20 Absolutely Essential Cities Skylines Mods & How to Use Them

[Music] hello welcome back to city planner plays a comment that i receive more than almost any other in the comments is what mods do i recommend so today i'm going to deliver and i'm going to finally provide you with my top 20 mods for beginners just starting out with the game i'm going to show you the basics on how to use each of the mods and provide you with a workshop collection so that you can just download these mods easily and give them a try yourself i'll also be listing them in the order of importance in my opinion so without any further ado let's jump right in so first up is a vital mod in my mind and that is city vitals watch so if you look at this little icon right here and you click on it it's pretty simple what it does is give you your vital city information your electricity availability water availability and so on and so forth so i think that this is incredibly useful to keep an eye on what's happening in your city and you can add a whole bunch of other things to this to see how your city is doing and it can help you diagnose issues with your city and you know employment percentage things that you'd have to go to and look within the city statistics normally to figure out what's going on you'd be able to do with this mod so it's it's very very useful and you can see right here for instance that my university availability is is in the red in this particular city number two one of my favorite mods move it so this mod can do some really basic things and some really complicated things so for the basic things you can select a node and kind of move it wherever you like and maybe this isn't the most uh useful location for that but there are some locations where it would be incredibly useful so for instance if i wanted to clean up this interchange at all i could easily do that with move it so let's say i wanted to move this over just a little bit then i could clean this up kind of improve the look of it and probably the most useful thing i could select those nodes and use page down that's what i have it set to anyway to lower things and this can really make some of the the assets that come with the game look a lot better because this is pretty unreasonable the way that it's initially set up for you so you can you can do a little bit of uh playing with it with this and just make things look a lot better maybe this isn't perfect but it's certainly pretty good so the other thing that you can do with this so let's say i got this here i'm happy with it even though i'm not um you could also say well right so i move this the pillars in the wrong spot and move the pillar so it's it's pretty neat you can rotate that around by holding on the right mouse button and uh you know really clean things up a bit so there's a lot of a lot of good functionality here but the functionality i think that a lot of people really really enjoy is the ability to slope things so right here for instance the slope is kind of ugly i would be able to select nodes in this bridge come over here to the toolbox and slope objects now that's probably not the best place for that slope because i don't think a train could make it through but well that's not going to work either well so you maybe this isn't the best location to demonstrate it either but that's the kind of thing you could do this might be a a better place to show yeah so just kind of smooth things out so if you're on a particularly hilly map it can be a complete godsend to be able to do this so it's it's certainly something that is is beneficial there are a number of other things you can do with the tool as well you can uh select things to duplicate them so let's say you selected some nodes and now you want to duplicate those duplicate in place and now i could place another one of those right next to it if i wanted to so very very very useful next up is another tool that's almost equally as useful and that's fine road anarchy so sometimes you'll get a situation where you just you know that you need to make a connection that you just can't make because the game says no can't do that turn on fine road anarchy and now you can do whatever you want so you can make connections that aren't right if you have move it on at the same time you can make some connections that the game would otherwise not allow you to make and that can be incredibly useful depending on on what you're doing so i i find this to be very very beneficial next up is one of my very very very favorite mods and it's it's a mod that many people probably think is pretty pretty frivolous but let's take a look so normally when you have a road if you don't have a fence there you get the zoning uh that's gonna be there but if you have the zoning tool set what you're able to do then is actually take a look at one of these roads click on this toggle zone zoning update and then just click on the road and it will get rid of all the zoning in between those nodes so that can be really helpful if you want to take an arterial and turn it into uh you know kind of an extension of your highway or even have a collector that doesn't have uh the same amount of zoning on it so this can be really helpful so here for instance i could say i don't want anything zoned along here i want everything to front the other road now where this is really useful is let's say i want to build a road here now this is breaking runway hierarchy obviously i wouldn't do this but you'll see that it's dividing the zoning between the arterial and this local road if i turn off the zoning here you'll see that i get bigger districts along the local road so this can be a way that if you're not going to maintain roadway hierarchy that you can improve traffic flow by improving your land use designations next is network extensions 2 and you can see right here that i've got some roads that are not available in the vanilla game and this is a great way to get all of those roads into your game it just it offers a variety of roads these narrower alleys it offers a variety of asymmetrical roads a narrow collector for instance that i love to use which is great for retrofitting if you realize that you maybe should have had a collector through here you could go through and add this collector road now keep in mind you're going to want this to function like a collector so if you do do that you're going to want to go through and modify your uh your stop signs and your traffic controls to make sure that this is now functioning like a collector but this network extensions too allows you to do that and there are a variety of different uh different roadway types that are available in there bigger highways things of that nature so it's a great mod so the next mod that i'm going to take a look at is a little bit different than the other ones and this mod is ultimate level of detail so what i love about this mod if you go into options you take a look at ultimate level of detail is it allows you to change the drawing distance of certain types of objects in the game so let's say you have a very powerful machine and want to be able to show trees from a very far away distance you could increase the distance there let's say you don't like some of the props you could minimize those or increase them and improve the loading now you'll see that this is really i mean i i set this way too high and it's taxing my machine which is a pretty pretty beefy rig so i'll take this down so the game default is 425 meters i like to increase that a little bit same thing with props and you'll see that everything's running a lot more smooth i gained about 15 frames a second now if you had a rig that wasn't quite as as beefy as this one you could take this down and it'll you'll suffer with quality but i just gained five frames a second by taking down my my tree loading distances so it's it's a very useful mod to improve the aesthetics of the game uh uh or to decrease the aesthetics to gain some frames per second next is dynamic resolution now i really really really love this mod what this allows you to do is if you push f10 it'll bring up this dynamic resolution menu and this is going to do a couple things for you so if we look in at the city you can see that things look pretty good we're in 4k right now but i could make things look even better and it'll it'll tell me my frames per second the hit i'm going to take so i took about a two frame per second hit to really improve the graphics but things just look awesome right now things are really really crisp and clear now if my machine couldn't handle this i could also degrade this take this back down to 4k you'll see it's a little bit jankier and if i reduce this even further i could take a take a visual hit but really generally improve my performance now it's not really improving things for me so i'll either keep it at 100 or when i'm recording sometimes i will kick it up as high as 200 so that it's really smooth so the next mod that i absolutely love is camera positions utility and the reason why i say that this is a either a 20 or 21 mod uh tutorial is you need two mods for this one so what this mod does is it allows you to zoom way way in and you can get right to street level or you can zoom way way out and get as far away as you want and this is this is incredibly useful but one of the things that you'll need to enable with this or i guess you don't need to but it's it's helpful is the shadow distance fix this actually has an impact on the way shadows look and you can kind of see it in the background over here so it's improve increasing my shadow distance so that when i'm zooming in and out i still have those nice shadows again this is one that could have an impact on your frames per second so you'd want to make sure that you're right sizing this with your setup next i want to take a look at a mod that can really help you out or improve the aesthetic of your game and that's hide it so this one is again in the options menu and you look at hide it and you can disable a whole bunch of stuff here so let's say you don't like chirper chirper's gone let's say you don't want to see the bulldoze button because you're adventurous now it's gone so there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can get rid of but what i'm really interested in are the objects and props because this can improve your fps so get rid of seagulls get rid of wildlife if you don't want to see that get rid of smoke or steam you can get rid of things like solar panels abandoned or destroyed cars you can also add things in that maybe you don't have enabled so this can really help you out you can also get rid of some other stuff that i think is is really interesting so ruining of trees and props that's the sort of thing that you see in industrial areas so i just enabled those so now if you take a look at these trees in the industrial area they look totally fine so let's go back down and take a look you'll see that i can get rid of some of the effects associated with the game too so let's say i want to get rid of edge fog distance fog you could also get rid of polluted area to get rid of that purplish destroyed area pollution and now look this dirty industrial area is already looking better the ground is still a little purplish let's see if we can get rid of that too so you go over here to grass ground pollution color you can get rid of that and now you can see that there is no funky ground color so this can really improve the aesthetic of the area you can also do what i just did that is get rid of the ground color for areas with trees you can do the same thing with fertile land as well so let's say i wanted to get rid of that turn off the fertility color and now the ground looks normal so you can just you can get rid of a lot of things i know that things that people don't like are like the ads and billboards neons logos smoke steam hvac systems little things like that can really have a big impact and you can see i've actually gained fps by doing this just a couple it's like two or three but it all makes a difference so it's it's certainly a mod that can can make a pretty big difference so the next mod i want to talk about is picker so that's this little eyedropper icon you click on it and what it allows you to do is click on an item and make a copy of it this is really helpful if you've used network extensions and have lots of different road types let's say i want to take that collector that i used over there and use it again over here now because i've used picker i quickly select it say i want to use this fence now i have this fence available to me it's a really nice quality of life mod that makes building a lot quicker so it's it's it's a it's a very helpful next i want to take a look at extra landscaping tools so what this allows you to do is it gives you this panel over here that gives you a whole range of landscaping tools so you can pick a bigger brush size and go through and use that to make your improvements it also gets rid of the the amount of soil that you have available to use so that can be really helpful if you find yourself bumping up against the limits for for soil availability or or whatnot but you got to be careful with this one because if you're not you can make mistakes like that so certainly one that i find incredibly useful it also allows you to place things like sand so that can improve the aesthetic of an area like this obviously you got to use it gingerly i just went hog wild there but it allows you to to to make some improvements that you otherwise couldn't make in the game but beyond that it also gives you access to this water tool so rather than for for instance in this area using this fresh water pump i could turn that off use this water tool place a spawning point and use that to actually fill in this area and now you'll see that i've created this water spawning point you can also use that to get rid of water water spawning points if in your game you're having issues with them so very very very useful tool use it uh use it well otherwise you'll get stuff like this so the next tool is probably one that i get more questions about than any other tool so that's the prop line tool this is a simple tool that gives you the same sorts of tools you'd have with roads with props so i use this a lot with trees it allows you to make a nice straight line of trees so if you want to tree line a road it's it's very useful there i use it in roundabout so there's a circle tool you can click in the center and head to the edges and make a nice even circle of trees if you keep it activated you can create circles of props that are that are similar and it really can make creating an attractive roundabout or doing your landscaping very very easy so it's it's a great tool so it's important to note that without prop anarchy you're not going to be able to build uh trees within a road but if you do have prop anarchy on you'd be able to place them anywhere regardless of collision errors just something to keep in mind so the next tool i want to look at is ultimate eye candy and the way that you toggle this one is you push control u shift u sorry and uh it allows you to do a whole bunch of stuff so first of all you see that my time of day is disabled so i'm going to go in to my game play and uh turn on time of day by using day and night cycle what that's going to do is give me a whole bunch of control so i can make this night i can increase the the frequency that we're going from day to night decrease it so i use this on a lot of my cinematics you can also change the latitude and longitude which can make the place feel more tropical or more boreal just uh however you want to approach it you can also increase the the light intensity which can make a desert area for instance feel a little bit more natural by increasing some of these the global light and the ambient light the other thing that you can do is go in and change the weather you can make it rain make it really rain turn off rain blur turn off weather all together and have fog i also love that you can change the lut in here so let's say you want to change the entire feeling of the area you could do that quickly through this through this menu and then you can save a preset so that when you're going into your save you're loading it up the right way so it's a very very useful tool to improve the look of your game so my next tool is relatively straightforward so earlier i made a mistake with my landscaping so let's say i meant to go down but i went up and that that's a huge mistake i can push ctrl z with undo it and undo it so the next tool is really helpful if you like roundabouts so let's say you're taking a look and you see that there's a roundabout needed right here well let's let's get this ready for a roundabout we'll delete this stuff around here and now i just push ctrl o and my roundabout builder comes up now with the builder you can make a whole bunch of adjustments and get it to your liking then you find your node that you want to build around about it has to be an intersection uh or no it doesn't it just has to be a node and you click on it and it automatically builds a roundabout for you now you do have to keep a couple things in mind it could break things like this this wouldn't be the greatest place for a roundabout because there's the tram coming through i'd need to fix that but uh it quickly allowed it allows you to quickly make a roundabout with very little thought perfectly circle uh and you can use any type of road you want to make that roundabout uh by changing your road type here so the next tool is probably the second most asked about tool that i use and that is toggle it toggle it's very useful in my mind so let's say you have everything toggled off [Music] well first of all let's back up if you go into your options you can actually change what your toggles do so you could toggle on notification icons district names icons borders contour lines and zoning and this is very very very helpful so let's say i want to look at contour lines you see i just toggled those on quickly i can toggle on a zoning grid so if i'm in here toggle it on toggle it off so it gives you the ability to look at your city without all of the noise so i find it to be very useful i also like that i have the ability to turn on contour lines district names and different things like that so i think it's a very useful tool this is really a quality of life tool because you can accomplish most of this through the info views if you really wanted to with the exception of obviously toggling the zoning like this the next mod is the 81 tile mod and i like this one because it allows you to purchase more tiles now i don't have tiles unlocked to be able to to unlock but when i do i'd be able to continue purchasing them out into the ether basically so right with the base game you're limited on the number of tiles that you could purchase and this allows you to basically purchase the entire map which can be really useful like let's say i wanted to be able to develop a park on this volcano this would allow me to actually purchase this area at some point in the future and build a park so it's it's very very very useful the next mod i want to take a look at is one that everyone loves and that is traffic manager presidential edition now i don't have this higher on the list because this adds a level of complexity to the game that can be very difficult for a lot of people so it allows you to turn off the spawning if you want to see what will happen if vehicles never despawn you can see if you get massive massive massive traffic backups it will also allow you to do a couple interesting things so if you have an issue where you know that you have remedied a potential problem you can clear all the traffic in your city to start fresh to allow things to start anew and you can see that when you go here it raised my average traffic flow things are going to come back to normal but it clears all of the traffic the other thing that you can do with this tool that's pretty neat in my mind is it gives you priority signals so if you're using the priority signals in traffic manager make sure that you're using only these don't use the the ones built into the game but allows you to have yield or give way signs so that's really useful the next thing it allows you to do that i really like is add parking restrictions so if you don't want anyone parking on a particular road you can disable that and it cars will actually move as you do this because they gotta park somewhere so it just allows you to have a little bit more uh fine grain control over your city like right here if i don't want anyone parking by those tram locations i can it allows you to set the speed limit so here for instance this is way too fast in this roundabout i could say the speed limit is now 45 in the roundabout that's still really fast probably say let's take it down to 25 and you can hold shift to apply this to the entire road segment so you could theoretically go through and start slowing cars down as they enter the roundabout and increase the capacity of this roundabout by doing so so it's it's very useful another thing that you can do with this tool is go into the lane connector and let's say you want this outer lane to not only be a turn lane but also be a through lane you could set it to do that you could allow the drivers to come into either lane force them into one of the lanes and really diagnose some some pretty challenging traffic issues in that way one of the other things you could do is you could force cars to switch lanes if that's something that you're interested in so i don't do that all that often i think that most of the time when you do that you create problems that otherwise wouldn't have been there but you can also remedy some stuff let's see you notice that there are cars switching into a lane arbitrarily you could change this to make sure that they're they're switching correctly and get rid of some of these weird things where you know you have someone being able to turn to the middle lane into this road now i'm forcing them to only go straight and this will fix itself after a little while it's it's a situation where you might want to clear traffic if you have a huge backup the next thing you could do is you could use lane arrows so that allows you to go in and actually modify the lane arrows so not super useful in a situation like this but for instance at this intersection i could change it so that when i'm looking at this it allows the second lane to to to make that left hand turn disable the through lane so now i have a dual left hand turn here which could be really beneficial if there were a lot of traffic trying to make a left-hand turn here so it's it gives you a level of granularity that is incredibly incredibly helpful you also have time traffic lights so you could take some traffic lights and uh set up a try timed traffic signal uh so that's that's one thing that you could do that could improve a situation that has a lot of backup where you know that people are taking a certain route or you could just toggle the traffic lights all together in in a particular area um and what this is like i mentioned if you're using this tool to control your traffic you should only use this tool not use this in the built-in game tools so a lot that you can do here one of the other things that you can do is if you click on a roundabout you can go over here and automatically apply roundabout configurations which will help you your roundabout move and operate a little bit a little bit nicer a little bit it'll flow a little bit better wow have despawning up and you can see that it is causing some backups let's take a look at our traffic real quick whoa gnarly certainly some uh some adjustments that would need to be made to the city to make this work appropriately so number 19 is a little bit different than the other mods because this is one that you actually take advantage of before you enter the game and that is the loading screen mod so with this mod when you click load rather than seeing the traditional loading screen you see this screen and what this screen does is uh lets you know if there are any assets that are that are broken uh lets you know your ram utilization so if you uh you don't have enough ram you'll be able to tell in this screen because the amount of ram needed to load into the game will be far greater than the ram you have available the other thing that you will uh the other advantage of this is it actually reduces your uh your loading time so it's it's it's uh by by minimizing the range so it's it's a very useful mod it can also kick out uh reports for you so it's a very neat mod and last but not least is a mod that i think is an absolute godsend and that is uh instant return to desktop so it doesn't show up here but what it oh actually i apologize it does uh what it allows you to do is actually immediately leave the game so if you have made a bunch of uh if you have a bunch of mods in your game and you go to exit sometimes it can take a minute or two to actually leave the game and if you have this mod enabled you will leave immediately so i'm not gonna do that because it'll mess up my recording but uh that is what it does so i hope that you found this useful if you did please consider hitting the like button if you are not yet subscribed to my channel please consider doing so and hit the notification bell if you want to be notified when i release new videos especially videos like this one thank you so much for joining me and i will see you in the next one bye-bye uh you

Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 442,600

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Id: g59WPTgpCcY

Length: 29min 4sec (1744 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021