Steam Workshop Tutorial for Cities: Skylines

everybody welcome back my name is yumble and today i'd like to talk to you about how i approach the steam workshop how i organize collections how i approach using mods from the steam workshop different best practices tips and tricks to get the most out of the steam workshop all of the mods and assets that you're going to see are user created or community created they're all free in the steam workshop they all get updated for free i do recommend supporting the content creators that produce this the community members that that create the mods and the assets that we all use are amazing and they deserve support in in whatever way they list in their descriptions but everything that you're looking at is is free to use but i want to show you how to get the best value out of the steam workshop let's do it the first thing i'd like to do is tell you why i use the steam workshop one it's because i bought city skylines through steam and i actually recommend that you do too here's why uh many of you probably got the game for free in other launchers from other companies that may be the case the reason that i recommend spending money on a game that you may have got for free so you can get it through steam is because the mods that you subscribe to get updated automatically so what this means is for instance we've got this recent recent mod inner city bus control from from bloody penguin i don't need this right now but i like the idea that's pretty cool here just in general these the steam workshop works on a subscription system so rather than hitting a button that says download and then moving the given mod to a folder in your file system what this does is it it does that you know you hit subscribe and it's putting the the mod file that's changing the game into a specific destination a specific file path in your system and cities can read that but what's really beautiful and and what makes it distinct with subscribing is that if bloody penguin decides to update this mod if there's an update to the game that the developer pushes and all of your mods are out of date you are going to have problems so this is great because modders are constantly creating for the workshop and also updating their mods to be compatible with the latest version of city skylines if you do this process manually you'll find yourself having to create lists of what mods you use going in re-downloading the latest version of the mod copying it to the given folder for every time the game gets updated that's insane like that's so much work if you do it in the cities workshop the steam workshop for city skylines it's automatically going to push updates to broken mods and broken assets as they come out i think that's brilliant the other beautiful thing about the steam workshop is that you've got this this dialogue going on you've got a community surrounding cities and a bunch of content creators that are making mods and assets for you to use right for for free i recommend supporting them but you also get this dialogue where you can give them feedback you can give them direct feedback on how their mod helped the game how it you know maybe caused an error how it's uh whatever you know you can you get to let them know how their mod affected your your game or ask questions i i think questions are really powerful i see a lot of mean stuff in this honestly so be nice to your content creators please they make really nice stuff and they give it to you for free so you know be kind let's talk about some best practices when using the steam workshop i strongly recommend running it in your browser so you'll see that i'm using i happen to be using google chrome here whatever your browser of choice is your web browser i would recommend using a web browser that's logged in with your steam account rather than using the steam browser i found that the steam browser is really chunky and cumbersome and not not too great at navigating in my opinion maybe some of you use the steam browser solely like there's a web browser that pops up when you go to the workshop through the the steam application down here i would recommend you can literally google cities workshop if you google the words cities workshop the first and second link that come up are going to be for the steam workshop for city skylines bookmark that and anytime you want to change your assets click that link rather than using steam i also strongly recommend i i implore you do not have the game running while you're doing this do not subscribe to mods with the game running do not unsubscribe from mods everybody says my pavement disappeared my my surface painter markings have all disappeared you did that you unsubscribed or subscribed to a mod or an asset while the game was running and it it affects things negatively because you're literally changing the file system of the game while the game is running not good you know so so don't do that that's a best practice for sure um as i said earlier the way that this works is you subscribe so you pick a given a given mod or asset assets are objects that get used in game mods are changes to the game files so two distinct things this is a mod has to be a mod the way that it works is a subscription system you subscribe to the mod and it automatically will download when you open the when you open up steam it also means it'll automatically update like i said earlier um read the description everybody there are so many there are comments in the mods themselves and then there's comments on the the stuff that i make so i make youtube videos right and i'm on steam a lot of the issues that people have when they say yumble you recommended this mod and it was it was supposed to be the greatest mod in the world but it didn't work because of some reason 99.999 of that can be avoided by reading the description read the entire description every single time you use a mod or an asset read the description and check compatibility like please make sure that it's compatible with all the mods you already use or if you find an incompatibility factor that in mentally because that's going to affect things also check the comments just like i said earlier that feedback thing that dialogue if you're seeing a lot of people having issues and you think it's kind of a credible issue that you might run into then you know go into it knowing that rather than subscribing to a to a random mod not reading the description not reading the comments coming out the other end going yumble why'd you tell me to do this when it's like oh because a lot of my responses are oh in the description it says this you should read it like i'm sorry if it sounds silly but it's not read the description also this little box over here required items these are your dependencies so this happens to require harmony which is just a general mod dependency it's kind of a it's a plug-in for unity that allows a bunch of the mods in your game to work and it's actually super duper important so ensure that you have all the required items with assets it might be ac units you know this is another single required item a lot of a lot of given mods or assets will have a series of required items okay i like that high school but it doesn't have any record doesn't suit my purposes right now how about this okay platform lite this will often be a list if you're downloading a map it'll be a list including trees and networks and everything go through if you're going to subscribe to something i recommend clicking on each one and seeing if there's sub dependencies as well this one requires custom effect loader down the rabbit hole we go and we've reached the end so in order to use this building you actually need to install the platform light which means you need to install custom effect loader so always make sure that you get the dependencies for mods and assets especially mods assets they may be optional you don't know until you know so i'd recommend getting the or at least being aware of required items for using a given mod also one one final note on this check the age of a of a given mod if you search something up and you find the coolest mod like uh i don't know it doesn't it doesn't matter i'm gonna find anything any old uh most popular all time okay move it alright here's a little known mod move it i've heard of that it was it was last updated march 8th that's amazing the this iteration was originally posted january 9th 2019 which is fine it's been at the making of this video it's about two and a half years ago that's great but it's also been updated march 8th which was only a few a month or two ago which ensures that it's compatible with the uh latest version of skylines always check these things every single time if you subscribe to something from 2015 and it says um you know the name of the mod or asset and it says uh depreciated or whatever irrelevant if in parentheses it says use new version be aware of that so check the date and double check the comments anytime you're subscribing anything old because oftentimes old things will not work in the current version of the game the game has changed so very much it's been updated so many times do yourself a favor read the description check the dependencies check the comments check the date love yourself moving on i'd like to talk about some more organizational aspects of the steam workshop i think the interface is is pretty clunky and a little bit dated but what it does is really good and you can use it to your advantage creators and users of the workshop can make what are called collections and if you want to see a given creator's collection i think my favorite way to search the workshop in fact in general is to google so check it out i'm going to type in my name and i'm not even i don't even have that many things i don't even have that many things in the workshop but you'll see within a few within a few links you'll see my steam community that's all well and good that's me workshop items so you can google your favorite creator click workshop items and you'll be able to see all of their contributions to the workshop mine are fairly modest um you know more to come probably i'm more of a video maker than a than a thing maker but i'd love to do more interchanges but this is how you can find your favorite asset creators assets very very quickly and not have to deal with the poorly optimized search the not really very optimized search of the steam workshop but here's the important button collections here so if you want to see somebody's collections a lot of people say yumble where where are all your mods and stuff they're in the collections they're linked in my about page on youtube that's how you can get here also go to the about page but these are all of my collections right so i did one for utilities and services vehicles networks transit parking maps buildings education parks page two interchanges okay where are the pictures doesn't really matter interchanges and mods the mods are the kind of the holy grail collection the rest are all assets but these are all the different uh the different things that i use so feel free to check out my stuff but you can make your own stuff is the real point let me uh let me figure out how to make a collection one second remember how i said the workshop is kind of cumbersome well welcome to it it's a little it's a little inconvenient but you go to the main page here so let's say this is the city skylines workshop page so google cities workshop and it'll be the first and second link we'll bring you here the way you create a collection is hover over browse click collections and then create a collection a reason you might want to create a collection is for sharing purposes um that's mostly why i make collections is because people want to know what mods and assets i'm using so that's really good maybe you just want to make a collection of like mods for my new city you know whatever the case may be it's just just a collection of mods for your new city you don't want to over subscribe to mods you want to have a collection just just for you so you can load that up when you load your new city that's great maybe you pick um let's see what do we have that's pretty terrible um so you pick an image i picked an image of my face that's great you can describe it and just say mods for parkville you know whatever your city is called that's that's a good example these are items that will work together and it'll show a subscribe all button up in the corner the subscribe all button just just for the sake of example it'll look like this um where are my collections files i've posted collections these are my collections and that subscribe all button and click my mod collection and this subscribe to all unsubscribe to all these buttons are here be leery of those if you're staring down the barrel of a collection that has a subscribe to all button nothing is guaranteed and i do not even recommend doing this on my own 100 item long mod collection here do you remember what i said about dependencies and reading the description if you're hitting subscribe to all you're not checking the dependencies you're not checking the description i i still recommend going in and clicking on each mod and ensuring that they're all compatible because i don't even use every mod on my own list there we go i'm not i'm not using that because it causes errors right now so go zoning adjuster i don't use it it's incompatible with this adaptive roads was causing errors so these are mods that all may work well in the future but right now i'm saving them in my collection until that day comes but that's what this button does it gives that that subscribe to all unsubscribe to all button there um or you can get rid of that button i items that users users should choose between in this case it would be like a mod collection and a map you know whatever designation you want save and continue and now you're allowed to add the the items that you want to use in that collection and that's great the way that i recommend actually doing this there's a there's a better way so this is the collection in question uh maybe i'll go back to the main workshop here's the best way to add a mod to a collection click on the given mod go to the page this is inner city bus control from earlier you can do add to collection check the box of the thing that you want to that you want to do once you've created the collection so let's uh i don't think i've published it yet or you know i haven't finished it but once i've made it to the end of these things the image the publish all that then there is a there's a thing oh no it's already there actually mods for my new city i'm not actually going to create this but mods for my new city you can check it there and hit ok and then this mod will show up in that given collection that you've just created it's really powerful it's it's easier to maintain than it is to start initially in my opinion so the sooner you start making collections for your city the happier you'll be when you decide to switch cities and then come back to the original city or it's it's really like i can keep up with all of my collections no problem but if i had to go back and redo them all i would be pulling my hair out so start this as soon as possible rip off the band-aid start making collections start taking care of your mods you finally did it you did it didn't you you subscribed to everything every asset every mod you're crazy why'd you do that now it's time to manage all of it so this is the city skyline's main menu we've just subscribed to a couple things or we just made some changes whatever the case may be the content manager is now the place you're going to want to go mods when you download them are are not active by default which is distinct from assets anytime you download an asset it's automatically deemed on in city skylines i'm not sure how it works across games or anything like that but it's automatically turned on if it's an asset mods are by default off so if you've subscribed to a new mod and you're wondering why it's not working you can go in and hit enabled order descending and you can see the mods that are not on right now like look at this i got i got new cube maps that's something i haven't talked about on youtube yet sky boxes you want to change your sky get a cube map um i'm going to turn that on real time not using it right now love it not using it right now i'm going to leave it off that's intentional hard mode we're going to leave that off i've uh you know that's okay i'm inexperienced that's what it is more challenge for experienced players sorry noob um everything else is on so the rest of the list is going to be on so that's a that's a clever way sort by enabled order descending a good way to organize your mods and see which one is not turned on yet right and remember you have to turn them on for them to appear in game or for their options to exist in game so that button is going to be grayed out and the the mod is is dormant it's in your system if it's on this list it is downloaded but it is not engaged a lot of mods that are conflicting or that shouldn't be installed together should be unsubscribed so you can click this to unsubscribe which is just as good as unchecking the subscribe button in your browser you can do that here you can do it just as easily in your browser but everything's here also so if you want to uninstall something entirely then get rid of it especially if there's a conflict and you know that there's a known conflict between an important mod for you and a mod that you have that's turned off just get rid of it frankly i don't have a good example of that here most of my mods are turned on um but if there's conflict just unsubscribe just say no you know i think that's the best way to do it rather than just unchecking another key thing about this so let's go into assets the workshop is a two-way street i've only talked about downloading stuff but you can also share stuff i think if i go to the bottom i'll see some of my there we go hey so these are some of my local intersections that i've created these are you know it's been almost a year but i made them i made them i've made others since i'll make more in the future when that time comes when you use the content uh creator what would it be called the to do the editor so you can open up the editors i usually use the the asset editor to make interchanges but let's say you've created a theme or a map or an asset or a scenario whatever the case may be when you save that it's going to appear in your local asset list here when you hit share it allows you to put your work into the steam workshop and this is how it's how it's done i'm not actually going to commit to this because i've already shared it you can change the you can you can redesignate the photo that comes with it things like that add some branding whatever you got to do but when you hit publish this goes to the steam workshop and it is live for people to to download and and critique effectively so i strongly recommend creating some stuff and sharing it in the steam workshop just to add to that sense of community and get some feedback and who knows maybe people will really like what you did i'd like to highlight one mod specifically real quick mods listing will save your life if you find that let me give you a scenario let's say you have a set of mods that you like to use when you load your game and you have a separate set of mods that you like to use when you're using the asset editor because some mods don't agree with the asset editor but work perfectly fine in your city use mods listing you can get this from the steam workshop hit options right here you can do this in game two i think but i would probably recommend doing it here you can create a list of currently activated mods right mods and not just mods assets and district styles too i underestimate the power of this i don't even use it for that it's worth its weight in gold just for mods enter the name of your current configuration whatever you currently have access in the previous window whatever you currently have enabled will be saved under whatever name you give it and i will save that and i'll overwrite my previous configuration so yumble 1.0 i've only ever used one configuration and i keep updating it and then i'll make a bunch of changes to it and then i'll always come back to the same one and you can hit apply on game restart and essentially what this really does oh my goodness 112 mods 21 29 assets for district styles look at them all um what this does is automatically checks off all these boxes for you so it's kind of like hitting enable all but it doesn't have to be all of them or disable all but it doesn't have to be all of them that'll save you a lot of time if you find yourself using the same set of mods frequently but wanting to change back and forth between configurations using mods listing combined with collections is extremely powerful in my opinion in organizing your steam workshop experience that's a wrap that's how i use the workshop and that's how i organize all of my mods and assets and keep track of everything i think subscribing to things responsibly is important i keep saying read the description make sure to subscribe to dependencies be aware of conflicts be aware of depreciated mods or or updated mods so you're subscribing to the right things so you don't cause errors there's a troubleshooting video that i'll probably have to make eventually i hate troubleshooting i hate doing it but you'll have to do it sometimes but you can avoid that by reading things correctly and also unsubscribing from things can be important too because we all have a finite amount of ram in our computers right but i appreciate you listening to me thanks for for learning these things and and feel free to discuss it in the comments feel free to subscribe to the channel i've got a bunch of other videos about how i use the mods in-game this one was just kind of an unnecessary explanation of of the fundamentals of modding city skylines through the steam workshop i really appreciate you listening to me i've been yumble i'll see you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBLtv

Views: 25,933

Keywords: workshop, steam, city skylines, mods, error, troubleshooting, beginner, console, output log, ram, city planner plays, biffa, t4rget, imperateur, node controller

Id: 1vXuI_ELB1c

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021