How to properly do an offline install of Mods.

Mods from the workshop are installed in your mods folder which is located in the following location:

X:\Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\255710

Now, there are quite a few categories of mods:

- Content (ingame assets: houses, facilities, citizens etc)
- Maps
- Themes/Lod
- Functional mods (enhances game functionality)

but the last two are the only ones you need to separate from the rest. How you tell the difference when looking at a mod on disk? Functional mods have .dll files in them, these are loaded by the game engine (Unity) and need to be separate.

In your profile folder (Where USERNAME is your name), the game will have created the following directory

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\

* FUNCTIONAL MODS (that have .dll files) go into this folder:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\Mods

They can have an (one) additional level name like

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\Mods\TMPE

* CONTENT MODS (Houses, Props, Textures)

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\Assets

* THEMES AND LUT (Look up tables)

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\MapThemes

In each respective game folder, you can place each mod in 1. an individual folder (You may want to rename them) - or 2. you can group them by category. I've gone with the latter and used a hierarchical storage method, like:

Assets.Dependencies
Assets.Facilities.Police
Assets.Facilities.Power
Assets.Facilities.Sanitation
Assets.Facilities.Transit
Assets.Facilities.Water
Assets.Houses.Commercial
Assets.Houses.Residential
Assets.Maps
Assets.Misc.Airplanes
Assets.Misc.Animals
Assets.Misc.Cars
Assets.Misc.Citizens
Assets.Misc.Flora
Assets.Misc.Ships
Assets.Themes
Assets.Uncategorised

You can create whatever folder structure you like. There are some problems if you use this storage method, like the game will only use one level of depth to identify content like:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\Assets\Assets.Houses.Commercial\

PROBLEM 1: It will not recognise mods placed in

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\Assets\Assets.Houses.Commercial\Parks\

This can lead to some name conflicts, and you have to rename some mods like "Park.crp" which was used by at least 3 (!) mod authors.

PROBLEM 2: Unique named files that has to be unique like "PloppableRICODefinition.xml" will not work as each mod placed there will overwrite the previous definition file. However, there is a solution: Use the "Find It!" mod instead of PloppableRICO.

The Rico XML file is not really necessary for the mod to work, it is a definition file to tell PloppableRICO what the game asset is called so you can search for it, if this file is missing, mods will still work, but they won't appear in PloppableRICO.

There is a distinct advantage of using a hierarchical storage method, you can place entire sets of similar content into one folder, like:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\Assets\Assets.Houses.European

When you don't want to use a European set of houses anymore, you can simply move that folder and the game assets will not appear in CitiesSkylines anymore.

That is it. Happy offline gaming.