We've seen road porn, we've seen useful mods, now let's take a look at the best of the most obvious kind of Cities: Skylines creations: buildings and maps.
The game's vanilla building selection is...weird, throwing together European, American and Asian architecture in a way that means your city never really feels as cohesive (at least visually) as it could. The game's colour palette also kinda washes away after a few hours as well; there's too many pastels and too many neutral colours, with few buildings really popping out of the scenery.
But whatever. That's what Steam Workshop support is for, and in the week since Skylines' release, there are already thousands of user-created models, maps and save games to import into your own game, ranging from medieval churches to custom burger joints to a very macho map. Here's a selection of the very best of this stuff.
Los Santos from GTA V
Does what it says on the box. This is all of Los Santos from Grand Theft Auto V, and what's more, it's already been built for you, from the docks to the airport to the satellite towns. The individual buildings may not be perfect, but the major roads and neighbourhoods are, and work that's been matching up the terrain is staggering.
Combine Citadel - Half Life 2
Yeah, you could pretend that you're playing the part of a benevolent urban planner, born and raised on planet Earth. Or, thanks to this building, you could pretend you're actually an instrument of a galactic force intent on crushing the very fabric of the human race and bending it to your will.
Gula's In-and-Out Burger
The people of Cities: Skylines need burgers. The people also need joke buildings. This handles both of those things, while also being one the slickest and most professional user-created buildings out there (though there's a very good reason for that).
Public soccer field
The game has quite a few parks by default, and one giant stadium, but it's missing something essential found in the urban landscape across much of the world: a public playing field. This "Public soccer field" fixes that by providing the pitch, parking, some small grandstands and even some advertising. Perfect for those pub team kickarounds.
MACHO-LAND RANDY SAVAGE
Lots of maps for this game are trying to recreate actual locations. Boring. We need more maps recreating dearly-departed professional wrestlers from the 1980s.
GabeN Heightmap
Or, if wrestlers aren't your thing, you could also try laying roads and dropping buildings all over the face of the boss of Valve himself.
Playground Park (1x1)
I love this one for its utility. The parks in the vanilla game are huge! Even the smallest can take up half a city block. In dense areas, that's a waste of space, so this 1x1 park takes a page out of Tokyo's book and lets you squeeze lots of fun into tiny spaces. Cute and economical!
Hong Kong
There are too many maps already in the Workshop, but of all the ones trying to recreate an actual location, I like this Hong Kong one the best, because it's both a challenge (lots of water and mountains) and because Hong Kong itself is basically a city-building sim's dream.
[ICT]DPruett2333
[ICT]DPruett2333 isn't the name of a building, it's the name of a creator, one of the most prolific in Skylines' workshop and who is responsible for a ton of fantastic homes, offices and skyscrapers. Many of these contain only minor tweaks, some even just a repaint, but even those tiny changes can make a big difference if they add splashes of brighter colour to the game. If you need a one-stop shop for improving the roster of buildings that'll spring up in your city, the first thing you need to do is head to [ICT]DPruett2333's Workshop page.