The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Modding Cities Skylines 2

Welcome to the ultimate beginner's guide to City Skylines 2 modding for 2026. The last time I made one of these videos, we covered 20 mods, but today we're doubling down. The modding scene has evolved and some new heavy hitters have been released, and honestly, I just don't think it's possible to limit yourself to 20 mods anymore. So, we're going to go completely unconstrained with this one and cover 45 essential mods and how to use them. And we're going to be covering everything from game-saving bug fixes to UI cleanups to advanced detailing tools that fundamentally change how you build. But do know that we're sticking strictly to code mods today. No custom assets or decals, but let me know if you like me to cover those in a future video.

Now, everything we covered today will be linked below, including a one-click save file so you can grab this entire collection instantly. I also included detailed timestamps if you want to skip ahead. But I highly recommend watching in order because I've ranked everything from the basics to the absolute essentials. But enough of the preamble. Without further ado, let's jump right in.

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Starting with number 45, Achievement Fixer. Achievement Fixer is a really basic mod. It just allows you to unlock achievements even if you're playing in a modded save. And considering some of the mods on our list are going to be bug fixes, I think that this is a requirement for basically everybody.

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If you have it installed, you'll be able to unlock achievements. And you'll know that it's working because it'll replace that text that says "achievements are disabled because of mods" with "achievements enabled because of Achievement Fixer." And you could leave it right here, but there's a little bit more to the mod that I want to show you as well. Achievement Fixer also adds a page to options. And if you go under advanced, you can actually reset 100% of your achievements. So, if you want to speedrun through all of them, you can do that with this mod. You can also unlock specific achievements using the mod if you want to do that because you inadvertently reset everything, for instance.

Number 44, Sunglasses. Sunglasses is a mod that allows you to dial in your visual settings to your liking. And it's especially useful when you're looking at the sun, where things can be underexposed. That's actually the problem the mod was designed to solve. To access the mod, you'll just need to go into the options menu and find Sunglasses. And from here you can modify the settings and see the changes happen in real time. So, the sundisk size is the size of the sun. Lens flare is the lens flare effect. You can toggle that on or off. Sun bloom allows you to control the bloom of the sun, but do keep in mind this actually controls global bloom levels. Next up we have sky exposure. And modifying this setting will actually brighten up the ground. And then daytime ambient lighting will actually brighten up the buildings. Be careful with this one though. If you turn it up too high, things can start to look kind of bluish. And then finally, we have exposure settings. If you change this, the auto exposure levels for the game will be modified. So, if you go to weak, things will just be brighter in general. And if you go to strong, things are going to be incredibly bright. And it's absolutely wild the results that you can achieve with this mod if you spend a bit of time to dial in your settings.

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And I'll be honest, this is a mod that I wasn't using before this video, but I will be using from here on out. There is one thing I wanted to point out about this mod, though. If you reset the default to try to get your default settings, things are not going to change unless you modify a setting. So, I like to toggle lens flare. They'll get me back to the defaults. Now I'm seeing how this would look in vanilla.

Number 43, Show Text Trends. This is an incredibly simple mod. It just allows you to see your budget and your population trends without needing to hover over the top of these boxes right here. So, just a UI enhancement. And this is actually the way that the game used to look prior to release. If you look at some of the early access videos, they all had this text trend there. This restores that. One thing to know about this though, if you'd rather look at your budget from a monthly standpoint, you can switch over that under options. Just select the option that you'd like to see, either hourly or monthly. And now we're seeing how much money we're making per month rather than per hour. And honestly, for me, I like to see the hourly numbers. The numbers are a bit smaller and it's easier to wrap my head around.

Number 42, Extended Tooltip. This is one of those mods that is so good that I forget that it's not vanilla. It basically gives you the ability to see a whole bunch of information about every entity in the game just by hovering over the top of it. And though the vanilla game does that to some extent, it's not nearly as extensive as this. For instance, with this home right here, the default vanilla information would be the street name, the building level, and the number of residents. But this adds the lot size, the zoning type, the building level, the land value, the number of households, the average wealth, the bank balance, the rent, and the parking utilization. And it's like this for everything. You can actually zoom in and see information about individual citizens. You can take a look at vehicles and see how fast they're going. And you can easily see information about companies just by hovering over them as well, including the number of employees that they have, what their bank balance is, and what their average rent is. And everything is customizable because if you go under options and find the Extended Tooltip options, you can completely customize the information that you're seeing with Extended Tooltip. So, if you only want to focus on a couple of things, you can absolutely do that. And, uh, really, it's the sky's the limit here. You can do whatever you want. Additionally, you can change the layout in here. So, if you'd like to see that information shown side by side instead, you can do that. And you can change how long it takes for the tooltip to pop up. And doing that will have the extended tooltip show up a little bit later to reduce the visual clutter on the screen.

Number 41, Prefab Asset Fix. If you've used the Southwestern Region Pack, you've undoubtedly noticed that a number of the pylon signs in front of the commercial buildings are floating above the assets. This is a relatively new phenomenon for the region pack. One of the updates to City Skylines 2 caused the pylons to no longer extend to the ground because it was causing conflicts with, I believe, bridges. And now the region pack looks like this, which is not ideal. This mod fixes this and a few other issues. Now, it's not automatic. If you want this to be fixed and you have this mod in your pack, you're going to need to do one of two things. You could just delete the asset and allow it to respawn back in. If you have a better bulldozer, though, you could just remove a sub-element and then reset the asset and the pylon will now be on the ground. Now, in addition to fixing the Southwestern Region Pack, this mod also fixes the prison van count on the prison. It fixes the service vehicle parking on one of the hospitals and it fixes hovering issues on a number of other vanilla props. And you can see all the fixes right here. So if something has bothered you and it's in this list, you'll definitely want to add this mod to your playset. And for me, this is one of the mods that makes Achievement Enabler, the very first mod I mentioned, an absolute requirement because this is a mod that just fixes bugs.

Number 40, Advanced Simulation Speed. This is a mod that gives you more information about the simulation speed and more control over it. If you add it to the game, you're going to notice that you get this box right here in your UI, and it's telling you what your current simulation speed is set to and what you're actually getting. And right now, it's pretty close to one time [music] speed. If I increase this, you'll see it says two times, and I get basically two times speed. And if I max it out, I get a little bit below four times speed. And this can be helpful because it likely means that my settings are a little bit too high. And if I want to try to get to four times speed, I can revise my settings down and improve the simulation speed. But it gives you more than that as well. Let's say you want to go a bit faster and you think you can make it happen. Crank it. You can go six times speed or even eight times speed. And you can see that for me it means that I can actually get to five times speed, sometimes 5.5 times speed, which is great.

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Sometimes you just want to move things along. And if you pop into settings, you have even more controls. You can adjust the steps. So if you want to have even more fine increments for adjusting your speed, you can add that. If you don't like all the decimal places that we were seeing down there, you can remove those. Or you can get rid of smooth speed so you don't see that at all. And now that I've deselected smooth simulation, instead of having all those decimals over here and the actual simulation speed being shown, it just says eight times speed, which for many people will be exactly what they want to see.

Number 39, Specialized Industrial Zones. If you're anything like me, it probably drives you crazy that there's only one industrial zoning category and things just randomly spawn in. And in some cases, the things that you want to spawn in in areas that make sense for them to spawn in, they just never happen. This mod fixes all of that. It gives you multiple zoning categories for [music] industrial. So if you want to have a forestry industry, you can do that. But what makes this really special is if you want to add storage, you can do that as well. So we have our manufacturing for forestry right here. And behind that, we can place forestry warehousing. Now, the one thing that's a little bit weird about this mod is that because you're zoning for a very specific and very narrow portion of the industrial zoning, if it's not what your city needs, it won't spawn in and there's no way to tell what you actually need. So just keep that in mind. The warehousing is where that's probably going to be the most evident. And you can see for whatever reason I have a strong need for ore warehousing, but no need for agriculture or for forestry or for [music] oil. And this just gives you so much control right here. These are all forestry manufacturing operations right over here. All ore storage. So I could place these very deliberately even if I plan on zoning buildings. This is a fantastic mod and it's honestly the way that the game should work in vanilla.

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Number 38, Transport Policy Adjuster. One of the things that I've always found frustrating about City Skylines 2 is that you can't revise the number of buses on a route down to just one, but this mod solves that. Additionally, if you find that you need more than 50 vehicles on a route, just go into options and you can adjust the maximum in here. You can crank this thing all the way up to 250 buses on a route if you want. Now, this applies to all modes of transit. And for me, the most valuable thing about this is being able to take an inner-city route and set it down to one or two vehicles. Oftentimes, these sorts of inner-city routes are incredibly long, and the game will just default to seven or eight buses and say that up to 22 would be appropriate when in reality, one or two will do the trick. So, in my opinion, this is a mod that basically everyone could [music] benefit from.

Number 37, Extra Landscaping Tools. Extra Landscaping Tools is the first in a series of extra mods that are in this list. They're all exceptional and they all add a lot of functionality to the game. This one in particular gives you the ability to paint resources, remove resources, and reset depleted resources. To access the most basic functionality, go under landscaping, and you're going to see a couple of new brushes. The ore brush, oil brush, fertile land brush, and the groundwater resource brush. Now, this can be incredibly valuable if you're playing in normal mode on a custom map because a lot of map makers, myself included, will add lots and lots of resources, and in some cases even overlap them. And what that means is tile upkeep can be incredibly harsh. And if you're using this mod and you develop an area, perhaps you want to remove the resources so that tile upkeep is not quite so bad. Now, this can also be helpful if you want to add resources. Let's say you don't have a lot of fertile ground, but you want to add some. You can paint it right there. You can paint oil. You can paint whatever you want. Additionally, if you hop into the options menu and look for Extra Landscaping Tools, you can refill all your depleted resources. So, while some may view the functionality of this mod to be a bit of a cheat, I find it to be incredibly valuable because it allows you to build the way that you want to build.

Number 36, Extra Asset Importer. Extra Asset Importer is a mod that enables you to bring custom decals and surfaces into City Skylines 2. If you're a detailer, this is probably one of the most important and impactful mods in your entire playset. And that might make you wonder, why doesn't it rank higher on my list? And there are really three reasons for that. Number one, without Extra Detailing Tools, this mod is severely limited. Number two, this mod is only useful if you download custom surfaces and decals. And number three, said surfaces and decals will take up a ton of space and they will slow your loading time into the game. I think another important consideration is that this is a very complex mod, and it's one of the mods that routinely breaks when there's an update to City Skylines 2. And because of the complexity of the mod, it often takes a while to be patched. So that means if you use this mod, you're likely not going to be able to play after a major game update, at least not for a while. But here's the thing, this mod is so impactful. And basically everything that you're looking at here is only possible because of the mod. The beaches are using some of Sully's beach assets. The farms right here are Mr. Broman 10's farming assets. And in the distance over here, the construction site, these are Sully's riverbed surfaces. And I think that all of these sites look way better than I could do in the vanilla game. And the mod really gets powerful when you combine surfaces and decals. I've used surfaces at the bottom right here and placed decals on top to blend the surfaces together. So rather than having a bunch of straight lines, we have things that look much more [music] natural. I've also used wave decals right here to give the water a little bit more depth. And over here in this industrial site, this weathered look was only possible because of this mod. It really makes everything look a thousand times better. But here's why this mod doesn't rank higher. On its own, this mod is missing a ton of functionality that you might expect it to have. Now, when you have this installed, you'll get the Extra Assets menu. And inside of here, you'll have all your custom decals and custom surfaces. But none of the vanilla surfaces are in here. That's part of Extra Detailing Tools. But the real issue isn't all the missing vanilla features. It's the missing functionality. For instance, right here, I have all my stain and leakage decals. And if I try to place this on the side of a building, I can't. And that's because that functionality is part of Extra Detailing Tools. So the only way that I can place a decal with this mod is on the ground. But you don't just need Extra Detailing Tools. You also need Anarchy and Better Bulldozer as well to get the most out of this mod. For instance, I can't overlap decals without having Anarchy. And it can be really difficult to delete the decals without Better Bulldozer because it enables you to narrow down to just decals when you're deleting something. And I think when you're using this mod, that is an important functionality to have. But even so, this is an incredibly impressive mod. Just know that you're going to have to install other mods with it to make the most of it. Now, if you're looking for recommendations on where to begin with decals and surfaces, I highly recommend looking at anything from Sully, The Broman, Alendo, or G87 or Rizza. Basically, anything that I've ever tried from them has been top-notch, absolutely spectacular quality, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any detailers not using their assets.

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Number 35, Write Everywhere. Write Everywhere is an incredibly powerful mod that does exactly what the name implies. It enables you to write everywhere in the game. All you have to do is hit Control Shift W, select an object, and you can add text or an image to that object. And what that means is that you can create custom assets in-game even if you don't know how to create custom assets. All you have to do is know how to create a PNG and learn how to use Write Everywhere. I was able to use Write Everywhere to create this Clearwater Southern Station sign. All I had to do is create two PNGs, one for the sign and one for the supports. And though it was a bit time-consuming, the results [music] are absolutely outstanding. And even the illumination is handled through Write Everywhere. But here's the thing. If this were all that Write Everywhere could do, it would rank much lower on my list because this is fairly complex and fairly niche. But there are some more mainstream uses because there are modules that can be added to Write Everywhere. And one of the modules is actually right underneath my sign. The Clearwater Southern Station sign you see underneath this is actually a Write Everywhere module called Station Entrance Visuals. And what it does is grab the name of the building and all the transit routes running to it and adds it to this sign right here. And it does so dynamically. Using the Public Transport Vehicles Text and Decals add-on, I was able to add Magnolia Bay Transit Authority to the side of these tram vehicles. And if I do say so myself, I think it looks fantastic. And one of my favorite add-ons is the Dynamic Street Signs add-on. You can see that this street actually says Washington Street all because of Write Everywhere. It does this for every single street in the game and it dynamically updates when you update the name of the street. And from as far as I can tell, the performance impact is much less than you would anticipate. Now again, this is a quite complex mod, so I'm not going to showcase how to create signage in this video, but if you want to learn more about that, I have two recommendations. My video where I actually created this Clearwater Southern Station signage, as well as Sully's video where he showcases how he created this McDonald's sign. Both of these videos showcase step-by-step how to create signage and how to get them to light up.

Editor Phil here and there's a couple things I have to mention about Write Everywhere. The 1.0 version, which is the version that's out now, is different than the one that I was using for my video. And the reason that's important is because the 1.0 version brought changes to the textures that are supported, as well as backface rendering, which now requires manual activation. [music] In the past, it didn't. Now, another reason that I mentioned this is that the changes with texture sizes that are supported has broken a lot of the older modules for Write Everywhere. So, if you go on Paradox Mods and you notice that there's a bunch of broken modules, that's why.

Number 34, Simple Mod Checker Plus. Simple Mod Checker Plus is an absolutely essential mod. So essential that I actually forgot to include it within this list the first time I went through it. And that's because it's a mod that I include in every single playset. If you're using mods, it's incredibly valuable because it will let you know whether or not your code mods are loading. Additionally, if you have a corruption with your settings file, which happens more than you think, it will delete the settings file so that you can load into the game. So, for instance, you can see right here I have a corrupted settings file. It will allow me to delete this, reload back into the game, and then I won't experience issues like crashing or even issues loading into the game generally. Additionally, if you're noticing that a mod isn't loading, you can come into Simple Mod Checker Plus to see if it's actually loading in. All you have to do is go under options, go to Simple Mod Checker Plus, and under mods, it will show you all the mods that are actually loading into your game. Additionally, if you go to the backup tab, you're able to back up your settings file. So, if you've really dialed in your graphics settings and your keybinds, you're going to want to do this because if you have a corrupted settings file, this will allow you to restore to one that was good. And finally, under the general tab, there are a couple more things that I think are valuable, such as disabling the resume button in Paradox Launcher and disabling the continue button on the main menu. The reason why these are valuable is if you have a whole bunch of surfaces or decals and you load into the game before they're loaded, you'll experience all sorts [music] of issues. So, getting rid of those buttons will ensure that that never becomes an issue for you.

Number 33, Magic Curse. Hot take [music] here. Death Care is stupid in both City Skylines 1 and 2. It's a game mechanic that's not rooted in reality and it doesn't function like reality. When a new neighborhood is developed, you don't see a massive death wave across your entire city. Yet, that's what happens every single time you do that in City Skylines 2. And that's why I like Magic Curse. This is a mod that basically eliminates the death care mechanic. When someone dies, they simply disappear. And that might make you wonder what happens to all of these assets, cemeteries and crematoriums. Well, they become tourism amenities. So people will come and visit these, but they are not requirements. To enable this mod, all you have to do is go into your options menu and find Magic Curse Redux. Select the toggle to enable the mod and enter the game and all of those icons will disappear and everyone will be gone. And it's as [music] simple as that. Don't worry about death care anymore. Focus on real city services like police, fire, and healthcare.

Number 32, Road Speed Adjuster. Road Speed Adjuster is a mod that allows you to adjust the speed limits for roads and tracks. All you have to do is select this icon up here and then you can select individual segments or click and drag to select multiple segments. [music] Then you can adjust the speed. So the default for this road is 65 mph. I could lower that down to let's say 25 if I wanted and then hit apply. And immediately the cars will slow down. I could do the exact same thing with train tracks or just slow the trains down around a corner. And I can tell that I've done this because I'll get these little overlays that tell me the speed limit right here. Now, if you're wondering why it's in miles per hour, it's because the mod has detected that from my map. If you're playing with kilometers, you'll see that as well. And when you close out of the mod, those overlays will disappear, reducing the visual clutter. There is one thing I wanted to point out, though. The on-road markings will still be there. So, if you don't like those, you'll need Better Bulldozer to get rid of them. Much cleaner. One important consideration, though. Removing this mod will not reset your custom speeds. If you want to reset your custom speeds and remove the mod, you'll have to go into options and then find Road Speed [music] Adjuster. From in here, you could set your speed unit or clear all your custom speeds. Doing this will remove all the custom speeds you've set on your map and make it safe to remove the mod. One of the reasons this mod is so important is it allows you to specify which roads are collectors and arterials because oftentimes speeds are really what dictates that. So for local roads, we could say we'll keep the default speeds, but we have a couplet right here. So let's go ahead and go up and down the couplet and adjust the speed to 35 mph instead of the 25 that's the default. Doing this will solidify those roads as arterials. And in the game, vehicles will actually prefer these routes because they're faster. So you'll actually see more traffic drawn to those roads. In my opinion, this is a functionality that should exist in the vanilla game. This is an absolutely essential mod.

Number 31, Realistic Parking U-Turns Fix. Realistic Parking is a bug-fixing mod that aims to improve the underlying parking simulation and stop all the traffic caused by citizens looking for parking stalls. And it does this in three ways. First, it reduces the number of pathfinding requests that a parking stall can accept. So, if a citizen is navigating towards a parking stall, it will become unavailable for future pathfinding requests, reducing the number of citizens navigating towards the parking stall. Second, it reduces the reroute distance for parking. By default, citizens can reroute for parking up to 40,000 nodes away. And the result of this is erratic U-turns by both vehicles and bikes. [music] With this mod, you can adjust that distance to your liking. And third, it increases the parking capacities of some vanilla assets such as apartments and high-rise office buildings. You might not have realized this, but some of these buildings, like this apartment building, in the vanilla game would only have three parking stalls. And that means that everyone else would be forced to park on the streets, meaning that they might be circling around forever. And the same issue is present for office buildings. In an office building like this one, you might only have 30 parking stalls in the vanilla game. With this mod, the number of parking stalls reflects the number of households or employees that these buildings have. But everything's also customizable. If you hop into options and look for Realistic Parking, you can enable or disable any one of these three features or modify them to your liking. But honestly, from my experience, the default values are tuned pretty well. But do keep in mind that if you add this mod to your build, you're going to need to let things simulate for a while because it will not impact existing pathfinding requests, only new ones. So, it might take a little while to see these changes reflected. Also of note is that this mod can be safely removed from your playset. So, if you don't like what it does to your game, simply remove it and things will go back to normal.

Number 30, Toggle Overlays. I'm not sure about you, but I absolutely despise the vanilla behavior of having these overlays pop up anytime I click on any of the menu buttons down here, especially because some of these are absolutely blinding. And that's why I love Toggle Overlays. It allows you to modify this behavior. But even if you like this behavior, you still might want to install this mod because it gives you the Control T hotkey, which allows you to disable it when you want. But if you want more control, go into options, find Toggleable Overlays, and disable this first button up here. I like to enable "automatically select the active assets info view" and "automatically switch to the assets info view when selected," which makes it so that I can select buttons down here without info views popping up. Now, if I want to see the info views, all I have to do is select the info views button up here and I can see them. And then as I navigate through the menus and select different buttons, the correct info view will now show up. To me, this behavior is much more preferable. It gives me much more control over what I'm seeing. And it means that especially when I'm zoning, I'm not blinded by the info views. Now, on that note, you might have noticed that my info views are in dark mode. That's another feature of this mod. This toggle right here that says "use in-game time for light or dark mode colors" is supposed to enable this functionality. But at least in my experience, the game's always in dark mode, but for me, that's not a problem. The other feature that this mod adds is colorblind mode, an accessibility option that I can't believe isn't baked into the game. But basically, it means that you can automatically change the info views colors to match the selected colorblind [music] spectrum. And honestly, in my opinion, this is an absolutely essential mod. It's one that I almost always have in my playset.

Number 29, Map Texture Replacer. If you're tired of the basic textures that come with City Skylines 2, Map Texture Replacer is the mod for you. It can completely change the way that your city feels. And to use it, all you have to do is click on this button up here and [music] select a new theme. Now, you will have to download these themes individually, but look at what they can do. They can completely change the way that your city looks. And my favorite thing about these is that they generally have more [music] depth than the vanilla themes. For instance, look at the Brixton Bay theme and how the mountains look. It just seems like they're so much more rocky, or how the Rocky Grasses theme makes you feel like you're in Colorado. And the great thing about all of these is you can mix and match them. So that means if you like the way the cliffs look in the Rocky Mountains theme, use those. And if you like the grass from Brixton Bay, use that. And you can also adjust the tiling so you can completely dial in the look to your liking. And ultimately, until the game supports proper biomes, this mod has to be how you achieve this look. Do keep in mind though that all these themes have been downloaded separately. So, not only will you need this mod, you'll also need some themes. I think my two favorite themes are the Brixton Bay theme and the Desert Map theme. Both of them are absolutely outstanding.

Number 28, Parking Lots by Dome. Parking Lots by Dome allows you to plop individual parking stalls, which can make really unique parking configurations completely possible in-game. Right here, I have a row of parking behind these buildings in a downtown area. And it's completely functional because of Parking Lots by Dome. You might wonder why use this asset instead of just placing decals. And basically, it's because the decals will actually trap vehicles. Parking Lots by Dome. To access this, you'll go underneath the roads menu and it'll create this new "Dome's Parking Lot" category where you can find individual stalls, double stalls, triple stalls, accessible stalls, front and back stalls, sideways stalls, electric vehicle parking, you name it, it's all available. There's also invisible variants for all of these, meaning that you can place this and have it be fully functional and invisible. This enables you to create a gravel parking lot, for instance. But there's a few things to keep in mind about this mod. Number one, you're going to need invisible roads. There's a couple of ways that you can access this. Either Extra Networks, [music] Find It, or Dev Mode. One of those is going to be a requirement. For Find It, you just look for invisible and you'll want to select one of the invisible car paths with pedestrian [music] access. We have a one-way, two-way, and a two-by-two way. Any of them will do. And the reason why this is required is if you don't have the invisible roads, Dome's parking lot assets will look like this. So, what we need to do is add this behind these. We'll see the little lines connecting the parking lot to the invisible road and the invisible road to the other networks. And when I place this, everything's fully functional. We'll see people going into these parking facilities and along this invisible road right here. Two other mods you're going to want in your playset are going to be Anarchy and Move It. And the main reason for that is if you want to get these side by side and looking really nice and tight, you're going to need Anarchy for that and Move It so that you can really get these adjusted exactly to your liking. But ultimately, I feel like these back alleys right here really demonstrate the value of this mod. It really helps you create something that feels very authentic and realistic and something that's not possible at all with the vanilla game.

Number 27, Taigon's Rail Infrastructure. [music] I know what you're thinking. I said no assets will be a part of this list and here we are with the second set of assets. But just like Parking Lots by Dome, this is a set of assets and I think that makes it unique. You're not getting just one building, you're getting a set of buildings that really extend the functionality of the game. And check this out. This is everything that you get with this asset pack. [music] It's a ton of stations. It's a ton of depots. It's a ton of tracks. And in addition to this, you're also getting a ton of trains. Now, some of these stations are simply the vanilla stations with the canal levers removed. That makes it feel much more North American because most of our trains here are diesel, not electric. In other cases, it's some of the subway infrastructure modified so that it supports trains, which I think is really cool because some of these assets are amazing and I never get to use them. And then in other cases, there are completely unique assets like this depot right here, which is a little square depot that can be fit in really urban contexts. I absolutely love this. [music] And Taigon's really thought everything through. There are upgrades for these that really make these special assets. For instance, this extra track right here gives you one additional train. And if you get creative with these, you can make gigantic rail yards that look really, really, really. It also comes with a bunch of resource-specific rail yards. And I think that these are super cool. For instance, if you have an ore industry and [music] you only want to ship ore out of your rail yard, this is the way that you can do it. And these are available for all industries. There's even one available for garbage. And I think that my favorite one is this one right here. This is for oil. I think it's absolutely awesome. It's so teeny-tiny [music] and it's actually functional. And rounding out the stations are these ones right here. These are actually subway stations that have been converted to train stations. And honestly, they look absolutely outstanding. If you want to be able to make an L like in Chicago, this is really going to go a long way for you. And the reason that you might want to use these over the subway stations are that they can accept regional traffic. It also comes with a bunch of great track and bridge options that I personally find to be completely indispensable. I find it difficult to build without these. They're so good. But my guess is the part that's going to interest the most people is the custom trains, of which there are many. Look at all of these passenger models that you can select from. There are so many of them. In a vanilla game, you have two, just two, North American and European. And with this rail infrastructure pack, you have so many options. But if I'm being honest with myself, the most interesting thing in here is the 52-wagon North American freight train. Look at this monster. These things are all over North America. And the reason I love seeing them in the game is you have to plan specifically for them. They will create all sorts of disruptions, all sorts of backups, and honestly, that makes for a really unique challenge. And like I said in the previous mod video, Taigon was committed to making sure that these work once official asset support was in the game. And here they are. They still work great. And in my [music] opinion, there's still some of the best assets available for City Skylines 2.

Editor Phil, and I forgot to mention, Taigon also has a tram pack that's just like this, but with trams and is currently working on a subway pack. So, be sure to follow Taigon if you want notification when that gets released.

Number 26, Recolor. Recolor is an awesome mod that allows you to change the color of most objects in-game. And if you want to personalize your build, this is the perfect mod for it. Select an object that you want to recolor. And when you have the mod installed, you're going to see this recolor panel. The first thing you need to do is decide if you want to change the single instance of an object or all color variations. The single instance will be just this one object. The variations will be all objects in your build that have the exact same color. So, for instance, right now I have this lime green building selected. If I wanted to change all of those, I would stick with "match color variation." Now, one of the reasons you might want to modify a single instance is because it gives you access to the palette options, which we'll talk about in just a moment. But the most basic option that you have is to set one of the three different color options. And these are going to be a little different for each object, but in general, the top option [music] is to select the color. The second option is to select the saturation. The third option is to select the brightness. And the [music] fourth is to select the transparency. So, if I slide over to blue, adjust the saturation to be darker, [music] I can now see that this first color is the main building color. I'm going to copy this using this button right here and paste it over here using this button right here. And now I'll modify this one. And I can see that the second color appears to be the sides of the building. And for the third color, it looks like it's the door. Now, this is really useful information and I highly recommend when you start to recolor an asset, go with some really vibrant colors so you can see what is recoloring because now you can really dial things in. Now, there are a couple of ways that you can do this. You can obviously continue to use the sliders that I was using before. You can also click on this number sign right here for hexadecimals. And if you happen to know the hexadecimal for the color, you can enter it right here. And the other option if you're in single instance is to use a palette. Now, one of the reasons you might want to use the palette is that we have a lot of complimentary colors that just look really nice. So, for instance, let's say I wanted to go with some really beachy colors. I'll go with the pastels. Then, for the sides, let's say I want to go for some metal-looking colors. And then for the door, we'll go with some wooden colors. And the whole reason that you'd want to use this is we could copy the colors from this building and paste it onto other buildings and have variations from within the palette. So, I'll use the color painter tool right here. Then, we'll use the color picker. Copy this building and paste it onto its neighboring buildings. And look what we get. A nice variety of colors. Now, if we wanted to go even faster, we could use the radius selection and color this entire area in incredibly quickly. And we only recolored the buildings because we only had buildings selected here. But if we wanted to recolor props or cars or fences, we could do that as well. But let's say that we're not satisfied with our changes, we can reset them as well. All we have to do is select this button right here, and everything goes back to the defaults. But let's say we want to be a little bit more methodical about this. There's a certain building color that we don't like. We want to get rid of just the pink buildings. All we have to do is select the asset, go to "match color variation," and now we can modify all assets that look like this one. Let's make these green. And you can see that the neighboring building has adjusted as well because they had the exact same color. There are a couple really helpful shortcuts with this mod, including Shift P, which will bring up the recolor menu. And from here, you can either clone colors from existing assets and paste them onto others, or use that radius tool I was using earlier. The other helpful shortcut is Alt F, which allows you to modify the color of a net lane, fence, or hedge. And from here, it's just like modifying anything else in Recolor. And it just lets you really dial things in to your liking. And finally, I wanted to point out that there are some additional recolor options in the options menu, including the ability to safely remove Recolor because Recolor will add additional information to your save file. So, if you want to remove it, this is the way to do it.

Number 25, Extra Networks and Areas. This is a really interesting mod that gives you the ability to create custom train stations, place invisible roads and parking lots, place animal spawners, and even create custom farms and parks. So, let's say we want to make a custom train station right here. All we have to do is go under [music] Transportation and Trains and find the Integrated Stations. I'll place that on the side of the track on both sides. And then using the Passenger Railway tool, I'll drag the train to these stops. Now, I want to provide pedestrian access to both sides of the track. So, I'll create a basic ramp that allows you to get to the other side. Now, let's make a custom parking lot. For that, I'll use the invisible two-lane car road with pedestrian access and parking. I'll snap to the grid and drag these down. There's some pretty big gaps there, so let's tighten this up by using the replace tool to move these over just like we would with any other road. And now, I'll fill the parking lot in with the area bucket. And for my snapping options here, I just want to snap to road and net lanes. And it's not perfect, but now it's pretty easy to clean up. I'll add a few details. And bam, custom parking lot. And now, after cleaning things up, we have our first train stopping here. We have a passenger that's looking to get on. I've used the mod to activate this beach. The way that I was able to do that was by adding lots of invisible pedestrian paths right through this area. And because these paths are fast and direct, there's a whole bunch of citizens using them. Over here by this fire station, I used an invisible road to add on to the fire station asset so that there were multiple ways that you could exit this parcel. And the really cool thing is cars actually use this access point and I added this to the asset. And two of the most creative ways of using this mod are creating custom parks and custom farms. To create a custom park, you have to place an existing park and then under landscaping, go to Spaces and Areas. Then zoom into your park and look for some of these invisible areas. You can now modify them. Citizen interactions with these park spaces will now occur in these larger areas. So, if there are people doing push-ups, you can expect to see them anywhere within these hangout areas. It's super cool. And speaking of hangout areas, that's what we can use to create custom farms. I've created a custom hangout area right here. And if I go under Objects and Markers, I can find any number of farm animals. As long as it's a farm animal and I place it within this square, the farm animal will spawn and not leave that square. That also means if I were to place a fence and then modify this hangaround area to be the exact size of the fence, the animals will appear to be fenced. Now, speaking of spawners, there are a variety of spawners, including a number of wild animal spawners that you might want to place to give your area

A bit more activity. Do keep in mind, though, these spawners have a mind of their own. So, if you place a bunch of moose in your city, they're going to be moose on the loose.

But I absolutely love to add these things because it means that I can add fish to water and birds flying above it and it just makes the whole area feel a ton more alive. But there are a few things worth mentioning. You might have noticed that I created a passenger train station and not a cargo train station.

[music] The main reason for that is even though we have an integrated cargo train stop, if I were to place this, it wouldn't work. I'm not really sure why, and I don't think that anyone else has figured it out, but people are still working on it.

Speaking of limitations, the invisible roads can't have buildings placed on them. [music] So that means that if you're using these to create a parking lot for a building, you're going to need to bound the parking lot with alleyways so that you can place the building on the alleys.

And finally, you may have noticed that I placed the park and modified the hangaround areas in the park rather than just drawing my own hangaround areas [music] and hoping that people show up to them. And the main reason for that is you can't do that. If I were just to draw these, no one will show up. Again, that's a limitation that no one's really been able to figure out, but you better believe that people are working on it, myself included, because I'd love to be able to create custom parks, [music] but this is a workaround that works.

And finally, a few other mods you're going to need to install along with this one. Anarchy, Move It, and Better Bulldozer, especially Anarchy and Better Bulldozer. [music] The main reason for that is without those two mods, you're really going to struggle to use this one. For instance, let's say you want to remove some of those animal spawners. The only way that you can do that is with Better Bulldozer. You have to filter to remove markers and ensure that the static object filter is selected. Then you can delete these spawn points. There's no other way to do it. And though you can create custom train stations and custom parking lots without movement anarchy, having them in your mod set makes it a ton easier. But ultimately, this is a really unique mod that can enable you to make some really interesting things if you push your creativity to the limits.

Number 24, Extra Detailing Tools. Extra Detailing Tools is a mod that adds a variety of detailing tools to City Skylines [music] 2, including the transform tool, additional snapping options, net lanes, vanilla surfaces, and vanilla decals. And in my opinion, this is the other half of the Extra Asset Importer. [music] But in my opinion, it's the much more useful half. If you had this mod installed, you're going to see the extra assets [music] menu just like with Extra Asset Importer. But this time around, you're going to have three tabs: decals, surfaces, and net lanes.

Now, this tab that we're looking at right here is only here because of Extra Asset Importer. But there are a number of tabs that are here because of Extra Detailing Tools, including the roadway marking decals, miscellaneous decals, which includes a bunch of letters, as well as court decals and a bunch of chirpers and parking decals. The second tab adds a variety of vanilla surfaces organized in a much more intuitive way than you'd find under landscaping. But in addition to all the vanilla things that you might expect to find like sand surfaces, concrete surfaces, grass surfaces, pavement surfaces, and tile surfaces, you also have miscellaneous surfaces, which includes a [music] clip surface if you want to see a view into the upside down, and ground surfaces, which includes agricultural surfaces, forestry surfaces, landfill surfaces, oil surfaces, and orura surfaces. And I think that these have a ton of value outside of their intended purposes, and you can't access them unless you're using this mod. And the final tab is for net lanes. And I absolutely love net lanes. They have so much value. For instance, let's say I wanted to be able to extend this bus lane all the way across here. That's a net lane. And I could easily do that. And just like that, we have our extension.

With the second tab in here, I can add fences. [music] And there are a number of vanilla options. So, if I wanted to add a privacy fence in the side of the highway right here, I can now do that. You cannot add fences like this in City Skylines 2 without this mod. And for that alone, I think many people are going to like this. And the third tab is for roadway markings. So, if you don't like the way that roadway markings look, this is going to be the mod for you. Let's say I wanted to add additional roadway markings right here. I can easily do that. Look for the marking I want to use, use the snapping options, and create whatever marks I'd like to create. There are also a number of custom net lanes available if you have both this mod and Extra Asset Importer installed. For instance, these wooden net lanes are from Elgendo, and they are absolutely beautiful and work like all other net lanes in the game. And that means that they have snapping options that work a lot like the road tools, which means it's very easy to make incredibly complex designs like this one.

Now, I specifically wanted to show a complex shape like this one because in combination with the Area Bucket, you can do some really special things with this mod. If you snap to net lanes, you can actually fill things in within the net lanes. And look at how easily I was able to make this shape. I can even delete the net lanes afterwards if I'd like to. And now I have this completely [music] perfect surface. All because I use net lanes to bound things. But it is worth mentioning the only way that you can remove net lanes is using Better Bulldozer. So if you're going to place net lanes, make sure that you have Better Bulldozer in your play set. Then underneath tool mode, you'll need to make sure that you have remove net lanes selected and then you'll be able to delete them.

But the mod has two more tricks up its sleeve. Let's say I want to modify these trees so they lean into one another. I can do that with the transform tool. All I have to do is select the asset and now I'll see transform tool. I can adjust the X Y and Z axis which will allow me to move the location of the asset either left and right with X, up and down with Y or side to [music] side with Z. The step is the increment for the adjustment. I can do the exact same thing with rotation. And if I change the step to one, I can really control this tilting the asset to the side as well as rotating it or adjusting it in the other direction as well. And with a little bit of playing, I can make these palm trees overlap just like you might see in front of an In-N-Out. The tool also lets you adjust the elevation of an asset. So, let's say I wanted to take this flower bush and make it feel like flowers on the ground instead of a tall bush. All I have to do is adjust the elevation. Let's make that 5 m. And now, when I place this, it'll be partially sunken into the ground. And I think that the visual effect of this is really, really nice.

But perhaps more impactful than all of that are the snapping options that it adds. I mentioned during the Extra Asset Importer part of the video that you're not able to snap to the building with the Extra Asset Importer. That's because it's a part of this mod. If I want to get this decal on the side of the building, all I have to do is disable snap upright. And if I have Extra Detailing Tools installed, now I can bring this right onto the side of the building. And that's all because it provides the option to snap to the surface of an object. You can also snap to roads and snap upright, which can be really useful if you want to put a surface on the ground because it will allow me to place this surface flat on the ground. Without this option selected, it doesn't work.

Now, I think to get the most from this mod, you're going to want to at a minimum have Anarchy and Better Bulldozer installed. And Move It. It's a great help as well, but you'll probably also want to consider having Extra Asset Importer because reasonably, the combination of the two mods is how you make the most out of custom surfaces and decals.

Number 23, Water Features. Water Features is a mod that allows you to place, delete, and edit water spawn points, as well as adjust the water simulation. It enables the water tool, which can be found underneath landscaping. This tool allows you to place streams, rivers at the border of a map, lakes, automated water sources, and seas at the border of a map. Water Features is the way that I was able to make Lake Sagunda, as well as a stream at the bottom of the lake.

Now, the workflow for using this mod is consistent across all the water spawn points. Basically, you select the type of water spawn point that you want, adjust the depth or flow depending on the type of water spawn point that you're using, adjust the radius, which is the size of the water spawn point, and then place the water spawn point. You can right mouse click the water spawn point and drag to an elevation to adjust the height. And then if things aren't filling in, adjust the radius to increase the flow. Once again, I'll change the elevation. And I basically just left click the spawn point and dragged it along to the elevation line that I want it to raise to. And as I let it go, I'll see the water rise to that point. And just bluntly, the water simulation's really finicky. So you might have to play around with this. And I'd highly recommend saving before you make any changes to water. And that's because if you're not careful, you can have stuff like this happen, which can be an absolute mess. But this is something that we can clean up. I've adjusted things to a rational level. And now I'm going to go into the options menu, and underneath Water Features, I'm going to run a water cleanup cycle. This will increase the evaporation rate for the entire map by a thousand for a short period of time. I'm going to only click this once because I don't want to evaporate all the water on the map. And within just a couple of seconds, everything is cleaned up. And in this particular instance, my little pond looks perfect.

But I'm going to tell you from personal experience, that isn't always the case. Recreating streams in particular, I find to be incredibly challenging. So, let's remove this one and see if I can get it right. Basically, I want to take the flow as low as possible. So, I'll take this to 0.1, which might seem low, but I think it's going to be perfect. And I'll take the radius to 5 m. Then, I'll speed things along and make sure we don't have flooding. And while we don't have flooding, the stream's not filling in. So, I'll change the radius and make it slightly bigger. And then the most challenging thing with this mod is remaining patient. I think that the radius has actually created issues because this was filling in. I just wasn't patient enough. So, I'll shrink this back down and this time be a bit more patient. And I had to run one water cleanup cycle, but it seems like things are mostly stable now. But ultimately, I'd have to be super patient and see if things fill in. Potentially adding more water spawn points along the stream if necessary.

Now, like I mentioned in the beginning, this mod can also adjust the water simulation in a number of unique ways. You can add detention and retention basins, [music] adjust the evaporation rate of water, add seasonal streams, and even add waves and tides. And the reason you might want to do this is to create sand on your shores. So, let's see how this looks with the default settings. And out here, we can start to see some waves occurring and things are getting wild. [laughter] And as we approach the shore, the waves are coming in. And the really cool thing about this is it makes those breakwaters actually useful. It creates a break between the waves and the rest of the bay, but it's also fundamentally altered our water levels. So, just like everything else in Water Features, you're going to want to do a little bit of guessing and checking and probably save before you make dramatic changes. But if you dial things in, the results might just be worth your time.

Editor Phil here, and I was just talking about the legacy water sources. So, if you're working on an older map like Magnolia County or Saguna Beach that hasn't yet been updated with the new water sources that came a few updates back to City Skylines 2, those are the options that you're going to see. They're a little bit more finicky. You definitely have to choose the right water source. And I think that it's just generally a bit more challenging to work with. But if you have a newer map or a map that's been updated to the new water sources, you're only going to see generic constant level water source. So, these are basically a catchall, do-it-all water source. This can be used on the edge of a map. So, if you go up to the edge of the map, you'll notice it turns yellow. You can also use this to make a pond. You can place a few of them in a row to make a river. You can use them in a variety of ways. So, just know that if you're working on a newer map or if you've updated your map to use the new water sources, this is what you'll see instead of those legacy sources. And honestly, this video is probably giving me the push that I need to update all of my maps.

Number 22, [music] City Stats. City Stats is a simple mod that shows information about your city in a graphical way. And more than basically any other mod, I get asked questions about this one, and it makes sense to me because it's really easy to understand, and it's incredibly helpful. Because this mod is currently visible, I know that I'm having issues with water, sewage, prison availability, and elementary school availability. And by seeing this front and center, it might prompt me to build some of those things.

But let's say I don't want to see this information and I want to see very specific information. I can tailor the mod to my liking. All I have to do is click the gear option right here and select options that I no longer want to see. I can also move the panel around. And if I want to have a vertical panel, all I have to do is go under options, find City Stats, and set the panel orientation to vertical. And one more thing, if you have this mod installed and you're not seeing the panel, click in this icon right here. This will show and hide the panel. And that's it. That's the entire mod. Incredibly simple and incredibly useful.

Number 21, Traffic Lights Enhancement. Traffic Lights Enhancement is a mod that enables custom signal timing for traffic signals in City Skylines 2. But before I show you how this mod works, I have to talk about its recent history because it's quite complex.

Now, Traffic Lights Enhancement Alpha is actually one of the oldest mods for City Skylines 2. It was actually in the thunderstorm way back in the day. And once Paradox Mods was added to City Skylines 2, Traffic Lights Enhancement was ported over and active development of the mod continued through late 2024. However, throughout all of last year, the mod was basically in maintenance mode, being recompiled for different game updates, and that continued until update 1.3.3. At that point in time, this mod was abandoned. [music] And then we started seeing things like this popping up in Paradox Mods, Traffic Lights Enhancement Hot Fix Unofficial. This was a recompile of the mod to make it compatible with version 1.4.2 of the game. And obviously, this treatment is not ideal. This is how we all get viruses. And I think because of that, this mod was forked. And there are currently two forks of the mod. One is called Traffic Lights Enhancement by Brucey Boy, and the other is Traffic Tool Essentials by Zessions Mod.

Now, if you use the original version of the mod, all of your data will work with either of these mods. And just by looking at the number of subscribers, you might think that Traffic Tool Essentials is the mod to go for. I mean, look, it has almost 90,000 subscribers in comparison to the less than 20,000 that Brucey Boy's version of the mod has. Further, Zessions has added a lot of really nice UI features, such as this traffic overview, which I've used and honestly works really well and looks great. So, that might make you wonder, why am I recommending Traffic Lights Enhancement over Traffic Tool Essentials? What it really comes down to is communication and testing. Brucey Boy has a record of taking over mods that have been abandoned, reviving them, and improving them over time. He's done this with InfoLoom and with Advanced Simulation Speed. He's also an active member of the City Skylines 2 modding community. And I've personally spoken with him on a number of occasions about mods. And because of that, I know that all of his mods are meticulously tested before they're uploaded to Paradox Mods. And that means that if you use this version of the mod, you're not a guinea pig. From all that I can tell, Traffic Tools Essentials is a great mod. However, there's no real way to communicate with Zessions Mod outside of the forums. And for me, that's going to be a little bit of a red flag. And that's because modding is all based upon trust and trust is earned via communication. But I do have to mention this is a personal decision for me and there's nothing wrong with using Zessions Mod if this is the route you want to go in. And I also don't want to discourage them from developing it. The mod looks really good. I just hope that they open up their communication a bit more in the future. Hopping on Discord, joining the Cities 2 modding community, and communicating with other members of the community would go a long ways towards making me feel more comfortable with this mod.

But another reason that I like Traffic Lights Enhancement is because I've spoken with Brucey Boy. I have an advanced version of this mod and I know that one of the features that's coming up in a future version of this mod is one that is highly requested. The ability to chain lights together and have a leading green light. This is one of the best features of TMPE and it's coming to Traffic Lights Enhancement in the near future.

But enough about all that history. Let's talk about how this mod works. If you've used older versions of Traffic Lights Enhancement Alpha, this is the exact same mod. Click on the button up here and you'll see this overlay. Then you just have to select the traffic signal. And once you do that, you'll have the opportunity to modify the phasing. Right now we're seeing the [music] vanilla phasing. But if I want to have split phasing, I can select that. I can also allow turning on red lights, add an exclusive pedestrian phase, adjust the length of that pedestrian phase, or even create my own custom phasing.

Now, if I want to create my own custom phase, I have to go into the custom phase editor. Then I'll click add, and this will be my first phase. Now, I like to adjust this so that I can see where each of the legs of the intersection [music] is that I want to modify. And now, for the first phase, let's say I want it to be a pedestrian phase. I could add all of those and then click add. For the second phase, let's say I want to allow through movements from this leg [music] all the way through. I could add those. And then I realize that going through here probably would work as well. But I don't want a left-hand turn. I want a straight. So I'll double click that and give it the green. If I want to have a yield, I can click twice. And now that left-hand turn is allowed, but they have to yield or give way to the through movement. Right now U-turns aren't allowed here. But if I wanted to enable those, I could do that as well, or even have them yield. Your call. And because I have no right-hand turns right here, why don't I allow pedestrians as well? Now that I'm satisfied with this phase, I can click add and move on to the next one. And then I can add this phase as well. Now I can go and modify these existing phases. [music] So let's say I want to change the duration of the phase. I can do that right here. Right now it's 2 seconds. [music] For the minimum duration, I can say the minimum duration of the pedestrian phase is 10. For the second phase, I can say the minimum duration is also 10. And I could prioritize cars. [music] And I'll do the exact same thing for the third phase. Then I'm realizing I added a fourth phase that I don't need. So I'll hit the trash can right here and delete it. Now I can speed things along and just see how things clear out. And if I have a lot of backups, I can enter manual control mode for a while and select the phase that I want to run for a while. Now once [music] I'm satisfied, I can go back and save this. And if I see the traffic light with the wrench icon, I know that my custom phasing is active for the signal.

Now like I mentioned in the future, this mod will give you the ability to chain lights together and you can add a leader. So, if this were the leader, you could have a green light here, enable a green light here, and then enable a green light here. That is going to be the power of this mod in the near future. But there are more things that this mod can do. If you pop into options and look for Traffic Lights Enhancement, you can set some defaults. For instance, let's [music] say you want split phasing to be your default. You can enable turning on reds, and you can add an exclusive pedestrian phase if you'd like. Now, again, these changes will only apply to new [music] intersections unless you force all nodes to update.

And finally, before I move on, I want to better explain what split phasing [music] means. So, in vanilla, you'll end up having both through movements from both directions be green at the same time. With split phasing, you'll have one leg of the intersection active at any point in time. So, in many cases, this will actually be [music] a solution to clear traffic if you're experiencing lots of backups, especially considering it will look at each of the legs individually and time the phase based on that one movement. And if you're at a more traditional intersection like this one, you can also have protected left turns. And again, this is just a way of maximizing throughput. And that's Traffic Lights Enhancement. It's a mod that I really think should be baked into the game, considering it has an agent-based simulation and one that many people consider absolutely essential. It's really kind of half of TMPE. And if you've ever wanted to live your Traffic Engineer fantasy, this is the mod for you.

Number 20, Plop the Growables. Plop the Growables is a mod that allows you to plop and move zonable buildings without them despawning. And if you're a detailer, this is an absolutely essential mod. But even if you're not, I think that this is an absolutely essential mod. And let me show you why. In some cases, you're going to have awkward gaps in zoning. And it can be really tempting to move a global asset just outside of its zoning district to better center it within your build. But if you don't have Plop the Growables installed, this building will despawn. But with Plop the Growables installed, it will not so long as you have the right settings enabled. And you can find the settings in options under Plop the Growables. And there are a few settings here such as non-plot buildings require zoning. So if you have this selected, any buildings that grow in naturally will always require zoning. If you have it deselected, like I do, buildings will never require zoning, even if they've zoned in naturally. You can lock the building level when a building is plopped. This is really critical if you're trying to dial in the specific look of an area. This will ensure that buildings don't change as they level up. You can disable building abandonment and you can prevent building leveling generally if you want to maintain the look of an area. You also have the ability to alter all existing buildings in your build by locking all building levels, unlocking all building levels, or removing abandonment for all existing structures.

The other thing that this mod adds is a historical button, locking the building level. And this is one of the reasons why you may want this even if you want to maintain normal zoning progression. And unfortunately, this feature isn't in the vanilla game like it was in City Skylines 1. But do know, if you add this mod to your playset, you want to make the most of it, you're going to want to add a few other mods as well, including Anarchy, Move It, and Find It. Anarchy so you can overlap things if you want to, Move It so you can move things around, and Find It so you can find specific assets. But do know Dev Mode works as well if you prefer to go that route.

Number 19, Zone Organizer. Zone Organizer is a simple mod that takes your different zoning categories and breaks them out into more tabs. And because of that, my residential zoning districts are broken into low-density, medium, [music] and high. Mixed has its own category. So does low-density commercial and high-density commercial, as well as low-density office and high-density office. And now that we have all the region packs, this can be incredibly helpful because in the vanilla game, all of those different categories are thrown in together. So all the residential categories, all the commercial categories, and all the office categories. And in my opinion, it can be really difficult to find things. But with this, it's incredibly simple. I don't lose any zoning categories, and I'm never confused. This is a mod that I recommend for basically anybody, and I really hope that in the future, this becomes a vanilla mechanic.

Number 18, Asset UI Manager. Now, if you're a fan of Zone Organizer, you're going to love Asset UI Manager because it does the exact same thing, but for basically every asset in the game. For [music] instance, it reorganizes the roads menu, adding in pathways, piers and keys, parking roads, parking spaces to separate categories. But where I think it's most useful is in the education menu, where we can now see elementary schools, high schools, colleges, universities, and research institutions all in their own tabs. And everything is customizable. If you go into options, you can decide whether or not you want things to be reorganized. Everything from the transportation options to healthcare, death care, and city services. And ultimately, this is one of those mods that just improves your quality of life. So, I'd recommend it to basically everybody, and I hope that in the future, the game actually organizes assets the exact same way that this mod does.

Number 17, Too. Topo Toggle is the simplest of simple mods. It provides a perpetual topography toggle, and this is a mod that I've wanted since the day the game was released. What it does is allow you to have this button right here where you can toggle contour lines whenever you want. You can move this around wherever you want on the screen and enable and disable topography lines at your leisure. This is a really helpful mod because in a vanilla game, there are a couple of spots where I think that you should have topography lines where you don't have them, such as when you're planting landscaping. By default, you can't see contour lines. But with this, you can. So that means if you want to plant out a contour line, you can now do that. It also means that if you're trying to use landscaping to accentuate contour lines, you can now easily do that. And ultimately, it means that you can display this important information whenever you'd like, whenever it would be useful to you. So, I'd recommend this mod to anybody.

Number 16, Advanced Line Tool. Advanced Line Tool is a line tool for City Skylines that's more advanced than the vanilla one, and it is a much better tool. So, when you have this mod installed, you're going to see two line tools, which is a bit confusing. Here's the vanilla line tool, and down here is the advanced line tool. [music] And it has all the same features of the vanilla line tool, but they're better. So we have a straight line, a curved line. We also have a circle [music] tool. So if you want to place things in a circle, you can do that. And there's also a grid tool. So if you want to place things in a grid, you can do that as well. But even the straight line tool is better [music] because it gives you much more customization. Let's say I want to space things in a relative way. I click this button right here. And now as I drag things along, I get a relative spacing. Let's say I want to randomize the rotation of these assets. I can do that as well. And you can see the trees rotating as I pull the line tool. You can also adjust the spacing variation if you like it to feel a bit more random. I love doing this when I'm making tree lines near farms. And you can see that looks a ton more natural. And you can adjust the offset as well if you don't want them to be perfectly in a straight line. And now it feels very organic. Additionally, you can snap to length. [music] So if you only want to move at fixed increments, this will do that for you. There's a fence mode. And this is particularly useful if you have the UK region pack which has a whole bunch of these fences. It enables you to actually place these as fences. There's also a wall-to-wall mode if you want to keep things nice and tight. And the ability to enable randomization. And this can be really helpful with rocks because if you use the boulder randomization, the random option here, and then adjust the spacing, variation, and offset, you can make a really natural looking rip rap wall in just a couple of seconds. And I use this mod everywhere. I used the grid tool to make these really nicely spaced farm fields. And I used the line tool with a bit of randomization right here to create a really natural looking tree line. And in this traffic circle right here, I use the advanced line tool's circle option to perfectly place these flowers. And I think it looks really, really even and really, really good as a result. And in my opinion, this mod is absolutely essential for anyone that likes to do lighter detailing like I do. And because of that, I recommend it to basically everybody.

Number 15, FPS Limiter. City Skylines 2 is notoriously GPU hungry and it will basically peg your GPU at 100% utilization if you allow it to. FPS Limiter is a mod that will tone things down. To enable it, go into options and find FPS Limiter. There are three options. You can limit the FPS and menus, in-game, or only when the simulation is paused. I personally like to enable the option for main menu and options menu and when the simulation is paused. And for both of these, I like to leave them to 30 FPS. Now, I kid you not. The moment I selected this option, my FPS dropped from 70 to 30 and I could hear my GPU ramp down. And ultimately, that means that my room is going to cool down. And that might make you wonder, why don't I want to limit the in-game FPS? And the main reason [music] is tearing. If I enable this, even if I have VSync enabled, it will override VSync. And the result is 30 FPS and tearing. It looks absolutely terrible to me. It also feels really sluggish. So, if I can get 60 FPS and keep V-Sync on, I'd much rather do that in game. But ultimately, that's a personal choice.

Now, in addition to those three options, you can also adjust the max FPS in any of these areas. So, for instance, if you only want to receive 15 FPS in the menu, adjust this down. And right there, I can see that the FPS is dropped to 15. I can do the exact same thing when the simulation is paused, or if I'm a madman, even do it in game. But again, just keep in mind that this will impact the way that the game feels. So, if you're not okay with things feeling sluggish, don't ramp down too much. And ultimately, these are my preferred settings. They work great for me. They ramp down my GPU, and they keep things feeling buttery smooth.

Number 14, Even Better Save List. Even Better Save List is a mod that does exactly what its name implies it will do. It provides you an even better save list. And it does this by allowing you to sort through your saves in two ways. First is you can sort through your cities by name, population, or when they were last modified. So right now they're in alphabetical order. I could reverse that. I could also sort them by population or when I last modified them. And then within each of these cities, I can do the exact same sort of organization. So for Saguna Beach, I could sort by the name of the save, the population, or when I last modified the save. And if you're someone like me that versions your saves a lot, this is an absolute godsend. And in my opinion, there's no drawbacks to using this mod. Just get it. It's phenomenal.

Number 13, InfoLoom. Now, if you're like me and you want to play City Skylines 2 as a simulator, but don't think that the in-game statistics and info use provide enough information to do so, InfoLoom is the mod for you. To access InfoLoom, click on this button up here and you'll get the InfoLoom menu. Now, before we dive into the details, I just want to let you know that this mod provides a whole bunch of information. And I think different aspects of this mod are going to be useful for different people, but there are a few areas that are going to be broadly applicable to everybody. Starting out with the workforce. And the reason this is so useful is it provides unemployment rates by education level. So for instance, I can see in Sagunda Beach that we have very high unemployment rates for the uneducated and poorly educated. And if I wanted to solve that, I'd probably want to zone industrial jobs or things of that nature. But there's another way that I could attack this. I can see that a huge number of highly educated and well educated folks are underemployed. So if I were to create more jobs that appeal to them, I might be able to provide more jobs for the uneducated and poorly educated. And I think this is especially useful if you've added districts around individual cities in your community. Cuz right now, for instance, I can see how Lake Valley is doing versus Saguna Beach. And it seems like the unemployment problem isn't quite as acute there. We can do the exact same thing with workplaces and see the percentage of openings and the number of people commuting into the community. The mod also breaks things up by sector, which I think is really interesting.

Under the residential menu, we can see demand by density. And this lets me see the number of empty properties as well as the number of homeless. And this is a much more accurate number than the one that's found in the in-game info views. If I take a look at the commercial menu, I can troubleshoot demand. Right now, I don't have any commercial demand, and I can see it's because my production capacity is way higher than 100%. That means that I have overzoned commercial, and that's the reason why I have zero commercial demand. I can also take a look at each and every commercial building, see how they're doing individually, and if I want find them and eliminate them. And I can do the exact same troubleshooting with industrial and office. [music] Do know that these are combined though, which can make figuring out why I have industrial and not office a little bit more complex. Thankfully, we have the demand menu. And if I go in here and scroll to the bottom, I will see office. And I can see that the reason I don't have office demand really comes down to two things. Number one, I have vacant buildings. And number two, my high skill labor availability isn't all that high. If I were to improve those two things, I'd likely see my office demand rebound. I also love that you're able to open multiple menus at once. So, if you want to cross-reference things, you can do that until your heart's content. And like I mentioned, you can really dive into the minutia if you'd like and figure out exactly what you should be producing in your city to generate the most revenue. Right here, I can see that grain and vegetables are super profitable, while timber is actually losing money. And again, this is one of those mods that makes playing with the simulation absolutely possible. It's how I've been able to troubleshoot a number of problems, and it's a mod I'd recommend to basically everybody.

Number 12, Area Bucket. Area Bucket's a mod that allows you to replace surfaces as well as fill in areas with surfaces using a bucket tool, kind of like in Photoshop. And in my opinion, this is a mod that feels like it should be a vanilla feature. To access this tool, just select any surface, and now you'll have two new options, the Area Bucket tool and the Replacement tool. If you go into the Area Bucket tool, you're going to have a variety of snapping options and tolerances to choose from. The snapping options include roads and networks, building lots, surfaces and areas, net lanes, and subnetss. I'm trying to build a parking lot right here. So, I want to snap to roads and networks. So, I'll select that. Then, I'll select the pavement that I want to fill it in with and just hover over this network. And you can see that it's filling this area in. And if I click it, fills it in perfectly. And this mod makes it easy for me to go all the way through here and fill these in. Now, in some cases, it won't be perfect, but that's okay. It's easy to fix. Deselect the tool. And now, I have my normal surface tool. And with just a little bit of cleanup, I was able to make these look absolutely perfect.

Now, adjusting the tolerances can be really helpful as well. The lower the number, the smaller the surface area will be. The larger the number, the larger the area that you'll fill in. Now, again, there are a variety of snapping options. And different options will be useful in different scenarios. For instance, let's say I want to add a surface underneath this elementary school. If I have building lot selected, I can select underneath the school and fill the whole thing in. I didn't mean to do concrete, though, so I'll select the grass surface and use the replacement tool to change that over to grass. Now, in my opinion, this mod works best if you combine it with Anarchy. And the main reason for that is in some cases, you may just want to move quick. So, for instance, let's say I just want to fill this entire block in. Even with the highest tolerance settings, I can't do that. But with Anarchy, I can just move around quickly and overlap the surfaces. And from a visual standpoint, it looks absolutely perfect. And then I wanted to point out one more option under options. If you select preview surface, you're able to actually see a preview of the surface as you're laying it down. Do know that there might be a performance impact here, though. So, if you don't have the most powerful hardware, maybe this isn't the correct route to go. But this mod is a huge timesaver. It can make replacing surfaces incredibly simple. And in my opinion, again, this is a mod that just should be baked into the vanilla game. I highly recommend it to everybody.

Number 11, Find [music] It. Find It is a really interesting jack-of-all-trades mod that probably does a little bit more than you realize. But there are two core functions that most people think of when they think of Find It. The picker tool and the ability to search through assets. The picker tool is this eyedropper right here. And if you select this, you can select an asset and instantly clone it. The search function can be found by clicking on this magnifying glass. And from within here, you can search for assets using plain text. Let's say I want to find all police assets. I'll type in police. And now I have all of the police assets. I can narrow this down to service buildings if I just want to see the service buildings. Or if I want to see police cars, I can go to vehicles.

Now, with Find It, I can place vehicles as static objects. That's something that you can't do in the vanilla game. And that's how I was able to create this auto dealership. I placed a whole bunch of vehicles using Find It. Now, one of the neat features of Find It is the ability to randomize objects. So, let's say I want to place a whole bunch of cars, but I want them to be random. All I have to do is create my filter. Right now, I'm just filtering to residential vehicles, and I have L set as my randomization hotkey. So, I can place this, hit L, and get a different vehicle. Now, I could take this to the next level. Let's say I only wanted to work with certain vehicles. I could add them to favorites. So, let's say I just want sedans, sports cars, muscle cars without stripes, and hatchbacks. I hit the favorite star, and now if I go over here, I can filter to just my favorite residential vehicles. And there they are. And now when I randomize, I'm only filtering through these ones. And you can do that with all sorts of assets. Everything from props to buildings to vehicles.

One of the most popular uses for this mod is selecting individual buildings to plop. So let's say I want to plop some of the southwestern row homes. I can select southwest pack over here. Select row homes. And now I've filtered to just these row homes. Now I want these to be consistent. So I'll adjust the lot depth to be three units. And I'll adjust the building level to all be level three. And now as I randomize through here, I'm only getting these assets. And this is the power of Find It. Now, obviously, I have Plop the Growables installed, and that's why these buildings are not disappearing. But even if I didn't have it installed, I could add the zoning first, pause it, then plop the buildings, and they would remain. But there's even more that I can do. Let's clear all my filters. And I want to search for a signature building. And I'm looking for this row home signature building. And I know that it has a one unit lot width. So I'll set that here. And there they are. So let's say I want to place a few of these. If I have Anarchy, I can do that. Again, that's the power of Find It. And using Find It plus Anarchy, I can place multiple copies of any sign that you're building. Just keep in mind that you are going to be duplicating their bonuses, though, and you might see some wacky stuff as a result. But for a building like the Baltar Pines, I'm only going to see increased happiness within 750 m. That's not the worst thing in the world.

Bet also lets you place a variety of props that are not otherwise available to you. Things like billboards, signage, and even lighting. But do know if you place lighting, you're going to need the Prop Lights mod. Otherwise, the lights will be on 24/7. And then the final thing I wanted to point out about the mod is that there are a number of different ways to view it. So, if you want the Find It panel to be bigger, click this button. And now you can see additional rows. If you want the orientation of Find It to be different, click on this button right here. And you can adjust where Find It is showing up on your screen, either in the center, on the left, or on the right. You can also adjust the view style, seeing just icons, small icons, or

just a list. And you can adjust the sorting options. And ultimately, once you dial things in, you're going to end up using Find It all the time. This is an absolutely essential mod.

Number 10, [music] traffic. Traffic is a mod that brands itself as the TMP successor for City Skylines 2, and I think it's about half of TMPE. If you click on the traffic cone up here, you'll have access to a lane connector tool and the priorities tool. The lane connector tool is absolutely essential. Let's say I want to have a double left-hand turn right here. If I click on this, I can now add that. Now, this looks really messy, and that's because it's showing you not only the legitimate official movements, but also the movements that are unsafe, like U-turns. I like to begin by removing those, and that cleans things up quite a bit. Let's get rid of this through movement and then add a double left. And it's just as easy as that. And the great thing about City Skylines 2 is that all the lane markings update when you make those changes in traffic. So it ends up looking really nice as well. And in more advanced scenarios, traffic can be used to completely clean things up. Right here, for instance, we have an awkward U-turn. Let's clean that up. We'll remove the unsafe movements. Then get rid of the U-turn by selecting this first movement and where we want to remove the connection from. And then because I have a slip lane right here, I want to get rid of this right-hand turn and do the same thing right here. And this looks incredibly clean now and was all made possible by the lane connector tool in traffic. The other half of the tool is the priorities tool. And this one's incredibly useful as well. I'm going to select this intersection. And now I can decide which movement has priority. If I want to prioritize Johnson Street, I'll select priority, select Johnson Street, and now I have a through movement right there. I can add stop signs to 7th and now cars will stop there. Or I can adjust this to make this yield signs instead. And now vehicles will give way. Now I just applied that to an entire intersection, but you can do it to lanes as well. So let's remove the traffic lights here and then use the priorities tool. I'll apply this to individual lanes. And now I can have a yield on the left-hand turn and priority on the through movement. I could stop here in the through movement and have a yield on the right-hand turn and the through movement right here. And if I combine this with a lane connector tool, I could get rid of that through movement. And now this yield makes a lot more sense. And ultimately, this is a mod that gives you more ammunition to tackle some of the most challenging traffic problems in your city. If you combine this with traffic lights enhancement, you can do even more. The two of these mods combined are basically TMPE, and I'd highly recommend them to any advanced players.

Number nine, Road [music] Builder. Road Builder is a mod that showcases the modularity of City Skylines 2 like basically no other mod. And with it, you can create basically any road that your mind can think of. All you have to do is click on this icon up here and you'll open up the road builder menu. Now, what you're seeing right here are all the roads that I've already put together. But if I wanted to make a new one, all I have to do is select a road and it pulls up this menu. Now, I can modify this thing in real time. Let's say I want to add additional lanes. I'll just grab this car right here and drag it down and I'll see the changes in real time. I can also adjust lane widths, which can be really helpful if I want to preserve right-of-way. I can also remove parking, forest decorations, and if I get really wild, I can even add tracks to roads. And just by adding this right here, I was able to add a train track right down the center of this road. Now, this sort of configuration actually exists in the real world, and you wouldn't be able to make it in City Skylines 2 without Road Builder. When you're satisfied with the way your road looks, you can name it, adjust the speed limit, change the category of the road, which will determine where you find it in game, set the add-ons such as traffic lights, power and water, zoning, and toggle whether or not you can see it in the toolbar. Now, by default, this mod has training wheels on it so that you can't make a whole bunch of broken roads. But if you want to take the training wheels off and try some truly funky stuff, you can do that in options. Just find road builder and options and remove the lane restrictions and the safety measures. And once you do that, you're going to be able to do some things that you wouldn't otherwise normally be able to do, like make this sidewalk really narrow. And now I got this all the way down to 1 m. I'll do the exact same thing on this side, and I've narrowed up the drive lanes, and now I have a super narrow road with really narrow sidewalks and a train track going down the center. This is only possible because of Road Builder. But one of the most exciting features of Road Builder is the ability to manage and discover roads. This is basically its own built-in workshop where you can discover roads that other people have published. Just click on discover. And right now, we're looking at all the most popular roads. Check this one out. We have a gravel pedestrian path. I'll click place. And now I can instantly place this pedestrian path. And honestly, it looks pretty darn good. Let's try out this alleyway. I'll click download, then place. But this time, I'm going to replace this. And I'll replace this road that we just placed with this one. And that's a really unique road right there. That looks great. And again, this is only possible because of road builder. Uh, before I move on from this mod, I just want to let you know that there are conflicts between this mod and platter. And that's a mod that we're going to talk about in just a moment. But basically, if you place a platter plop zoning on a road builder road and then modify the road, you'll crash your game. So, the safest bet is to probably not use them in combination with one another or to not modify any of your roads if you're using both platter and road builder. But do know the authors of those two mods are looking at the incompatibility and hoping to have it resolved soon. But even with that caveat, this mod's [music] fantastic. I'd recommend it to anybody.

Number eight, Better Bulldozer. Better Bulldozer is a mod that is exactly what it says it is. It's a better bulldozer tool for City Skylines, too. The reason it's better is it allows you to filter and delete [music] only certain types of objects, as well as delete things you wouldn't otherwise be able to delete, including automating some deletion tasks. To access Better Bulldozer, just click on the bulldozer icon when you have it installed, [music] and you're going to immediately notice a whole bunch of new filters and tool modes. For the filters, you can narrow in on what you want to delete. So, if [music] you want to remove surfaces, just select this filter. And now, the only thing that I'll be able to delete is surfaces. I can do the exact same thing with networks, buildings, trees, plants, decals, [music] and other props such as lights. You can also select multiple of these at once. So, if you know that you want to get rid of trees and plants and props, now I can delete just those. And the great thing about this is it can prevent you from making mistakes, which is really important because the game doesn't have an undo function. It also comes with a number of tool modes. This first mode allows you to remove surfaces and spaces. And if you have this selected, you can actually remove surfaces from buildings. The remove markers option will allow you to remove static object markers and invisible roads. [music] So, if you want to remove roads like these that are invisible, you must have better bulldozer. Remove net lanes allows you to delete net lanes. And this is the only way to get rid of them. So, if you're using extra detailing tools, you must have better bulldozer. So, you can delete things like these net lane fences. Bypass confirmation allows you to delete things without a popup saying, "Are you sure you want to delete this?" And this option to remove moving objects and Sims allows you to delete Sims and vehicles. You can either do this individually or if you select this option right here, you can do so in a radius. Now all those folks are gone. You can even increase the size of the radius. Now everyone is gone. But the tool that I like the most is removing sub elements. Sub elements are portions of a building. And I often talk about deconstructing assets. This is how I'm doing it. Better bulldozer with the remove sub elements tool. And there's a few different ways that you can do this. You can remove a single item. So let's say I just want to get rid of the chirper right here. Well, I got rid of that half of the field. [laughter] You can do that. Now, do keep in mind when you remove a single item, I've noticed that they'll often regenerate. So, it's better to use exact match and that will get rid of both of those. And that's because it's going to remove whatever sub elements are exactly the same. So, let's say I want to get rid of all the lights. I could do that. Then, we have similar category. This would allow me to get rid of all the branding, for instance, even if the branding signs are different sizes or remove all the landscaping, even if it's different types of trees. And if I've made mistakes, I can click on this button right here and restore the asset and everything comes back to the way it was. Now, if you're attempting to remove a portion of an asset and for whatever reason you can't do so, it might be because you have an extension on the building and it's actually a sub element of the extension. So, if you want to remove it, try clicking on this and seeing if you can remove that portion of the asset. Then, in some cases, this will make it possible. But that's not where asset deconstruction ends. You can actually select multiple of these tools such as adding markers to this. And now I can remove elements of assets. So let's say I want to remove one of these drive bays. I can now do that. But it is giving me a warning. Removing sub element networks may break assets. So you do have to kind of roll the dice a little bit when you're doing this. And if you break it, you can't reset it. You'll have to replace the asset. But now that I've done this, the only places that we'll see vehicles go through here are these three bays. You can also remove static objects. And though I don't know exactly what this static object does, in many cases, these are spawn points for people. So if I don't want people to spawn at those locations, I'll just remove those static objects. And I can't remove these ones. But if I select sub elements, now I can. And creative use of better bulldozer is how I was able to make this custom harbor. So this is one of those mods where your imagination is the limit. Finally, I do want to point out that if you go into options, there are some advanced features in here that you might not know about that are really pretty cool. First, you can remove all manicured grass. And this might be something that you want to do if you have map texture replacer enabled. Select this option. And now, whenever a building spawns in or is plopped, it'll no longer have the manicured grass. And if you want to remove all the manicured grass in your build, click on this button right here. And now, as I go through, all the manicured grass that's part of my assets is now missing. Anything I placed is still there. That's why I have manicured grass right here and right here. Another thing you can do with this mod is automatically remove fences. So, if you don't want to have a bunch of assets that have fences like this, select this option right here. Do know this change will only be reflected after you load back in, though. So, if I exit out, the fences are still going to be there. And finally, if you're not a fan of all the branding on the buildings, you can remove that, too. All you have to do is select this option right here, and the next time you load back in, all the branding will be gone. And that's Better Bulldozer. It's an incredibly powerful tool that I recommend to anybody. Even if you don't plan on using the advanced features, being able to filter down and only delete certain objects is incredibly useful. [music]

Number seven, Time and Weather Anarchy. Time and weather anarchy is a mod that allows you to adjust the time of [music] day, season, and even the weather. And it does so rapidly on the fly. All you have to do to access this mod is click on this button up here, and then you can adjust all the settings until your heart's content. For instance, [music] I could adjust the time of day and make it night. Change the season from winter to summer. Change the temperature. Let's make it -4. Enable some precipitation. And even though it's summer, now it's snowing. I could also adjust the cloud cover and even enable a custom aurora borealis. Though, I'd probably want to get rid of the clouds and precipitation to show that. Now, if I dial in settings that I like, I can also create profiles so I can quickly come back to them in the future. And ultimately, this mod is a quality of life mod. It allows me to dial in the visuals to exactly what I'm looking for at that point in time. And I almost always play in day mode because I feel like day mode looks better than the default. And it's all about the way that the shadows are cast. This also allows me to stay in summer, which is really helpful when you're landscaping, as well as disable precipitation, which I think can make things look a little bit too dreary for my liking. And this is one of those mods that I really feel should be built into the base game. But since it's not, this mod is there and it [music] works beautifully.

Number six, Zone Color Changer. Zone Color Changer is a mod that allows you to change the color of your zoning districts as well as their opacity. And this mod is so essential for me that I don't even like playing the game without it installed. To access this mod, click on zones and you'll have this edit colors button up here. When you click on this, you'll get this new menu that pops up. From here, the thing that I like to change the most is the opacity. So, I'll take the fill opacity, which is the color of the zones that are actually filled in, and lower this quite a bit and keep the border opacity fairly high. I like to do the exact same thing with the empty cells, but take the border opacity and lower that way, way down as well. And to my eyes, this is much more understandable and much more legible. And that's why I like to make these adjustments. But the great thing about this mod is that you can dial things in however you like. In addition to being able to change the opacity, you can actually change the color for individual zoning categories. So right here, for instance, if I wanted to change the color of the low-density gable roof housing, I could select this and change the color of just this zoning category, and it will actually change the color down here as well. Now, obviously, if you're not careful with this, you can make the entire game completely illegible, but also this is a way that you can highlight specific districts if you'd like to. But maybe the best thing about this mod is it provides accessibility options. If you're color blind, this is an absolutely essential mod for you. You can change the mode and select [music] colors you'd be able to see. There are three different options. And if you close the zoning menu and reopen it, the colors are adjusted in there as well. And I'll be honest, from the first time I played this game until now, I've wanted this mod incorporated into the vanilla experience, and I still hold out hope that it will be at some point. But until then, this mod is an absolute essential.

Number five, Zone Tools. Zone Tools is a mod that allows you to remove zoning from roads. [music] And this ranks so high on my list because zoning is one of the things that put many people off from the game. Here's how it works. Click on this icon up here and you'll get the zone tools menu. By default, zoning shows up on both sides of the road. However, you can update any road to remove zoning. All you have to do is select the way that you want to remove it. So, let's say I only want to have it on the left-hand side of the road. Select this option, then update the road, and now it's only on the left-hand side of the road. I can do the exact same thing with the right-hand side or remove zoning altogether. Now, do know that this will not allow you to add zoning to highways or things like that, but you will be able to remove zoning or change zoning on roads that could otherwise have it. But let's say you try to remove zoning from a road that already has buildings. It will not allow you to do that. Not without changing one setting anyway. Hop into options and remove protection for occupied cells. If you do that, you'll be able to remove zoning on roads that have buildings. Be careful with this. The only reason those buildings didn't disappear is because I have plopped the growables. If I didn't have it, those buildings would be disappearing. The other way that you can use this mod is when you're drawing in roads. [music] So, let's say I don't want to have zoning on roads going up this hillside. I want to have them on the roads that are parallel to the hillside contour lines. I will make sure that zoning is off. And then I'll draw the roads in. And now these roads don't have zoning cells, at least for the most part. There was a small error right here. So, let's update the road. Perfect. [music] And now I'll follow the contour line with the next road and make sure that I have zoning cells enabled. And now they've shown up on this road. But I think where this mod is most useful are areas like this. [music] An area where I created a custom grid and the zoning cells are facing in random directions. I can clean things up very easily. Now I'll say no zoning. And on these roads right here, I'll disable it. Now all of my zoning is facing the east-west roads. And now when I reenable zoning on these, they have secondary priority. So, the zoning is back, but it's not replacing the zoning that I removed. The only other option of note is the ability to protect cells that have zoning, but no buildings. If I go back into options and I have this selected, I won't be able to inadvertently desone these. It's acting as if there are buildings there. In my opinion, this mod's absolutely essential. This feature should be built into the vanilla game, and honestly, I was shocked when it wasn't. So, I'd recommend that everybody picks this up. It'll save you so much frustration.

Number four, Anarchy. What is there to say about anarchy? Outside of that, it allows you to do basically anything that you want to. To enable anarchy, hit control A and you're going to see flaming chirper like right next to my head over here. Flaming chirper means that you can do whatever you want. And I mean literally [music] whatever you want. Want to overlap landscaping? You can do that now. Want to place landscaping on the road? You can do that. Want to place this police station inside of this building? You can do that. Want to create a whole street of the Atkins Palmer residence? Plop until your heart's content. And ultimately, Anarchy is a mod that you're probably just going to want to have in your mod set no matter what other mods you're using because it'll bail you out of a whole bunch of trouble. For instance, earlier when I went to use traffic lights enhancement and I wanted to go and place a traffic light right here without Anarchy, I was going to bulldoze a bunch of buildings, but with Anarchy on, that doesn't happen. Just be careful with this mod because you could do absolutely wacky things like inadvertently draw a line straight through here that is ground level. And while in many cases nothing bad will happen, in some you'll experience a crash. And one quick thing I want to point out about this mod that you might not have known. If you go into the options menu, you can select place multiple unique buildings. And if you do this, the signature buildings will never leave from this menu. You'll always be able to place them. So it means that if I place this once, it's still [music] there. Even if I exit out and go back in. And I have a feeling that anyone that has the supply chains content creator pack is going to want to have that enabled because most of the industrial buildings [music] don't have citywide bonuses. And being able to place multiple of them is going to mean that you can create jobs in your city. One of my favorite features of Anarchy, though, is the ability to use the replace tool to adjust a roadway [music] segment to have a retaining wall or a key wall or become an elevated segment. There is a tunneling option as well. I I don't find that that one works all that well. But basically, what you'll do is just go into the replace tool and you can select the option that you want. So, if you want it to be a key, you can add that. If you want to add a sound barrier, you can. If you want to add a retaining wall, you can do that. And then just go up to the segment that you want to convert and add it. And you can even reverse it by dragging in the opposite direction. When you're in a normal road, you can also add bike lanes, grassy terraces, [music] trees. This can be particularly helpful if you want to add an elevated segment to dig out underneath to prepare for a new road. And I obviously didn't go low enough here, but with anarchy, I can make some really special things happen, too. So, I'm [music] going to convert this to be an elevated segment and then right mouse click it to remove that. And now it's a ground level segment. So, basically, I was able to dig out and get this to be exactly where it needs to be to be able to go underneath that elevated segment. I also like to spend a little bit of time adding nodes and then using the road services version of anarchy and adding key walls. The whole reason I'm doing that is then we get this really nice transition that looks very natural. If you want to dig it out, you can do that and then you can make it feel like this was built into the hillside in a way that is just not really possible in the vanilla game. That in my opinion looks incredibly good. Now, I know that some people don't like having these options right here inside of Anarchy to add key walls and elevated segments. It can be confusing if you're not used to it. If you want to modify it, all you have to do is turn off the network upgrade options. And now, when you go back in here, they are no longer there. You can still use them from the road services menu, though. And for me, that's the way that I use it most of the time. And I'm not really sure what else there is to say about Anarchy. If you're playing with mods, it's probably a mod that you want to have in your play set. It really supports most other mods. and I've been talking about it throughout this entire video. And in my opinion, no matter how you play the game, you're going to benefit from installing Anarchy.

Number three, Platter. [music] Now, I know that this mod is number three on my list, but in my heart, it's number one. I think that this might be my favorite mod of all time. Platter lets you plop zoning, and that might sound strange, but in reality, if you're someone that doesn't want to do hyperdetailing, this is going to be the mod for you. This is going to allow you to zone on irregular parcels. It's going to allow you to create a city that feels very organic. Now, the way that this works is you can select the type of zoning district that you'd like to zone. Then click on the P down here and it will open up platter. You can select the size of the zoning cell that you want and then plop it. And as you place the zoning district, it'll tell you how many buildings are available in that size. If you're not satisfied with the number, hold down control and scroll your mouse wheel to increase the lot depth or alt on your mouse wheel to increase the lot width. When you're satisfied with the size, plop and proceed to fill in the block. And that was incredibly easy. Now, one of the reasons this was so easy is all the snapping options. The first option allows you to snap to the vanilla zoning grid. The second will allow you to snap to the side of a road. The third snaps to existing parcels. And the fourth snaps to parcel corners. And you can see that as I snap to parcels, my platter cell is falling within the parcels. If I snap to the side of the road, you can see that I'm now sliding along the road. If I snap to parcels, I now slide along the parcel. And if I snap the parcel corners, I'll snap to the corner of that parcel. [music] And now it's perfectly in line with that last one. Another unique feature of Platter is the ability to create a setback. To do that, all I have to do is hit control and shift along with scroll my mouse wheel. And now I've created a setback. The most I can do is 8 m because any more than that will break connection to the road. Thankfully, Platter has that guardrail. And one of the really cool things about Platter is you can use it with the advanced line tool. So, if you want to do some really advanced stuff, you can like this. By using the line tool and rotating the platter parcels, I'm able to place these buildings all at a slight angle, all completely parallel to one another. This would be impossible in a vanilla game. And another great thing about platter parcels is that you can reszone them or add signature buildings in the place of the zoning. So let's say I no longer want these to be residential. I can reszone them to become commercial. And Oldtown North American is probably not the best zoning category for this configuration, but I can do it. Also, because platter replaces the vanilla zoning, I could place a signature building right over the top of Platter. And now it has the exact same angle as the rest of those parcels, which is so cool. The other thing worth pointing out about Platter is that it will let you know whether or not you're going to spawn a corner building. The way that it does this is the thick white line along the street. So, right now there's a thick white line along Beach Street. And if I slide this over towards Empire Street, I'll get a thick white line there as well. Seeing the thick line on both streets lets me know that this is a corner section. And I can see that there are no 3x4 corners. That means I want to address this and potentially even switch to a different zoning category that has corner pieces. With the North American Oldtown, I can now see that there are five 4x4 corners available. And when I place it, you can tell it's a corner because there are two entry points. And with platter, you can easily control this. Now, I recently just made a video about Platter where I built this town and filled things in using platter. Platter's had a lot of improvements since I made that video, but it's still relevant. So, I'll leave a link in the video description to that video if you want to check it out. And if it wasn't clear already, I absolutely adore this mod and I recommend it to anyone playing City Skylines 2. In fact, I really hope that they incorporate this into the game. It completely changes the game for me and makes me enjoy it a ton more.

Number two, Move It. Move It is a mod that allows you to move things, anything, whatever you want, and it gives you such precision in City Skylines 2. I really think it should be in the base game. I've said that it sometimes feels like when you're playing this game or honestly its predecessor, it kind of feels like you're fingerpainting with mittens on and move it takes the mittens off. Let's say you want to nudge this building over. Hit M, select the building, and you can nudge it over. Let's say you think that this intersection is in slightly the wrong spot. Use move it to move it over. Let's say the angle of this road looks inappropriate to you. Grab the whole segment and adjust it. And if it still looks wrong, go into manipulation mode and adjust just one half [music] of it. This level of precision is basically impossible in the vanilla game. But it gets even better. If you select one node or one object, you can ctrl H into another and that adjusts the height. So let's say I want this node to be the exact same height as this intersection. There I go. Easy as pie. I can do the exact same thing with buildings or props or trees, whatever I want. And where this is going to be most useful is when you're making complicated infrastructure like this loop right here. This was made so much easier by being able to use move it. The other way that you can adjust heights is to select a node and hit page up or page down. Page up and page down allows you to adjust the height of any object that you have selected. And speaking of that, you can select objects in a number of ways. Right now, I'm in the single mode, but I could also use the marquee mode. Now, you got to be careful with the marquee mode. Obviously, you can select a whole bunch of objects at once. But let's say I don't want to select everything. Let's say I only want to select buildings. I'll toggle a filter. Select buildings only. And now under marquee mode, I can select all these homes and I can easily move them into the wrong location. So let's say I want to move them back. Move it has undo functionality built in. Ctrl +-z and the homes are all back. You can also grab objects and spin them around. All you have to do is select the object, right mouse click and drag, and you can spin the object around regardless of what it is. If you hold down shift, you can select multiple objects and you can spin them together or move them around. And again, control H them to a height, whatever you want to do. And bluntly, the possibilities with this mod are endless. You can move decals, props, and if you're really wild, even surfaces. This is an incredibly powerful mod. The only thing I'll really say about Move It is that with great power comes great responsibility. So, know that if you're going completely ham selecting a whole bunch of objects and clipping them into one another, you might break things and your game might crash. So, be careful with this one. But this is one of those mods that just makes the game so much more fun to play and it makes you feel like you have so much freedom. It's an absolutely essential mod that I'd recommend to anybody.

And the final and most important mod that I'll recommend is Sky. If you're playing modded City Skylines, you have to install Sky. It's going to save you so much trouble. Sky lets you know whether there are incompatibilities with your mods or if you have mods that are reported broken. For instance, I can see that I currently have one mod in my playset that's broken. I can click view mods with issues and it will show me which mod is broken. Now from here I could just simply disable this or instead I can view my entire compatibility report and take a look at the recommendations. [music] And right here it says that this is known to be broken. I can apply the recommendation to remove it and now it's no longer in my play set. I can also see compatibility issues like platter and road builder having issues together. And if I want I can select the package I want to proceed with. And if I know that the warnings here are not actually problems I can snooze the recommendations. And now when I go back to the dashboard, I'm in the clear. But that's only part of the reason I love Sky. One of the reasons I love Sky so much is that with multiple saves, I have multiple playsets. So Sky allows me to change my playset before I load into the game, which saves me a restart. So let's say I were going to play in Magnolia County. I can now activate this playet, then click the Sky button to launch City Skylines 2. And when I load in, the Magnolia County playet will be the one that's active. And remember, if I didn't have Sky, I'd have to load into the game, change the playset, exit out, and then load back in. And if these are large playsets, that might take quite a while. So, this just saved me a whole bunch of time. The other great thing about Sky is that you can manage your playsets right from it. So, in Magnolia County, I could disable mods. If I right mouse click, I could go to manage and remove a mod. I can do that from this playet or from all of my playsets. If it's my active playset, I could click on the Paradox mods button and add additional mods to the playet. And I can even share this entire play set if I'd like to. Clicking on this button will create a JSON file of your entire playset. And if you click add a playset, you can select one of these JSON files and it will immediately start recreating that playset for you. Now, obviously, I don't want to have two Magnolia County playsets. So, I'm going to delete one. And I can do that right from Sky. I'll click the three dots right here and go to delete this playset. And now it's completely gone. And there are more useful things that you can do from Sky. You can adjust your launch settings, for instance, to enable developer mode or change your logging level. And I'll adjust this to only log to the fatal level. And this will dramatically increase my loading speed. One of my favorite features of Sky, though, is what's new on Paradox Mods. Now, you can filter to code mods or assets, maps, or save games. But this gives me a quick [music] glance at Paradox Mods without needing to go into City Skylines and click on the button. And I love how quick it is. It's there all the time. And the great thing is I can add things in here as well. I'll click view more of what's on the workshop. And now I can add things with a click of a button. Additionally, if I go in here, I can read all the information about the mods, take a look at the gallery images, read comments about the mod, see compatibility information, look at all of my playsets that have the mod in it, and even add it to other playets if I'd like to take a look at the change log, and even see all the included links. Basically, anything that I can do from the Paradox Mods website or from inside of City Skylines 2, I could do from Sky, and I can do it way faster. But there are some things that you can do from Sky that you can't do from in-game. Like, take a look at your help and logs. And if you're experiencing a ton of crashing, these logs can be a lifesaver. [music] Often times, modders will ask you to provide the logs to them. They'll go through them, see what issue you have, and provide a resolution. [music] And the best place to do this is a C's 2 modding Discord, which I'll leave a link to below. And what you'll generally want to do is save your logs to file and [music] then provide this log to the modders. The final thing I want to point out is the backup center because this can really save your bacon. Let's say you want to back up all of your settings, all of your mods, and all of your local mods if you have them. Select the types of files that you want to back up. Determine your backup frequency, when you want your backup to occur, and where you want your files to be backed up to, and then go to backup and restore and click back up your files now. And your backup will begin. Now, if you're wondering if you can trust Sky, you absolutely can. It was put together by TDW, who's one of the most prolific modders in the community and who is now an employee of Paradox. Sky is absolutely amazing and an absolutely essential mod if you're going to be modding in City Skylines 2.

And with that, you have my top mods for City Skylines 2 and how to use them. And this was an absolute marathon of a video. Now, if you want access to these mods, I'll leave links in the video description to each and every one of them, as well as a link to a JSON file with this entire playet that you can load directly into Sky. But I am very curious. How do you feel about this list? How do you feel about the order? Are there any mods that I missed? And do you disagree with any mods that I've included? Let me know in the comments below. And after that marathon, I think that we're going to leave it here. And I really hope that you've enjoyed this one. If you did, please hit the like button. If you're not subscribed to the channel, please consider doing so. And I want to thank you so much for your time today. There's a million things that you could have been doing. We decided to hang out with me and go over 46 mods and how to use them. And for that, I appreciate you and I appreciate your time. Can't wait to see you in the next one where we have a normal video again. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye-bye. [music] [music]