Hi, it's Ola. First time speaking to you today.
I would like to show you my favorite 15 mods that are, for me, essential to have a satisfying
gameplay. They are still fantastic in 2024, and I use them all simultaneously with
no compatibility issues whatsoever. This is not a tutorial, just a brief overview. As
mods can mess up with your performance a little bit, I recommend a great guide which tells
you in detail how to boost your performance, graphics, etc. It basically
saved my unplayable cities. Okay, let's start then. We
will start with gameplay. Great mod, which is essential if you use a lot of assets. It speeds up your loading time and
provides a screen that tells you how much RAM your game uses and which assets are broken or
missing. If you have trouble loading your save, it can help you restore it. It has an option
to generate an HTML report that you can scroll through to check which assets are heavy on
your save. It also allows you to load the game only with the assets you've previously
used. That's how the loading screen looks. 81 Tiles This totally fits my gameplay style. I
was frustrated with the normal 25 tiles, starting in the middle of the city and building
an industrial zone or sewage pump right on the coolest central part of the map. As you can
see, you can either unlock 25 center tiles or go big and choose 81. This is a small vanilla
map, but you can go big with custom ones. It just generally gives you more realism, and I
didn't notice it being extra heavy on my FPS. City Skylines' traffic system is usually
a mess with blocked highways, messed up roundabouts, and crazy intersections. This mod
allows you to do almost everything you can think of regarding traffic management. The options panel
is huge, and I recommend playing with it. Options regarding realistic parking or reckless drivers
are especially cool. You can control traffic lights, including timed traffic lights, line the
roads, set speed limits, specify vehicle types, and stop limits. There are tons of
separate guides about it on YouTube, but with some experience, I completely got
rid of my traffic issues. If you mess up, you can start again by simply
clearing all the traffic altogether. Realistic Population
This mod overrides the vanilla simulation system for more realistic gameplay. It helps you with
the management of schools, workplaces, taxes, and basically everything. You no longer find massive
skyscrapers with only five households, while tiny houses accommodate five people. It calculates the
capacity of each building individually based on floors, etc. As you can see on the school panel,
it changes the simulation pattern slightly, so I really recommend implementing this mod on a new
save or at the very early stages of gameplay. The Industries DLC was one of my favorite City
Skylines DLCs as it added realism and more dimension to my city. This mod, similar to the
previous one, overrides the industrial system, meaning the number of trucks, their capacity,
and the capacity of warehouses and factories. It also affects production speed and
rate, as well as worker management. Bonus points for helping with crazy industry
traffic, as you can see in this comparison. Improved Public Transport 2
There are a few transport mods out there, but this is my favorite.
It's not overly complicated and has all the essential tools I need. It adds
several options to transport management, allowing you to customize each line and check
your stops. It helped me better adjust the number of vehicles on certain lines according
to their popularity. It lets you modify and batch times so buses or other means of transport
are spread evenly and not just queued up at one bus stop. It helps you play with vehicle types,
especially if you are asset-obsessed like me and can't imagine ugly vanilla buses around your
town, as well as their speed and capacity. Now let's get to what we love the most about
this game: building. It was hard to choose the essential mods, but let's go. You won't
do much without Anarchy mods in this game. This one adds a little panel that lets you do
a lot. Not only can you create crazy spaghetti junctions, but you can also ignore any game
limits. I'm talking about collision, slope, shoreline requirements, or the annoying automatic
snapping to nodes. You can switch between ground, bridge, or tunnel modes whenever you want, set
one fixed height for the road, and much more. It's simple yet powerful. Apart from Network Anarchy,
check out Tree and Prop Anarchy, which I'll mention in another video where I will present
mods that add small tweaks to your game. This mod, along with Move It, transforms
the aesthetics of my entire city. Initially, the game was created to use zoning options,
which is cool and speeds things up, but you risk getting totally random, ugly buildings.
With RICO, you get a completely new tab that allows you to place buildings individually,
browse between different kinds of buildings, their specialities, or sizes. I also like using
the Find It mod, which is a hidden gem that allows me to immediately search for the asset I'm
interested in. I really like the RICO panel, which, to be honest, I haven't explored much yet,
but it has options regarding the categories of buildings, modifying the level of the building,
or even changing their type. Mostly, I use the workers tab that helps me assess the number of
workers more realistically. You can also cheat a bit and change a building type, for example, to
industrial if you need more industry development. Just be aware that it can spawn weird trucks
in the middle of your luxurious city center. Move It
This is such a classic. It complements RICO perfectly and is a
must-have if you want to level up your gameplay. As the name suggests, it lets you move things
around, which is already huge, as well as align, mirror, and adjust the height of stuff you
place. It works on any type of building, prop, network, tree, etc. I can't imagine my gameplay
without it. It will be especially useful if you plan to build a European city, which I have
never done, with all those tenement houses. It also works with procedural objects to
quickly align something on the three axes. Precision Engineering Another classic mod since City Skylines
1 didn't have all the cool engineering options, like angle adjustment, that
are in CS2. We had to do weird stuff to get things right. Building a roundabout was a
challenge without this. It's simple yet essential. Extra Landscaping Tools
You might have noticed a pattern here: mods came to save us from all of CS1's imperfections.
If you started with CS2 and downgraded to CS1, you will need some of the tools I mentioned. This is
one of them. Compared to vanilla, it gives you way more control over landscaping. It has a built-in
tree brush, which is pretty simple, a water and resources tool, and makes simple landscaping
much better. You can set the custom terrain height as well as undo any modification, which
I think isn't the case in the basic game. Okay then we will finish with graphics
slash visual mods. First.. BOB.This is actually my most recent addition. It has a few
options, but the one I use the most is the tree replacer. It allows you to change the trees
on the whole map with a different type, no matter if you want to go from vanilla
to custom or vice versa. Additionally, you can replace the trees placed in networks
with a few extra options or edit the type of trees on a chosen lot. It just adds that extra
touch. A disclaimer: be mindful of your FPS. There are a few graphic mods out there, but this
is the easiest one to use in my opinion. I highly recommend downloading a LUT pack of your choice.
I use Relight 2. Ultimate Eyecandy gives you a tab with a few options. It allows you to change the
vibe of your city right away, adjust the weather, or completely turn it off if you're annoyed by
the ugly rain. It has a few basic lighting options regarding the sun, and what's cool is that you can
adjust the speed of the days. In my understanding, it does not affect simulation, just the visual
aspect. You can completely block the change of time too. It's the simplest way to load the
LUT and make your game more visually pleasing. Relight
Complementing Ultimate Eyecandy perfectly, this mod allows for rebalanced lighting and
tone mapping. The window pops up, and you can play around with different settings. These are my
settings that work great with Relight 2. Alpine. I think I copied most of my graphic settings from
a video that should pop up in your right corner. I highly recommend it if you want a guide on
how to make your city look more realistic. This is the last but not least of the mods I
mentioned today. This mod gives you a simple way to change how your game looks. It affects
performance, so play around with the perfect settings. These are mine if you want to take a
screenshot and copy them from the creators. This mod enables you to increase the render distance
of detailed tree, prop, building, and network models. I've noticed that it's way less heavy on
performance than similar mods, but you have to be careful. You know what, I'm not sure if I can
really describe it—just look at the comparison. And that's all, guys. These
were my most essential mods, but I plan to post a future video with mods
that add extra tweaks to your gameplay. So, stay tuned for that. Give this video a like
if you enjoyed it, and until next time!
