Best Civilization 6 Mods

Do you love Civilization 6? If so, you'll love this list of the best Civilization 6 mods to download and play right now!

If you’re Civilization 6 fan, then you know that each playthrough is a distinct experience reliant on your map layout, starting location, leaders, and available resources.

While this formula allows each entry to feel fresh and exciting after multiple campaigns, having so many variables to keep track of can be overwhelming for some.

Thankfully, the Civ modding community is constantly finding new ways to streamline the series for newcomers while also delivering new content and features to veterans.

In this list, we’ll highlight the best Civilization 6 mods for PC in 2024, including the best Civ mods available through Steam Workshop.

We’ll continue to update this list as new mods catch our eye, so make sure to check back and let us know if we missing any of your favorite Civ 6 PC mods!

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A lot of players prefer the more realistic look of previous entries compared to Civ 6’s cartoonish visuals.

Luckily, you’re not stuck with the look of the vanilla game as modders have provided numerous alternatives, including a mod that brings back Civ 5’s aesthetic and neutral color palette.

The Civ 5 Environment Skin mod alters just about every basic tile and decal in Civ 6 while decreasing the overall saturation. 

It also assigns a bunch of new textures to objects like trees and grass, which give the game a more natural look.

While the changes are subtle, they go a long way towards creating an immersive experience reminiscent of one of the best entries, especially when paired with mods like the R.E.D. Modpack, which rescales units to a more accurate size.

One of the highlights of Gathering Storm was the addition of labels for major geographic landmarks on the map.

However, if you’re a consistent player, chances are you’ve long since grown tired of seeing the same names over and over again.

That’s where the Mappa Mundi mod comes in hand, adding 15,000+ names for rivers, deserts, valleys, volcanoes, mountains, and more, all based on real-world locations.

The mod’s script achieves this by pulling data from Wikipedia to come up with new names for each location on your map, referencing iconic landmarks from around the globe.

Additionally, it’s compatible with most other popular Civ 6 mods, making installation wholly seamless and painless. 

There are a plethora of mods dedicated to increasing the sense of realism in Civ 6’s worlds. However, none are as detailed as this one.

The Detailed Worlds mod elevates maps to new heights by implementing a series of changes to the way worlds are presented.

This includes better placement for volcanoes, deserts, rainforests, and marshes, as well as detailed coastal lines filled with numerous bays and coves.

Also, this mod reduces the amount of polar land you’ll encounter as well as adjusts food placement throughout desert tiles to appear near rivers more frequently.

There are seven different map scripts to explore, including Continents, Pangaea, Archipelago, Islands, and more.

Playing Civ 6 on the highest ‘Hyperreal’ disaster intensity is a formidable challenge in of itself.

However, if you consider yourself somewhat of a masochist, you may want to take things even further by installing the Catastrophic Disaster Intensity mod, which causes a new disaster to pop up nearly every turn.

Dormant volcanoes become a thing of the past, and the chance of finding floodable lowland tiles is increased from 35% to 75% across all intensities.

Additionally, this mod makes it so that stronger versions of each disaster type are more likely to appear than their weaker counterparts.

If you feel like Civ isn’t testing you enough, this is the ideal mod to prove yourself once and for all and battle it out with Mother Nature.

Another way to boost the immersion in Civ 6 is to install new map packs, such as the aptly named Yet Not Another Map Pack mod.

This mod allows you to use more accurate maps as well as culturally-linked start locations based on your chosen civ.  

However, the real highlights here are the new, bigger map sizes, which include Enormous (128×80), Giant (180×94), and Ludicrous (200×100), with players able to select the map type and size whenever starting a new game.

There are a few compatibility issues when running this mod after the Gathering Storm update, specifically potential crashes when selecting maps larger than ‘Enormous’. 

Experienced Civ players will know how annoying it is to be fully entrenched in a playthrough only to have the Queen of England continuously bombard you with trade offers.

With Zee’s Fewer Trade Offers mod, the game’s AI is adjusted to leave you alone for longer periods.

The cooldown for AI trade offers increased from 10 turns to 50 turns, peace offers during war from 3 turns to 10 turns, and friendship offers see a substantial boost from 5 turns to 30 turns.

You’ll no longer have to worry about keeping the Queen in business and can instead use your newfound freedom to plan out her demise.

Civ 6 has a bad habit of cramming way too much information into the user interface to the point where it becomes downright impossible to keep track of.

However, with these two mods, you’ll be well on your way to a more seamless experience free of clutter.

The first mod we recommend installing is Better Trade Screen, which adds new sorting options to the Trade Overview screen as well as the ability to select ‘Repeat Route’ when trading. 

Combine it with the Simple UI Adjustments mod for a more productive and easy-to-understand UI.

This mod simplifies most of the original UI functions and includes a few cool features, such as the ability to observe which tiles are currently being worked on by hovering over a city’s banner.

Additionally, it provides the player with information regarding final flood yields, tooltips for building, districts, and wonder, and plenty more. 

As great as Civ 6 is, the game doesn’t always do a good job of explaining how some gameplay mechanics work, especially when it comes to district benefits.

Certain districts, such as Industrial Zones, can share their benefits with all city centers within six tiles, even though the game doesn’t share this at any point.

Making things worse is the fact that there’s no built-in system for counting tiles other than by hand.

Luckily, someone has taken the liberty of creating a Radial Measuring Tool to make the process a lot less tedious.

This simple mod measures the effect distance for different districts as well as terrain yields for tiles not currently owned within a set radius. 

Era Score is one of the more interesting new features introduced in the Rise and Fall expansion.

However, it’s still missing one essential part: the ability to track which actions count towards your Era Score.

This makes the vanilla system feel like a lot of guesswork and achievement memorization to raise your score.   

Thankfully, the Real Era Tracker mod improves upon vanilla Era Score in several ways.

Players are presented with an aim-style list of methods to earn Era Score as well as indicators for when another civ has claimed objectives.

To see this mod’s full potential, we recommend starting a fresh playthrough and watching as your Era Score quickly fills.

Total conversion mods are a great way to breathe new life into Civ 6 if you feel like you’ve exhausted all the content in the vanilla game.

Mods such as Anno Domini allow the player to experience things that are usually outside the scope of a Civ game by focusing on a specific period, in this case, the Ancient/Classical eras.

Taking place “from the Dawn of Time to the fall of Rome,” this mod maintains the same pacing, civ count, and some unlockable technologies as you’d expect in a full game while zoning in on a moment in history.

The same can be said about the numerous buildings, units, wonders, and resources that are made available to the player.

Although Gathering Storm forced players to change how they approached strategic resources, the expansion still didn’t address many of the glaring issues that arise late in the game.

Zee’s Strategic Resources Overhaul mod attempts to remedy a lot of GS’s oversights in some clever ways.

For one, it adds more practical applications for strategic resources that become obsolete early on, such as Iron, Horses, Copper, and Aluminum.

Additionally, these resources become handy bargaining chips, which can be leveraged in negotiations with other civs and factor into wars. 

First introduced in Civ 5, Tourism has had a hard time proving its usefulness in playthroughs beyond a single strategy.

However, the Diplomatic Favor with Tourism mod seeks to make the mechanic more relevant by rewarding the player with one Diplomatic Favor point for every +100 Tourism they manage to generate.

The intended goal is to provide players with a more substantial incentive for investing in Tourism beyond just a ‘Culture Victory.’

It adds a subtle, but noticeable layer to how the game is played without compromising gameplay balance.

Climate change is an exciting new mechanic that drastically raises the level of challenge in Civ 6.

However, the game is pessimistic when it comes to providing eco-friendly power alternatives, locking you into an eventual environmental disaster.

Luckily, two mods can be combined to give your civ more room to breathe.

The first one is the Decommission Power Plants mod, which lets you shut down power plants within the management panel to reduce your carbon footprint.

Since you’re going to have to find somewhere else to get power from, we recommend installing the Snowlar Panels mod as well.

It lets you turn what would otherwise be unusable snow tiles into a source of energy by building solar panels on top of them.

If you find yourself wanting to crush Rock Bands in Civ 6 only to find the game provides no way to do so, then you’re in luck.

With the Religious Units Fight Rock Bands mod installed, you’ll be able to defeat those blasphemous, music-blasting cretins once and for all through the power of prayer.

This is achieved by assigning Rock Bands a religious strength level of 125 within the game’s files.

They don’t gain any additional bonuses but are instead made vulnerable to fervent praying, fasting, and proper use of wonders/policies from Apostles and Inquisitors.

Rock Bands are not able to initiate combat, making them the ultimate guitar-playing punching bags.

If you feel like you’ve seen and done just about everything you can in Civ 6, the only logical choice is to add a bunch of new civs to the game.

There are a plethora of options for expanding civs/leaders in the vanilla game.

However, not many are as impressive or extensive as JFD’s Civilization and Leader mods pack.

You can find a huge list of civilizations and leaders from past games as well as new ones with unique traits not discovered in the original game.

Highlights include Isabella I for Spain, Elisabeth for Russia, and Wilhelmina for the Netherlands.

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Justin Fernandez

As a fan of both indie and triple-A games, Justin finds joy in discovering and sharing hidden gems with other passionate gamers. In addition to reporting on the latest and greatest titles, he manages GamingScan’s social media channels.

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