The 12 best Cities Skylines 2 mods
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The 12 best Cities Skylines 2 mods

While the city builder sequel has a lot of new toys to play with, we have the best Cities Skylines 2 mods to perfect your experience.

Cities Skylines 2 mods: a suspension bridge with a star destroyer in the groundground, a delorean on the road, and spiderman sitting in the distance.
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Cities Skylines 2 

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 own 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.

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The 12 best Cities Skylines 2 mods to try right now are:

A building is highlighted, showing its demolition cost in the punishing Hard Mode Cities Skylines 2 mod.

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.

Best Cities Skylines 2 mods: a huge canyon, surrounded with a beige, arid land.

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.

The Los Santos map made in CS2 thanks to GTA5 map, one of the best Cities Skylines 2 mods.

GTA5 map

Sometimes, you might want to combine two of your favorite game, 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.

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Anarchy

It would be complete anarchy to allow the average Cities Skylines 2 player 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 there are annoying little props 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.

The better tooltips is one of the Cities Skylines 2 mods and gives more info on buildings.

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.

Cities Skylines 2 mods: a huge grass field, with a circular road.

Midgar Map

Why not turn your hand to recreating one of the most iconic cities in all of videogames? Midgar, well, 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? Up to you to figure that out, really. Download the Midgar Map mod and build your own Final Fantasy city.

The New York map is one of the best Cities Skylines 2 mods.

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.

A lake in Wanaka New Zealand, one of the best Cities Skylines 2 mods maps.

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 huge 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.

Cities Skylines 2 mods: a city min-construction, with the outlines of the residental areas shown.

Will there be official Cities Skylines 2 mod support?

Cities Skylines 2 will have full mod support at some point — the mods will be hosted on the developer’s new Paradox Mods platform, as opposed to Steam Workshop. That said, the official feature was delayed.

Paradox stated in a blog post that the move to a bespoke mod platform allows players who own the game on a console to access the same mods as PC players. Paradox has stated that all the mods hosted on the Paradox Mod platform will be free and that it will handle the moderation process itself. This should assure players that the differences between the Paradox Mod platform and Steam Workshop will be minimal.

There’s already a first look at the Editor below, which details what to expect from the Paradox Mods platform, which is currently in its beta stage, but doesn’t have an official release date.

Cities Skylines 2 mod wishlist

That said, the expanded framework of the sequel could mean that the community can deliver some game-changing mods. The most appealing, at least to us, are the ones that add additional cosmetics to the game, whether that be famous buildings from around the world or locations from works of fiction.

Here are some of the Cities Skylines 2 mods we would like to see:

  • Lord of the Rings map and buildings
  • Blade Runner buildings, including flying cars
  • Cyberpunk buildings
  • Iconic UK buildings (Millennium Dome, Liver Buildings, St. Georges Hall, etc.)
  • Nakatomi Plaza
  • Zombie natural disasters

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.

When he's not writing guides at PCGamesN, PK is usually found waiting for the respawn timer in League of Legends, hanging around a tavern in Baldur's Gate 3, or fighting his way through the Settled Systems in Starfield. PK's extensive knowledge of video games is matched only by his extensive wardrobe of flannel shirts, which he has been curating since he was born, proving he was always meant to be a games journalist. He watches an episode of Star Trek every night before bed, and he loves toast, even though it makes him feel a bit sick. Buttery goodness exacts a heavy toll, one that he's willing to pay.