Cities — Skylines Extra Landscaping Tools Best

In the base game of Cities: Skylines, terraforming is often described as "clunky" or "restricted." You are limited to specific brush sizes, crude elevation steps, and the inability to edit land after a road is placed. Extra Landscaping Tools , created by the legendary modder Ronyx69, shatters these limitations. It transforms the map editor and in-game terraforming from a minor utility into a core creative gameplay pillar. Below is a comprehensive breakdown of the tool's mechanics, hidden features, and professional applications.

1. The Core Paradigm Shift: No More Limits The fundamental difference between the vanilla terraforming tools and ELT is the removal of hard restrictions.

Brush Size & Strength: In vanilla, you have a slider capped at a certain radius. ELT allows for massive brush sizes (ideal for creating mountain ranges quickly) and extremely fine-tuned strength sliders (essential for delicate detailing). Unrestricted Editing: Vanilla prevents you from terraforming underneath existing infrastructure. ELT ignores these collisions, allowing you to lower terrain under a bridge to create an underpass after the road is built, or raise ground through a building to create a forced basement effect. Resource Manipulation: ELT allows you to paint Ore, Oil, Fertile Land, and Forest resources with the same precision as terrain. This is vital for forcing industrial specialization in specific areas that the game’s procedural generation might have missed.

2. The Toolset Breakdown The Terrain Tools cities skylines extra landscaping tools

Level: Unlike the vanilla "level" tool which creates flat planes at the cursor's height, ELT allows you to set a specific height manually. This is crucial for creating consistent plateaus or riverbeds at exact elevations. Slope: This is arguably the most powerful tool in the kit. It allows you to draw a line from Point A to Point B. The tool then automatically calculates the gradient.

Deep Application: Use this to create realistic, accessible wheelchair ramps, highway on-ramps with perfect grades, or river flows that guarantee water moves in a specific direction without pooling weirdly.

Smooth: The vanilla smooth tool is often too aggressive. ELT offers "Soft Smooth" settings that gently blend jagged polygons into rolling hills without destroying the overall silhouette of the terrain. In the base game of Cities: Skylines, terraforming

The Water Tools (The Hydro-Engine) Before the "Sunset Harbor" DLC and the official "Water Tool" mod, ELT was the only way to manipulate water.

Channels and Canals: You can carve deep canals into the bedrock to create functional canals for shipping or decorative city waterways. Map Theme Dependency: How water looks depends heavily on the Map Theme. ELT places the water, but the water texture (murky vs. tropical blue) is dictated by the theme (e.g., European vs. Tropical) loaded in the game.

3. Advanced Techniques: The "Procedural" Approach This is where ELT separates casual players from content creators. The "Procedural" Button Located within the ELT interface is a button labeled "Procedural." This is a logic-based terraforming feature. Below is a comprehensive breakdown of the tool's

How it works: You paint a mask (a specific area), and the tool generates terrain based on logic rules (noise, falloff, height). The "Chaos" Factor: Instead of manually sculpting every hill, you can use procedural generation to lay down a base layer of realistic noise. You can then go in with manual brushes to refine it. This saves hours when creating large maps. Erosion Simulation: ELT can simulate hydraulic erosion. It calculates how water would naturally erode rock over thousands of years, carving realistic valleys and ridges into your terrain. This gives maps a "generated by nature" look rather than "sculpted by a mouse" look.

4. Critical Synergies: Making ELT Work ELT does not exist in a vacuum. To unlock its full potential, it requires companion mods. Move It! (Integration) ELT and Move It! are the "Dynamic Duo" of Cities: Skylines.