When it works – when it runs smoothly – Cities Skylines 2 traffic is one of the most satisfying things to behold in all of videogames. You make the perfect road system. You carefully pinpoint your junctions and roundabouts. And then it just flows, every single one of your Cims traveling effortlessly from home to work and back again. When it doesn’t work however, traffic, as part of the broader Cities Skylines 2 simulation, becomes a nightmare. As Colossal Order continues to try and improve its beleaguered city building sequel, two essential new Cities Skylines 2 mods are here to improve some of the game’s most aggravating aspects. If you want a better eye on your Cims’ daily habits and a new way to manage and comprehend traffic, these are vital.
Cities Skylines 2 mods were expected to transform the struggling city building game, but the official Paradox and Colossal Order platform for community-made material is still problematic, given how it occasionally refuses to load some modifications or cannot detect them within your game folders. Nevertheless, when it does work, it makes Cities Skylines 2 much better.
Like the original game, CS2 – hopefully – will improve over the next few years thanks to player-built tweaks and additions, and we will eventually have the superlative sequel for which we were all hoping. In the meantime, if traffic and the broader simulation are causing you a proverbial headache, there is still something you can do.
First up, download ‘Cim Route Highlighter’ by ‘mattswarthout.’ If you’ve made new roads or public-transport networks, it can be useful to know whether anyone is actually using them, and if not, where they’re going instead. Similarly, when it comes to zoning and general city planning, you want to know where the people who live in your residential zones go when they go to work – you need to be able to see, in real time, how sections of your city are connected.
Cim Route Highlighter allows for precisely that. When you select a vehicle, it will show you the destinations of all the vehicles’ occupants. Likewise, if you click a building that contains or serves as a workplace, it will show you where all the employees live. This can help you identify which areas of your city need better transport routes, and why traffic is perhaps more of a problem on certain roads. You can get the mod here.
On the traffic note, ‘Traffic Simulation Adjuster’ by ‘tduck973564.’ This allows you to customize the density of traffic and the extent of the simulation. On a scale of one to ten, four is the vanilla setting, whereby traffic runs per the Cities Skylines 2 base game. Ten removes all vehicle traffic completely, whereas setting it to zero will remove all culling and generalization, and create a car on the road for every single Cim who is traveling, at all times. It’s a useful mod because it lets you stress test your road network in increments.
Rather than building what you think is a great set of highways and offramps, and then hit play, only to see it fail, you can create something that supports a low number of vehicles, then gradually increase the slider to see how it handles greater amounts. Good traffic management in Cities Skylines 2 depends on experimentation. Traffic Simulation Adjuster lets you play with the variables to a much greater extent. And naturally, if you’re just fed up with traffic, pollution, and all that fuss, it also lets you turn that stuff off completely. You can get the mod right here.
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