Given how long Cities Skylines has been around, the stockpile of mods for it has gotten all the way out of control–the Steam Workshop hosts more than 350,000 mods, custom maps, and assets. That’s a lot to navigate when seeking out Cities Skylines’ best mods, particularly since a large number of those mods have been abandoned for years. But that’s what we’re here for.

Despite the fact that the sequel has been out since 2023, the original Cities Skylines remains the gold standard for city-builder games. It’s not just that Cities Skylines 2 was such a huge mess when it launched–the original game has a decade of updates and DLC from the developers, plus the massive mod library on Steam Workshop noted above. Cities Skylines 2, by contrast, doesn’t even have monorails.

We’ll help you get started on your Cities Skylines modding journey by going through the mods that pretty much everybody will have a use for. While the game may accuse some of them of being outdated when you install them, everything listed below currently works just fine.