

- Building highways and roads in cities skylines pc mods#
- Building highways and roads in cities skylines pc Pc#
They can also be functional: some of the paths have paths inside them that can be connected to footpaths outside. They all increase happiness and land value, and visually break up an area to make it look more natural. Parks, playgrounds, tennis courts, gardens, carousels – there are tons of options. This is pretty obvious! A simple way of making an area look less homogeneous is to break up buildings with other things. Depending on the finished look, you either leave the gaps empty or just fill them with low-density buildings. The point is to avoid getting rows of adjacent 4×4 blocks which can look overbearing unless it’s right in the city centre. So instead of filling or dragging across an area, you just draw a fairly random selection of plots.Ī 2×2, a 3×3, a 4×2… the occasional 4×4. Essentially it involves zoning plots individually rather than en masse. It’s quite time consuming and is something I picked up from YouTuber ImperialJedi.

It helps avoid the ‘urban jungle’ effect and can also be used to help merge lower density areas with higher density ones. This is a way to reduce the size and proximity of high-density residential blocks.

Which is tricky! Hand-drawing high-density buildings In which case the challenge is convincingly blending the edges of the city into the empty surroundings. Having said that, maybe your city is a cluster of small industrial towns in a wide, flat expanse. The point is that by choosing a map that constrains you, the city will look like it’s a product of its environment, rather than an alien spaceship that’s just landed in the middle of a plain. Others have wide rivers, tall hills and steep slopes. Maps like Natural Disasters’ Archipelago have lots of water and not much buildable space. But after that, look for cities with some geographical restrictions. And in truth that’s a good place to start if you’re still learning the game’s systems. It’s tempting to pick maps with wide open spaces and very little to get in the way. Ultimately, the city will feel much better realised and alive if it has a purpose. Not all the questions need to be answered, obviously, but having a general idea will let you build each district with that character in mind. What is its focus? Type of business? Will it be an exporter or importer? A tourist destination ( guide here ) or an industrial powerhouse ( guide here )? Once you’ve got an idea, build around that. What’s the story of the city?īefore you even load into a map, it’s worth having an idea what the city is going to be about. Personally, I like it, but I do understand the desire for a more muted, gritty appearance – and perhaps that would be great for a future sequel.īut without really getting into editing the colours and assets in the game, ‘authentic’ is a lot more achievable than ‘realistic’. By default, Cities: Skylines has quite a cartoony look, probably inspired by 2013’s SimCity. It’s worth saying I’m not talking about cities that look ‘realistic’. And here I’ll go into a few ideas and things I use to try to bring cities to life. There’s a lot of tools and techniques in the base game we can use to make cities look more natural and authentic.
Building highways and roads in cities skylines pc Pc#
For anyone on a console, an elderly PC or who prefers to play vanilla, that approach isn’t going to work.
Building highways and roads in cities skylines pc mods#
But a lot of those realistic-looking cities depend on vast numbers of mods and assets. Some of the images that go up on Reddit are little short of extraordinary. How do we make a city feel like a real place? How can we make it feel alive – like it exists independently of us?
