You certainly could play Cities Skylines without mods, and you probably would have a solid time with today’s premiere city builder game if you did. But the Paradox Interactive title really became the gold standard thanks in large part to its robust mod support that has allowed users to improve and add to the game in so many different ways. Cities Skylines may be great on its own, but it’s even better with mods.

It also, unfortunately, hasn’t yet fully passed the torch to its sequel, which was released in 2023 in a very messy state and still hasn’t really gotten very far into its original post-release plans even now, two years later. Cities Skylines 2 has a long way to go before it can take the crown from its much more established predecessor. Wake us when the second game gets monorails.

The problem, however, is that after almost a decade of folks making stuff, the Steam Workshop for Cities Skylines is massive, with more than 358,000 mods, maps, buildings, vehicles, props, and other stuff to sort through, and navigating all that ain’t easy. But that’s what we’re here for. Below you’ll find a selection of some of the best Cities Skylines mods to get you started on your journey.

• See on Steam Workshop

One of the biggest issues with Cities Skylines has always been traffic–it’s very easy to accidentally create new traffic jams once your population has ramped up, and you’ll spend a lot of your time with this game smoothing those jams out. Fortunately, this Traffic Manager mod has all the tools you’ll need to micromanage all aspects of your city’s traffic flow.

• See on Steam Workshop

This mod simply allows you to select any object on the map and move it however you want, which often makes life easier than it would be if you had to delete and replace every building you plopped in slightly the wrong place. It’s an incredibly useful tool in many small ways, solving a ton of minor irritations.

• See on Steam Workshop

For some reason, Cities Skylines does not let you use the full map by default–and unlocking all the available tiles still only gives you about a third of the available space. This mod solves that problem, giving you access to the entire map so you can build as much as you’re able.

• See on Steam Workshop

Network Anarchy is a combination of a pile of different road mods that will let you do whatever you want when you’re building your city’s streets, like forcing the ground to follow the elevation of the road or removing all limitations regarding slope angles.

• See on Steam Workshop

Game Anarchy is essentially a cheat mod that allows you to control the fundamentals of your city–you can eliminate pollution, make your entire populace educated, unlock all the unique buildings and place as many of each as you want, give yourself money, and on and on. Even if you don’t want to cheat, Game Anarchy is necessary for helping deal with some of Cities Skylines weirder quirks, like its “death waves” that often overwhelm your crematoriums and cemeteries.

• See on Steam Workshop

To make your digital city feel like a real one, you’re going to need to decorate it with foliage like trees and bushes–this mod lets you remove the restrictions on tree placement so you can place them on roads or on a building lot and make your town much more immersive.

• See on Steam Workshop

This is essentially the same mod as Tree Control, but for other types of ploppable “props,” such as statues, lightposts and other similar things.

• See on Steam Workshop

This mod is similar to Network Anarchy, but it’s got a very specific focus: enabling new types of road junctions so you can much more easily design complex roadways. While no mod will make road-building as intuitive as it is in Cities Skylines 2, the Network Multitool will let you come fairly close.

• See on Steam Workshop

One of the more annoying things about Cities Skylines is that its load times tend to get all the way out of control if you’re using a lot of mods and have a large city–we’re talking 10+ minutes of loading here. The Loading Screen Mod streamlines the loading process to make it so much faster and more efficient.

• See on Steam Workshop

It’s not overly difficult to place roads in parallel in Cities Skylines by default, but it does require some effort. Fortunately, this mod takes a lot of the effort out of it by letting you place as many parallel network paths as you want–roads, train tracks, walking paths, and so on.

• See on Steam Workshop

You’ll spend most of your time looking at your city from above, but a big part of the fun of building a city in Cities Skylines is taking a look at it from the ground every once in a while–and this mod makes doing so much easier. You can simply click on any citizen or vehicle in your city, and you’ll have a new option to take on their point of view, following a person as they walk around, or a bus as it drives its route.

• See on Steam Workshop

This is actually an add-on for the First Person Camera mod above which allows you to actually drive vehicles rather than just view their perspective. It’s not the smoothest driving experience, of course, since Cities Skylines does not actually have mechanics for this, but it works better than you’d probably expect and is pretty amusing.

• See on Steam Workshop

Nobody likes Chirper, the goofy faux Twitter that your citizens will use to complain when their power goes out or whatever. This mod completely removes Chirper from the game so you can ignore it fully, but keep in mind that you may miss out on some problems that the people of your city are having as a result–but honestly Chirper is so irritating that it’s a fair trade.

• See on Steam Workshop

When you create an intersection to a roadway, it adds a node that this mod can customize extensively in any manner you choose–when used in conjunction with Network Anarchy and Network Multitool, you’ll have almost complete granular control over how your city’s roads operate.

• See on Steam Workshop

Once you’ve manipulated your roads and intersections to make them function the way you like, you may also need to change how they look. This mod, which is purely aesthetic and does not influence traffic flow, will allow you to paint fancy lines on your roads to match your fancy intersections.

• See on Steam Workshop

If you’re the sort of person who wants their roads to go exactly where you intend them to, Precision Engineering will be a godsend. With this mod you’ll have new tooltips for angles and length on the sections of road you’re building, as well as new building options, like the ability to snap an intersection in five-degree increments. That may not sound like much on paper, but these are extremely useful quality-of-life features.

• See on Steam Workshop

This mod adds a number of new granular options for managing your public transit lines, including the ability to change vehicle types on the fly–very helpful if you’ve downloaded custom trains or monorail cars. And you can also edit vehicle types themselves and adjust their capacity or speed, which you’ll probably need to do if you use the next mod.

• See on Steam Workshop

By default, Cities Skylines population numbers don’t work on a normal human scale–it’s pretty silly, for example, that there are residential skyscrapers that only have a couple dozen apartments in them. This mod rescales and rebalances the game’s population calculations to generate population numbers that resemble the real world’s. Just keep in mind that using this mod will add significant complexity to the gameplay.

• See on Steam Workshop

This is very similar to Improved Public Transit, but for cars, trucks, and airplanes. You’d use this for, say, increasing the capacity of cargo vehicles so they can deliver more items from your industrial areas to your commercial zones, or allowing your hearses to carry more dead bodies before returning to the cemetery.

• See on Steam Workshop

The standard camera view for Cities Skylines is really irritating in a bunch of ways, like how it just will not let you pull back far enough to see your whole city at once. ACME Camera Mod solves that and basically any other issue you might have had with the way the camera works by default, giving you granular control over its movement so you can make it do pretty much anything you want to.