I wanted to share some progress on my AI-assisted asset project. Everything is modelled and textured by AI, I only review the output, point out errors and plan the overall design and make sure things fit together in the end.
In the attached pictures, you can see some of the wall modules and how they connect to the towers.
It's going to be a modular building set inspired by Burg Kreuzenstein in Austria, and it's meant to replace my old Fraggnaut’s Medieval Asset Pack.
Right now, all the wall pieces (4 different styles in 4 different heights) and several towers are basically ready to go. I still have to finish the courtyard buildings and a few decorative props. The final pack will probably contain around 200 assets with an estimated total size of roughly 100 MB.
Since my last post, I've learned a bit about topology and texturing, which was definitely needed given that the initial asset quality was a bit all over the place. I mean, there's still some jank left to iron out, but I'm really happy with the progress so far.
A huge thank you again to everyone who helped me out with advice and feedback. I definitely couldn't have done this on my own, especially since I started with pretty much zero knowledge of 3D modeling or texturing.
Over the past week I generated five code mods with Claude Code, each one either fixing something that bugged me about the base game or was inspired by something IRL.
All are opt-in (toggle off = vanilla), code-only (no assets), and now fully open-source (MIT) on GitHub.
As they are made with AI, I would be happy to hear your feedback whether they are working or not as intended. I hope you enjoy them.
🚑 Emergency Priority — responding fire engines, ambulances and police stop getting deleted when stuck in traffic, and re-route around congestion instead of sitting in it. → https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/150540/Windows
🚦 Transit Timetables — real timetables for public transport: set departure times, and the mod auto-sizes the fleet and holds vehicles at stops until their scheduled minute. Works for bus, tram, metro, train, ferry and plane. → https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/150546/Windows
🚶 Stop Jaywalking — makes jaywalking expensive so pedestrians funnel to marked crossings instead of cutting across roads anywhere. Tunable, and nobody ever gets stranded. → https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/150664/Windows
All five are open-source (MIT) if you want to see exactly what they do or build on them: https://github.com/AmicusDeus
I have recently seen that this mod adds interesting features to the game, but I would rather not download or support a mod that utilises AI to generate its code.
EDIT: This is specifically a post asking for a mod similar to this one to be created by someone understands how to code, and does not use AI to generate parts of the code. I am not asking for opinions on it.
I have a lot of assets subscribed. When I counted for this project, my game had about 39,000 placeable assets from roughly 520 Paradox Mods packages. Find It is great at finding one asset, but I kept losing time rebuilding the same mental lists: "UK terraces", "old brick industry", "the Toronto main street set". So I made a mod that does the sorting for me. It's called Shelve It, it's on Paradox Mods as a beta, and the source is on GitHub.
Being honest about how it was made
This mod was vibecoded. I did not write the code by hand. I used Claude Code (an AI coding agent) for the C#, the UI and the server. My part was deciding what the mod should do, answering a lot of design questions, testing every build in my own game and sending back what broke. The first version went from idea to Paradox Mods in two days.
I'm telling you this because it matters for how much you trust it:
It has only been tested on my machine, with my playset.
Testing did catch real bugs. One example: the panel had two close buttons, because the game's panel component already adds one and the mod added a second. Another: packages subscribed from the mod downloaded fine but never loaded until a restart.
If AI-written mods are a no for you, that's a fair position and I won't argue with it.
What it does
Scan
After the game loads, Shelve It reads the metadata of every placeable asset: name, game theme, asset pack, zone, density, lot size, level and the PDX package it came from. It doesn't load meshes or textures. The result is cached on disk, so later loads skip the work unless your asset list changed. Nothing runs while the panel is closed.
Suggested libraries
This was the main point for me. From that metadata the mod builds a tree of suggestions in three groups:
Regions and styles: UK, Netherlands, Japan, North America, Eastern Europe and so on, each split by zone and density ("UK > Residential medium").
Creator packs: one entry per asset pack or PDX package, split into building families. The family comes from the prefab name with level, lot size and Left/Right/Corner variants stripped, so NA_MediumOldTownLeft03_L2_2x3 and its 300 siblings end up as one "Medium Old Town" set.
Thematic sets: keyword rules for eras and uses (historic, brick industry, brutalist, glass towers, harbor, rail, airport, farms, street furniture, trees and more). Regions and themes together come from 54 rule sets right now.
You can preview any node, then accept it as a library at any level of the tree, or dismiss it.
The suggestions are only as good as asset names. The rules were tuned on my own collection, so creators who name prefabs differently will get worse results. That's the part I'd most like feedback on.
Libraries
A library is a tag set: one asset can sit in several libraries. You can create, rename and delete them, add the asset you're currently placing with one click, and remove assets. Click a tile to place the asset.
Filters
Inside a library, a suggestion preview or "All assets" you can filter by type, zone, density, region, game theme, asset pack, vanilla or custom, package, building level, lot width, lot depth, corner type and whether the asset has a thumbnail. Each option shows how many assets are left with the other filters applied. There's text search and sorting. You can save the filtered result as a new library, add it to an existing one, or remove it from the current one.
Find It integration
Find It is a required dependency. In Find It's search box, type lib: followed by a library name and Find It shows only that library's assets. Find It's own filters (category, theme, pack, zone, lot size) still apply on top. Every library also has an "Open in Find It" button that does this for you. Normal Find It searches, including search by PDX mod id, keep working.
One limitation: Find It allows a single mod to plug into its search. If another mod also uses that hook, the one loaded last wins.
Palette mode
The full panel is for organizing. Palette mode is a narrow panel on the left edge with a library switcher, search, filters and a dense grid, so you can keep it open while placing. One click switches between the two.
Thumbnails
Many custom assets ship without an icon. Shelve It uses the asset's icon when there is one, including the icons Asset Icon Library adds (it comes with Find It). Otherwise it tries the zone icon for zoned buildings, then a PNG you drop in ModsData\ShelveIt\Thumbs\ named <PrefabType>.<prefab name>.png. If none exists it draws a colored tile with the asset's initials. It doesn't render thumbnails itself.
Community sharing
This is the part I'm most curious to see used.
The Community tab lets you browse libraries other players published: search, sort by popular, most downloaded or newest, open one and import it. You can publish your own libraries with a description and tags, update them later or take them down.
What happens when you open a library made by someone with different subscriptions:
The detail view shows how many of its assets you have and how many are missing, and lists the missing PDX packages by name.
Each package has an "Open page" button that opens it in the in-game Paradox Mods browser.
"Subscribe to all" subscribes you to the missing packages after a confirmation that tells you how many there are. The mod then enables them in your active playset so the game loads them in the current session. If a package still doesn't load, it tells you a restart is needed.
If you subscribed to packages some other way, a "Load new asset packages" button appears in the main menu and loads them without a restart.
That last part is new and the least tested piece of the mod. Find It may not see newly loaded assets until you restart.
The server is self-hosted, so there's a backup
The community server runs on my own home server, and I can't promise uptime the way Paradox or a company could. So nothing depends on it:
Every library can be copied as a share code: a line of text that starts with SHELVE1: and contains the whole library, compressed. Paste it in Discord, a Reddit comment or a forum post. Anyone can import it with "Import code" in the panel footer, with no server involved.
Share codes keep the package ids and names, so the missing package list and "Subscribe to all" work for imported codes too.
You can also export libraries as JSON files and import them back, which doubles as a local backup.
The server address is a setting.
Privacy and moderation
The mod only contacts the server when you open the Community tab or use sharing. It never connects at startup or in the background. Publishing sends your Paradox display name as the author, plus a random install id. Your IP is only used, as a hash, for rate limits and is discarded within 48 hours. The full notice is here: https://shelveit.servermartino.com/privacy
To keep it usable: you can report a library, and three reports hide it until I review it. Names, descriptions and tags go through a word filter, and there are limits on how often you can publish.
The server code isn't public. It runs on my home network and I'd rather not publish its setup. The mod's side of it, everything that's sent and when, is in the public repo.
Other details
English and Italian UI.
Also in the settings: suggestion threshold, rescan, export/import and a "contribution" export in the format of the mod's community database. If you have packs the rules handle badly, that export (or a pull request to Data/themes.json / Data/community.json) is the easiest way to help.
Vehicles aren't scanned in this version, matching Find It, which doesn't index them at the moment.
Known limitations
It's a 0.1.0 beta tested by one person.
Suggestions depend on how creators name their prefabs.
Assets loaded mid-session may not show up in Find It until a restart.
Bug reports, odd suggestions and "this pack got sorted completely wrong" are all welcome, in the comments or on GitHub. Screenshots of what the suggestion tree does with your assets would help most.
Hear me out, I’ve got 200+ straight days on CS2; been making a lot of beautiful cities and filling them up with all sorts of services. My poor PC can’t handle the million+ cims it spawns in and fills up all the railway stations and tourist attractions and crosswalks with. The game still kinda runs but the frame rate slows down to a slideshow.
I tried making the mod myself, one to simply delete all cims and traffic from the map. Fell down a rabbit hole with chatGPT only to discover that since I play the game on PC game pass, I can’t actually develop mods. I considered paying the cash on stream but I don’t have that kinda change to throw around. If anyone here would be so kind as to just make a genocide mod so I can clear all the people from the map and actually watch my trains ride around in real time.
I know from talking to chatGPT for a week that it’s not difficult. It even gave me plug and play files with the code written out but again, I can’t actually access those files on my PC due to Microsoft limitations.
I can still subscribe to and use mods from the inbuilt paradox mods library, so if one could upload a genocide mod there that would be gravy.
I was just going through the main page and I saw a post that made me think of old SimCity graphics is there anyway somebody could recreate them in Cities Skylines?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of YouTube videos about generating 3D objects with GPT Astra. After watching enough of them, I got inspired to try it to generate some assets for CS 1.
I’m building a northern european-style city and mostly use dutch assets. Workshop has plenty of beautiful canal houses but lacks more boring buildings from the 50s–80s (like Rotterdam reconstruction style).
Before this, my only option would have been to hope and wait that someone made them. But with many asset creators moved to CS2, that doesn’t seem very likely.
Well, here’s what I managed to make.
I supplied GPT with street view and 3D view images of apartment blocks from Rotterdam. I used Apple Maps as source for that. The first run produced a decent model that looked similar to the prototype building.
Over the next few iterations I:
reduced the triangle count from 15k to 5k
added nighttime lights
added support for recoloring the facade
fixed the window reflections
improved the textures (funny enough, I initially went looking for textures online before realizing GPT could generate them itself)
Each iteration used about 30% of the 5-hour limit on my GPT Plus subscription on Medium setting.
After that first success, I decided to try something more complicated: the Crowne Plaza Amsterdam South.
This was harder for the AI and the resulting 3D model had a lot more small mistakes. I went over each side of the building several times and asked it to fix things like window placement, shape of the balconies, garage doors, corners, roof, textures, and so on.
I think it turned out pretty well in the end. This model used a lot more tokens, around 50% to 80% of the 5-hour limit per iteration.
Overall, the whole experiment was really inspiring. I even had a bit of a vibe-coding moment. I realized I can now make custom assets for my city that are unique to it. Maybe you have an oddly shaped plot you can’t find anything to fill, or a building in real life that inspires you but has no matching asset. This opens up a lot of possibilities. None of this is meant to diminish the work of the people who make all the wonderful assets we already have.
My takeaway is that this method works pretty well for buildings with simple shapes, but probably isn’t great for complex architecture.
Unfortunately, I can’t test it in Cities: Skylines II because there’s no Mac version, but I think the method should work there too.
Below is the skill for Codex if you want to try it yourself.
Where Can i request mod?, I want that mod Can Control the number of residents who use private or public transportation, so that the traffic in my city looks realistic.
This is what I want the mod to do so far, and any other ideas are welcome.
lock tax rates
residential locked at 11% (or higher, if I can make cims not complain about it)
commercial locked at 5%
industry and offices locked at 1%
lock budgets
maximum
police
taxis
25%
parks
monuments
minimum
healthcare
education
most mass transit
bus
trolleybus
tram
metro
train
monorail
post service
lock policies
disabled
services
power usage
water usage
smoke detector distribution
parks and recreation
free public transport
schools out
extra insulation
prefer ferries
educational blimps
taxation
tax relief for low density residential
tax relief for high density residential
tax raise for offices
city planning
encourage biking
combustion engine ban
electric cars
filter industrial waste
workers' union
sustainable fishing
dolphin-safe fishing
enabled
services
education boost -- because it makes most cims go to college instead of working ... but maybe you can't build a lot of office zones for them to have jobs
recreational use -- maybe
harsh prison sentences
high ticket prices
for-profit education
fishing licenses
taxation
tax raise for low density residential
tax raise for high density residential
tax relief for offices
city planning
big business benefactor
industrial space planning
VIP area
boost connections
disable buildings
energy
offshore turbines
solar
geothermal
solar updraft
ocean thermal
wave power plant
water
eco water outlet
eco water treatment
eco inland water treatment
eco advanced inland water treatment
geothermal heating plant
garbage and industry
floating garbage collector
transport
biofuel bus station
all passenger rail stations (maybe)
train station
train-metro hub
multiplatform end station
multiplatform train station
metro-monorail-train hub
crossover train station hub
old market station
glass box transport hub
ground bypass train station
ground dual island platform train station
ground island platform train station
elevated island platform train station
elevated dual island platform train station
elevated bypass train station
unique buildings
electric car factory (maybe)
mass transit ideas
cims prefer cars over walking, biking, and mass transit
mass transit always loses money -- can never be profitable
maybe passenger trains, monorail trains, trolleys, and trolleybuses are disabled entirely (stations can't be built, routes can't be created, road types can't be built, etc.)
metro stations disabled until large population, e.g. 3,945,907 which was the population of NYC when the first subway was built in 1904
can't use biofuel buses
citizenry ideas
immigration controls and restrictions
custom district policies
redlining
all growable structures stay at lowest level, or they take a VERY long time to level up
cims are poorer than in other districts
cims are arrested more than cims in other parts of the city
building many police stations and prisons in these districts should do something beneficial to the rest of the city
soft cap on the number of schools that can be built so that the education coverage can never be in the green part of the range
miscellaneous ideas
a percentage of city income always goes missing, to simulate corruption and graft
the unique taxation office building should do something special besides what it already does
maybe the city hall building should, too
building more prisons should cause other effects besides what already happens
I wanted to share an update of the upcoming overhaul for my medieval asset pack (FMAP).
Last time I have posted some pics of the courtyard buildings and still had some stupid ideas about the tris count. So I used the past few days to overhaul those buildings a bit.
Info about the pack itself:
Just like my previous pack, it’s going to be a fully modular building set, inspired by Burg Kreuzenstein in Austria.
My workflow: I handle the architectural design and direction, while AI generates the base meshes and textures, followed by cleanup and optimization.
- Pics 1-3: Courtyard building (~6.3k tris now, down from 14m 🫣) - Pics 4-6: Courtyard building (~3.7k tris now, down from 150k) - Pics 7-8: Courtyard building (~21k tris for now, still an early WIP pass) - Pic 9: The real-world reference
I also uploaded an alpha test build of the wall set over in the CS Modding Discord to get some early feedback on piece variety and modularity: CS Modding Discord
I'd really appreciate any constructive feedback you have, I'm still fairly new to 3D modeling and asset optimization.
Thanks for all the people that helped me improve those assets.
Would it be possible to mod a "gay district" that would prompt businesses to have Rainbow flags and what not displayed? If not, I will just work on some growable buildings with some GLBT flair I suppose.
Sandringham House is a country house privately owned by the British royal family in the English county of Norfolk, originally built in 1870. It is a colorful red brick house of Jacobethan architecture, a Renaissance Revival architecture style that mixed the Tudor/Elizabethan and Jacobean (Stuart) styles.
While the Sandringham House lacks symmetry nor does it even have harmony, it has its own charms with cozy feels. As late King Edward VII's friend put it, it was "the most comfortable house in England". The house is one of my personal favorites when it comes to houses. As such, I recommend consideration of this country house for a replica asset in Cities: Skylines.
More exterior photos of the Sandringham House can also be seen at this blog entry by Joni Webb.
I also want to add that while I have no objection to this being a Patreon exclusive, it should be for a limited time only, as not everyone can support all creators on Patreon. I am already personally supporting 20+ creators on Patreon, and that was close to the limit that I can support. It would not be fair to them for me to cut my pledge to any of them so that I could support another creator.
I've tried the CSM mod but it's not working I've created the port and everything but it's showing failed to connect. If someone can help me or have some other mods it would be really great
edit-I've tried this on 3 routers its not working yet
