The editor then makes it easy to add the road, rail, and aircraft external connections, as well as natural resources to make it a playable map. Adding water sources and smoothing some banks resulted in a map that looks very close to the water layout I see from satellite imagery. However, I took another go with Southern Maryland and was highly impressed. (Though, come to think of it, this isn’t far from what happens when you add water to the area, as I witnessed in 2013.) The projections are different, but the terrain I generated (right) using terrain.party and the map editor is clearly identifiable as St Mary’s County. Once I added water, a good chunk of the landscape flooded. My attempt to get the terrain for Moose Jaw (a town in Saskatchewan, Canada) was not very successful as the height data there is based on 30m resolution, and the difference between river levels and their banks is not sufficiently large to make a meaningful depression on the map. All the details on how to use it and where to put the height maps are on his post. There are lots of maps available in the Steam Workshop already, many of them jaw-droppingly gorgeous, but what if you want to build on a real-world location? Reddit user willglynn has created a web tool that makes it easy to extract terrain data from almost anywhere in the world and put it into the correct format for the map editor in Skylines. Placing it side-by-side with Google Maps, I was amazed to see his perfect mimicking of interchanges, railways, and notable structures. I had it up and running in under five minutes.

While there are a number of custom assets needed to successfully render it with all the correct buildings, he has assembled them in a single link to make subscribing a snap. What’s more, he has shared the save game file on Steam Workshop so you can run it yourself. Eisenhower Highway between his city and Google Maps.

ixohoxi’s San Francisco is insanely detailed. Using a number of mods to give him unlimited cash (the city is deeply in the red), access to more than the default 9 tiles, and more content, he has placed roads, hospitals, schools, and even mass transit to match as much of the city as possible. Reddit user ixohoxi has painstakingly recreated San Francisco inside of Skylines. I’ve kept poking around since then, and the goodies generated by the community are astounding. Near the end of the article, I noted that mods are highly supported by the developer, Colossal Order, via the Steam Workshop.

Last week I wrote about Cities: Skylines and told you what an incredible city simulation it is.

Creating map water in cities skylines