People using mods might want to check and see who made them. Stream banned a guy for inserting malware into his mods.
Well that’s some timing. I was just an hour ago thinking I might start using mods to deal with my intersections.
With my city now 50,000 strong, traffic is becoming an issue. That original intersection I posted a video of upthread is still chugging along just fine with half stop signs, no worries there.
Unfortunately my diamond interchanges coming off the highway (I’m up to four now) are starting to buckle. Even more concerning, the roundabouts off my diamond interchanges are also starting to buckle.
The worst roundabout was clogging up the entire southern half of my city, so I increased it from $200 radius to $240 radius (using two lane bike roads) and upped it from three lane highway to four lane highway. It is now barely holding on, so that’s clearly not sustainable.
I’ve found videos detailing designs for highway interchanges that should improve on my diamonds, and also t intersections with elevated left turn lanes for inside my city proper. I think I can get rid of the roundabouts altogether, which would be ideal.
So just as I was getting excited to finally start using mods, doh! Watch out for malware…
I wouldn’t be TOO worried. This is the first time I’ve heard of the issue and I think the actual malware program was a separate program install apart from the Steam Workshop. It’s just that the Workshop items required the 3rd party malware program to operate. If you’re just downloading stuff off the Workshop, you should be fine.
Some mods have been removed but NOT because they had malware as such:
Yes, my understanding is that it’s a third party library asset or possibly API wrapper or something, and it’s actually used by multiple games, not just CS.
The third party mod is called Harmony, and though I didn’t personally subscribe to that mod, I have that mod active when I run… TMPE? I can’t remember which one. But it’s in my list, having been installed by some other mod.
I’ll definitely take a look at the author’s name of the harmony I’ve got going on. I’m the target audience of the malware, a clueless noob. A half decently disguised mod pretending to be a well-known mod could fool me since I have no idea what the known mod is supposed to look like.
EDIT: Reading the link above from @Askance, it’s got to be network extensions 3. All I knew was I wanted to install something called network extensions, but there were multiple ones to choose from IIRC. (Turns out they’re mostly useless to me since few of those roads have bike lanes.) It was super annoying how my 12 second loading time all of a sudden jumped to like 50 seconds with network extensions enabled, even when I unchecked all the assets except the two-lane one-way road with bike paths.
Why does Afterdark not include one way roads with bike paths? Super irritating.
I don’t know but apparently you’re not the first to want them!
Looking on the computer now, I have Network Extensions 2, not 3. My harmony is still there, last updated 7 days ago, so I think I’m good to go.
Is there a custom road in the workshop with these features?
5-lane road with bike paths, same as (based on) the 4 lane road with bike paths. The right half of the median gets transformed into a left turn lane.
- Same street light color as 4-lane roads. Bus stop compatible. Sidewalks functional for pedestrians on both sides.
If not, I’m somewhat capable of learning how to mod it myself. Would the above be super difficult, does anyone know?
Also:
Custom 4 lane road with bike baths where the median doesn’t break for one way roads.
And actually, you know what I really want?
Double-wide combination pedestrian + bike path with 3 lanes in a two-grid-square-wide path. That would make each lane 2/3rd the width of a standard path. The middle lane would be for pedestrians, bike lanes on the right and left. Possibly with a small barrier (curb? very low fence?) separating/protecting the pedestrian path in the middle. Basically it just annoys me that pedestrians can’t use bike paths.
*swoon*
EDIT: Boooo! Streetlight colors are wrong and there’s no median. The Afterdark six-lane road with bike lanes is just as good in every way. So disappointing. When it didn’t appear in my 4-lane road list, but instead the 6-lane road list, I should have realized it was based on a 6-lane road, not 4. Maybe adding lanes out of thin air isn’t possible.
There are 100,000’s of items in the Workshop! I found those above with a quick search, but for your specific desires please check yourself.
I’m not a modder, but there are excellent guides here:
https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Modding
The modding community in that second link is also very helpful.
Good luck!
Just a quick side note, I’m noticing on most or all of these custom roads with bike lanes that they require you have Afterdark for them to work.
Upthread we had been wondering aloud about whether you had to buy Afterdark to get bike lanes or if you could just use assets from the workshop. It’s looking like even if you use assets from the workshop you still need Afterdark to make the bike lane part of it work. (And many of them have comments complaining that buses either don’t work at all or they block traffic, unlike the base Afterdark versions.)
I think you might actually need After Dark for bike lanes to work.
Personally, my AMERICAN style cities don’t have much use for bicycles! (Started building this one a few weeks ago when the Airport DLC came out).
I actually stopped using Network Extensions 2. It works fine and all, but it will crash your game if you stop using it. I prefer to use individual road networks these days. Handy tip: You can use the “RON” road replacement tool to automatically replace the NEXT2 roads in your city with a compatible network roads.
Gorgeous!
I did find a solution in CSUR, which looks like it can handle all the functionality I want. You can freely add and subtract lanes to either side of the road, add or subtract medians for protected lefts, everything you want to do. It has to replace all of your roads, but it does support bike lanes.
The downside is it’s super involved. Less work than modding something from scratch, but still a significant amount. And also, I bet a dollar that I can’t use two different color street lights like my actual city has. Oh yeah, and it installs 4,000 assets, so I guess having already upgraded to 32 GB would serve me well in that case.
I’m going to try and get this city to 100,000 straight vanilla, albeit with tons of DLC.
I searched the workshop and found two possible matches for this idea. One includes decorations that I don’t like, so that’s out. The other works, but has a direction. As in, the pedestrian path is on the side (like real life probably would have it), so if you draw it in two different directions, the pedestrian path will be on two different sides so they’ll have to cross over.
That’s manageable easily enough, but I really wanted pedestrians in the middle. Turns out creating custom roads and paths isn’t difficult. I don’t want to say it’s trivially easy, because it was confusing at first, but it ended up being pretty darn easy. Super tedious, admittedly, but easy.
So I created exactly what I wanted but in normal single-width path size instead of double width. It’s friggin’ awesome. And bonus, custom assets are assets, not mods, so I can use these and still get achievements.
Here’s a couple-minute video demonstrating a few of the more crowded walkways in my city using my custom path. I would say this is more moderate volume than heavy, but it seems to hold up pretty well.
Once I polish it up (get a good thumbnail, etc…) I’ll publish it to the Steam Workshop. But first, I’m like 99% sure I can make exactly the 2+3 Asymmetrical 5 Lane Road (4 lane + left turn) w/Bike Lanes I’ve been wanting, so that’s next.
Is there a mod that remembers your tool settings? Not game settings, or mod options, but the drawing tool choices? It’s kind of search-resistant.
When I start the game, typically I’ll go through and set my preferences, which takes a hot minute:
Road Tool: I change height adjuster from the highest step to lowest step, then I select the 2 lane road with bike lanes and the 4 lane road with bike lanes.
Zoning Tool: I set to marquis instead of fill.
Transit: I select Bus lines, then set Train tracks height adjuster to minimum.
Landscaping: I set strength to maximum instead of minimum, and switch from raise/lower to make even.
Paths: Change height adjuster to minimum.
That’s a bunch of mouse clicking every time I fire up the game. To the point where I’ll frequently just leave it running, but then that needlessly pads my Steam play time history.
Anyone know of a mod that can save and restore these tool settings on startup?
Probably best to ask the mod experts here
!
Airports DLC might be one of the higher value packs in that it comes with double capacity buses, 60 vs 30. That’s pretty sweet. The airport itself is super busy and at least moderately profitable, just like any other upgradeable area like parks or campus.
Funny story: After a massive redesign, my airport ended up moving and I finally had space to put in an airport bus station to use the double decker airport buses. The layout ended up being perfect largely by accident. Didn’t even bother to set up any bus lines, just placed it and fired up 3x speed to gauge traffic. All bus lines near the airport immediately went dark. I could see the buses all stop what they were doing and drive straight to the depot, never to be seen again. Bus stop crowds just got bigger and bigger. No buses.
Finally I realized that the airport bus station is a station, not a depot. It doesn’t send buses out. Instead, your regular bus depots send out whatever kind of bus your lines need. And if, like me, you only use biofuel bus depots because they’re so much easier to fit (7x4 compared to 6x6), you get nothing. Biofuel bus depots only deploy biofuel buses.
I quickly plopped a handful of bus depots in my central leisure area (it’s already loud); hopefully redeployment won’t turn into a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
More importantly, the airport itself doesn’t have anything to do with the higher capacity vehicles, other than maybe having to start it to unlock the airport vehicles. You just get them as choices on the Lines Overview screen, just like changing a bus’s color or setting it to the schoolbus graphic. Only when you choose the Airports DLC buses, it’s not just the graphic that changes. The double decker holds 60 people!
And again, as a reminder, NOT from biofuel bus depots. Only regular bus depots.
Anyone else have any naming conventions for your cities? A while ago I started a city named “Danville” and every new city I build I just add a prefix or suffix to it.
My current city is “New Upper Little San Danvilletonboroughsteadburgmontshireportchesterdale.”
FWIW Steam is having a big sale on Cities: Skylines (80% off…now $5.99) as well as DLC (many, NOT all, are 0-75% off).
What’s the historical comparison of the dlc sale? Has it been cheaper? I was considering shifting from Epic to steam (yeah, the Epic cloud is shit), and wondered if it was likely to be cheaper with a few of the major DLCs in the future.
Near as I can tell (read: a quick glance) Epic is having the same sale on Cities Skylines including the DLC. I have not done a 1:1 comparison though.
Epic in the past has given Cities: Skylines for free.
If you have it on Epic the only reason to move to Steam would be for Steam’s ability to mod Cities: Skylines. You can mod the Epic version too but Steam is much easier to do that.