How to unlock more tiles in Cities Skylines?

When you start a new town in Cities Skylines you can choose a map where to play. In Cities Skylines are “tiles” which determine the borders of your city. Inside these borders, you can build anything you want but out of them, you can build nothing.

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As in the image presented below, there are big maps. However, you always start with a small part of it. You can see that maps have highways/rivers/railroads or minerals. After a later expansion of your city, you should get access to these new things and get more space for building in general.

More tiles are unlocked when you reach milestones. To reach milestones you will need more inhabitants to live inside your city. To see how far you are from your next milestone, see the bottom left corner…

… after clicking on the green locker, you can see which milestone should be next and how many people you need for the growth. From start, you have 1 tile available. After reaching milestones, you can have 9 tiles in the base game.

When is the new milestone tile map open?

In the base game, you could get just 9 map tiles. You get the first one right from the start and after you reach these milestones (below) you will get more map tiles:

• Worthy Village 1x
• Boom Town 1x
• Big Town 1x
• Big City 1x
• Capital City 1x
• Colossal City 1x
• Metropolis 1x
• Megalopolis 1x

Each milestone is on a different cap on each map depending on the size.

How to get a new map tile in Cities Skylines?

If you reach one of the milestones, you can pick up a new tile. You just need to click on the day/night cycle in the left bottom corner and you will be moved to the overall map…

… there you can see available tiles which you can “buy”. You need to have a connection to these new tiles. As you can see in the image below, you are able to open just four tiles. In case you buy a tile, you can get another next to your selected one. It is good to choose thoroughly because when you buy some tile you cannot sell it. Hence it makes sense to buy tiles with big land to get maximum land for your next expansion.

In case you decide to purchase a new tile, you can get a piece of information about the tile. First, you will see which natural resources are available on the new tile. The second important thing is outside connections which are good to grow from time to time.

For me, the main information should be % after suitable area for buildings. This % shows you how much area you could potentially use for building. In case I don’t use mods to get all tiles at once, I’m focused to buy lands which have the most % of suitable areas because you will be able to build there a lot.

Mods which can provide you multiple map tiles

You can say that 9 tiles aren’t enough for your megalopolis plans. For that, there are two mods you can use. The first one is purer to use and it’s called Big City (25 tiles mod). This mode allows you to get all 25 tiles when you get the very last milestone called Megalopolis.

If you want to have 25 tiles from the very beginning, you need to play with “unlock all” settings and then you will be able to buy all map tiles. The 25 tiles are the maximum number of supported tiles in the Cities Skylines modding api. As I said, it is called “pure” and it doesn’t change much.

The second mod for getting more map tiles is called 81 Tiles 2. It is from 2022 and it allows you to get all tiles which are on maps. This mode is more complex and I personally recommend to you use this mode only if you want to get more tiles than 25. After all, 81 tiles is a lot and I can only recommend it to experienced players.

Which of the recommended mode to use?

• Are you a newbie or you are a casual player? Use 25 tiles mode.
• Are you a modder and an experienced player? Then use 81 tiles mode.