Cities: Skylines 2 Guide – When will Mods be available?
Cities Skylines 2 is finally upon us and this city-builder is packed full of features and customisation. Developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox, the first game was a runaway success, and the second is just as enticing.
Modding has always been an integral part of the Cities: Skylines experience, and the sequel looks to be no exception. In fact, Paradox have released a whole bunch of articles on the topic to set your mind at ease!
How will Modding work?
Paradox have been pretty forthcoming when it comes to modding and how that’s going to work in the future. Cities: Skylines 2 takes a slightly different approaching to modding this time around, as it won’t be using the Steam Workshop, despite there being over 400,000+ assets already available on there.
Instead, Paradox has created a brand new platform in conjunction with Cities: Skylines II, called Paradox Mods. This is a free platform that will handle all the mods from here on out.
Any mods created will be entirely free and available to download for those on console as well as PC. Paradox have been pretty vocal about their desire to allow mods on different platforms, which could go some way to explain why these mods are running through Paradox Mods rather than Steam Workshop.
However, many have taken online to express their disappointment at this, especially given how familiar modders are to the Steam tools.
At the time of writing, modding isn’t available on PC as it’s still in its Beta stage, and given the current optimization and performance issues the game is suffering from, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this has been pushed back a bit. We can expect it soon, but in all likelihood, it’s probably going to be the back-end of November before it’s fully ready to be released.
This FAQ guide from the Paradox forum answers a lot of the more pressing questions in more detail. You can find that link HERE.
What mods can we expect?
Once the community goes to work, Cities: Skylines II will inevitably have some excellent mods once it gets up and running. Some of the pressing issues that need addressing include a lack of diversity with natural disasters, those aforementioned performance issues and additional building types and cosmetics.
We’d love to see earthquakes, tsunamis, blizzards and even kaiju attacks, not to mention specific cosmetic skins for different areas around the world. Being able to implement Japanese-style buildings or quaint wooden huts like those seen in Switzerland, would be a massive bonus.
Furthermore, we could also see more streamlined options or tweaking of certain UI elements too. Ultimately, Cities: Skylines II’s success will depend on its longevity and right now, we can only wait and hope that there are some excellent mods in the future to keep this game going.