What are the best Cities Skylines 2 mods? With bigger maps, signature buildings, and even new weather cycles, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Cities Skylines 2 has everything you could possibly need. However, with the immense mod support that the first city builder received, it would be a shame if this entry missed out on the community creativity that made Cities Skylines so engaging for so long.
While we’ve explored every aspect of the game in our Cities Skylines 2 review, fans of the series are dreaming up their ideal mods – it could be recreating real-life locations, adding fantastical elements to their settlements, and everything in between. Now that official mod support has reached Cities Skylines 2, the quantity and quality of these mods is ramping up, so we’ve scoured through them for very best of the best.
The 18 best Cities Skylines 2 mods to try right now are:
Dan’s Parking Lots
When you’re constructing the perfect city, we feel it’s important to have plenty of tools at hand to ensure you’re always ready to tackle any job. If there’s one thing Cities Skylines 2 is lacking, it’s a range of parking lots. Thankfully, Dan’s Parking Lots with Parks Pack rectifies this issue by adding in three new assets: extra small, medium-sized, and large-sized car parks. This helpful mod should give you the ability to ensure all of your retail shops have adequate parking, regardless of what size you build them.
Rail Infrastructure
Rail fans, hold on to your socks as we have a mod that is about to leave the station. Tigon’s Rail Infrastructure Pack gives trains some much-needed love with a huge asset pack, adding five cargo stations, non-electrified rail networks, and two depots to the game. This mod is perfect for both EU and NA maps as it provides train variants to match either region.
Real Billboards and Signs
It’s rare for people to willingly ask for genuine advertisements, especially in-game where you can’t escape them, but they add an undeniable realism element that cannot be replicated with fake ads. The Food And Beverages Decals Pack by Ameenmahboub gives your cities that extra bit of oomph as you design storefronts and retail outlets. Take your city from a Lidl-style wannabe store, right up there to a full-blown Walmart.
Extended Bus Station
Hardcore players will know all too well about the struggle with bus stations causing far too much traffic congestion, leading to poor citizen mobility. Fortunately, mod creator Shaine2010 has created the perfect solution to this problem with the Extended Bus Station mod, allowing players the room to resolve the problem at the root. This mod also introduces subway station extensions, taxi stop extensions, and improved pedestrian paths to ensure your citizens are as mobile as they possibly can be.
Better Bulldozer
Become the Cities Skylines 2 equivalent of Thanos wielding the infinity gauntlet, capable of deleting things from existence in a mere click. The bulldozer feature in the base game is fine, but there are some stubborn items that simply won’t budge, no matter how many times you try. Enter the Better Bulldozer mod by yenyang, giving you the power to remove anything that stands in your way.
Traffic
When you really think about it, the traffic in your city determines how optimally your city can run. If everyone is late to their destinations, nothing will get done all day, and if everyone is early or on time, things should be running smoothly. With the Traffic mod by krzychu124, you can gain access to several tools that aren’t available in the base game to give you granular control of your roads.
Hard Mode
If you’re anything like us, you’re here looking for mods that make your life easier. However, if you’re a glutton for punishment, you might be more interested in the Hard Mode mod, a mod with new difficulty settings, increased costs, and changes to demolition. We’ve got a more in-depth look at this brutal mod here, but if you’re looking for a challenge, you should probably just download it and dive straight in.
Black Dragon Canyon
A map, sure, but what a map. The Black Dragon Canyon mod allows you to set up your utopia in one of the most scenic areas we’ve ever seen. With interesting obstacles such as a giant canyon, there is so much room for you to flex your creative planning.
GTA5 map
Occasionally, you might want to combine two of your favorite games, and that’s never easier than recreating one in another building game or city-builder. Well, in this case, you can do just that thanks to Rhy5Kyl3 and their GTA5 map CS2 mod, which perfectly replicates Los Santos in Cities Skylines 2, for you to build upon. Roads, rails, and subway lines have already been placed to match the Rockstar game, but the rest is up to you – including whether the traffic should be utter carnage or not.
Anarchy
It would be complete anarchy to allow the average Cities Skylines 2 player to use tools exactly the way they want to. Think of all the damage you could cause if you avoided any error checks, at least, that’s what they want you to believe. Anarchy was created by yenyang, a tool that allows you to place props and trees inside previously locked boundaries. The creator reminds anyone using this mod to save frequently and learn to back up your saves.
Move It
Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to build the perfect road, but annoying little props are standing in your way? The Move It mod by Quboid gives you the ability to move the trees, buildings, and segment curves out of the way, enabling you to create the road of your dreams.
Better Pedestrian Pathfind
If you’re finding that pedestrians crossing the road when oncoming vehicles are blatantly about to hit them breaks your immersion, the Better Pedestrian Pathfind mod by TheDequing might help you out. This improves your pedestrian’s awareness of weird crossings and even oncoming traffic.
Extended Tooltip
Also by TheDequing, the Extended Tooltip mod, this mod gives you a bit more insight into how well your facilities are doing whenever you bring up the tooltip. While the early functionality is there, more features will be coming in future updates.
Midgar Map
Why not turn your hand to recreating one of the most iconic cities in all of videogames? Midgar, well, it didn’t go that well, but you’ll do better, right? A segmented circle gives you the chance to create a satisfying-looking city, but how will it run? It’s up to you to figure that out. Download the Midgar Map mod and build your Final Fantasy city.
New York
One of a series of maps based on real-life places, GucciSnack’s New York map centers around the island of Manhattan, and its surrounding areas, giving you the chance to rebuild the Big Apple from the ground up. It’s likely to be a challenging one to start in, given how much water there is, but it’s a worthy challenge for the most experienced city developers.
Wanaka New Zealand
For those looking for a semi-challenging map, Wanaka New Zealand by RaftermanNZ and tman383 might be for you. It includes pre-buried voltage lines, connections for air, sea, rail, and electricity, and even a couple of local landmarks featured as easter eggs, such as “That Wanaka Tree”. The landscape is frankly gorgeous, so you should have no trouble making a scenic town here.
Alpha DLSS Enabler
It’s fair to say Cities Skylines 2 isn’t very well optimized, however, using CapfainOfCoit’s experimental DLSS mod, Nvidia users can gain up to 10fps without having to make any considerable sacrifices. You may experience some visual bugs, but we will take this every day if it means the game runs better as a result.
Realistic Density
We know that Cities Skylines 2 doesn’t exactly run perfectly well on unoptimized machines, however, if you have a powerful computer that can run the game smoothly, the Realistic Density mod by TheDequing might be for you. Give your buildings the number of citizens they deserve, for example, your school can have 2,000 students surrounding the premises. Again, your in-game performance will suffer as a result, which is why you should use a new save before trying this mod.
Now that you know how the Cities Skylines 2 mods will work, the only thing left to do is patiently wait for the community to get to work. In the meantime, make sure your system is up to spec with the Cities Skylines 2 system requirements, and check out some of the best management games, or even the best city builders if you’ve got a creative itch.
