
Hello everyone! Welcome to the development diary of the Eastern European Pack for Cities: Skylines II! I’m Alex_BY, one of the first modders of Cities: Skylines. Today, I’ll tell you a bit about how we worked on this vast building pack and the concept behind it.
You can download the Easter European Pack here: https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/98960/Windows
Concept and Inspiration
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the phrase “Eastern Europe”? Depending on what you’ve seen in pop culture or what you’ve read, you might have thought that it looks something like this:


The Development Process
Challenges in Planning
During the planning phase of our pack, we already encountered some challenges. First, the pack was going to be really huge. My reference file alone was almost 1.5 GB.
- All the residential Medium and High Density, as well as Mixed Density.
- Low Density Commercial
- A big part of service buildings.

Technical Hurdles
One of the toughest challenges was adhering to Colossal Order’s detailed technical specifications for models. Unlike traditional workflows, where tiled textures are often used, Cities: Skylines II required every building to fit into a texture with a maximum size of 4096x4096 pixels. In the original Cities: Skylines, many modders used a technique where textures were often mapped to a smaller resolution, with UV islands extending far beyond the 0,1 UV boundaries.
Optimization: Reuse and Innovate
Thus, our first major goal in working on the pack became optimization. It became clear that we needed to reuse details and textures as much as possible wherever we could. The beauty of real-world Eastern European architecture came to the rescue: most buildings that we were inspired by were explicitly designed to be built very quickly and to create many different structures from the same panels. This design philosophy translated perfectly into game assets. And it worked!



From Gray to Gorgeous
Yes, here we can circle back to that very first association with the words "Eastern Europe.” People living in countries of the former Eastern Bloc (all the way to East Berlin) likely understood this concept right away. In modern times, many old gray panel buildings have been renovated or are undergoing significant renovations, transforming into quite decent and visually pleasing homes. With the pack, we decided to bring the same idea to life. The more leveled up your city becomes, the better it will look! While at the beginning of the game, neighborhoods with panel buildings might appear rather gloomy and depressing, over time, you’ll see them flourish! As you can see from the screenshots below, players will see this transformation unfold in-game:- Level 1-2: More gloomy, monotonous facades.
- Level 3-4: A splash of color and added character.
- Level 5: Fully renovated, visually striking structures.

From Panels to History
As I mentioned earlier, the Eastern Europe Region Pack includes a wide range of panel buildings and some historical architecture. A distinctive feature of many Eastern European cities is that panel housing districts surround their old historical centers. At the same time, historical buildings have long been repurposed for business and commercial use. Therefore, we decided that Low Density Commercial in our pack would represent the low-rise historical buildings. There are also the Low Density Residential buildings. We also have many historical wooden houses that you can find all over Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and their colorful exteriors stand out among the gray and snow.

Service buildings
Of course, we absolutely had to create an expansive range and complete set of service buildings. The Eastern Europe Region Pack includes:- Elementary School
- High School
- Medical Center
- Hospital
- Police Station
- Police HQ
- Post Office
- Welfare Office
- Research Center
- Disease Control
- City Hall
- Water tower
- Firehouse
- Fire Station

Spotlight on Disease Control
However, I would like to highlight one service building in particular. I came up with the idea for this building during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019.



