After 25 years this strategy city builder series is finally getting official mod support

A city from 1800 — (Image credit: Ubisoft Blue Byte)

Part of the lasting appeal of a game like Cities: Skylines is the thousands and thousands of mods created by its community. Maps, buildings, landmarks, vehicles, roads, themes, and sometimes entire new game systems are constantly being created by modders, meaning every time you sit down to design a city you'll find something brand new to add to it.

So it's always great news when a publisher embraces the modding community instead of just tolerating it, even if it takes them a while to come around. In this case it's been about 25 years coming: the Anno series of strategy city builders has been around since 1998, first developed by Max Design and later by Ubisoft Blue Byte. This month marks the first time in Anno series history that it will have official mod support.

Mods are being integrated in the most recent Anno game, Anno 1800, with mod.io, and the official support is being rolled out in phases. The first phase was an invitation to modders to submit mods, and it's no big surprise that invitation was resoundingly accepted. Over 100 mods appeared within the first 48 hours, and you can already find a variety of building skins, modified production chains and resource buildings, a larger harbor, new map templates, and lots of little improvements and alterations to the city builder.

You won't have to wait long to start playing with those mods: on August 22 the mod.io integration will become accessible to all Anno 1800 players. You'll be able to launch the game, browse the in-game mod menu, and download and activate all the mods you want. Pretty cool!

That's not the only interesting mod-related news this week: just today we learned that Rockstar bought the makers of the GTA Online FiveM mod it banned 8 years ago. That's quite a turnaround.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.