurs (loading the game, loading a save, etc) so people know what kind of problem to look for.

Note: Many of these will be reported by Loading Screen Mod.

Search for each of these in turn to identify and unsubscribe assets:

• BrokenAssetException
• System.IO.EndOfStreamException
• System.NullReferenceException
• System.BadImageFormatException
• System.FormatException
• System.IO.InvalidDataException
• Invalid dimensions
• Water facility cannot have water consumption or sewage accumulation
• FormatException: Invalid DDS Image: failed to load
• Private building cannot include roads or other net types
• wants to be a sub-building for itself

7. Mesh Info

Download anime bakugan sub indonesia. Now, assuming you are able to load a save, the next thing to scan for is just generally bloated assets.

The Mesh Info mod is the perfect tool for that. Open it up (Ctrl + M or Cmd + M) and you will see something like this:

There are two main columns to look at:

• Weight
• Texture size

Each of those columns is split in to two subcolumns:

• Left column = normal values (camera zoomed in to asset)
• Right column = LOD values (camera zoomed out from asset)

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So, you have some decision making to do (but read all of this before making decisions).

Weight:

• Big (red or yellow) weight in left column = reduces frame rate when zoomed in
• Big weight in right column = reduces frame rate when zoomed out

Textures:

• Big size in left column = eats lots of RAM
• Big size in right column = reduces frame rate when zoomed out, and could degrade graphics quality

But it depends how often the asset is used!

Let’s say you have a bloated unique building – there’s only going to be one of them on the map. Sure, if it’s super-bloaty just that one building on the map could cause problems, but otherwise you can probably ignore it.

The thing to look for is assets that are used very regularly – road vehicles, growable buildings, cims, props. A bloaty thing that’s used a lot will cause much more performance problems than a very bloaty thing that’s only used once. Let’s say you have a bloaty vehicle, and there’s 5,000 of them on the screen… you see?

8. Vehicle capacities

This is the last thing we’ll check. Vehicles with unusual capacities will break the AIs and cause them to do weird things.

Let’s take a Hearse as an example. It’s normal capacity is 10.

• Your hearse has capacity of 10, and there are 100 dead people: AI sends out 10 hearses, each of them visit 10 buildings
• Your hearse has capacity of 100, and there are 100 dead people: AI sends out 1 hearse, and it has to visit 100 buildings!!

See the problem? That huge hearse will take forever to collect 100 people.

There’s a similar problem with transport vehicles, particularly trains and busses. There is a set amount of time that cims can board a transport vehicle. If the capacity is too big, you get too many cims trying to board, which means the vehicle runs out of time but still has to wait for the extra cims to board. It gets stuck.

So, using the Advanced Vehicle Options mod, or the Customize It Extended mod, check your vehicle capacities to make sure they are similar to vanilla game capacities[github.com].

• Beginners guide to mods & assets (not my guide, but very helpful to new users)
• TM:PE Troubleshooting Guide[github.com] – any problems with traffic, go here (even if you don’t use TM:PE)

Written by aubergine18

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