So, you want to know about Civ 6 mods? Civilization VI is still one of the most popular strategy games around right now, despite strong contenders rising to the challenge. The secret to the success of a lot of games – especially on PC – is the potential that mods and other user-generated content can bring to the table. The Civ 6 mod scene is just as robust as any other, and there are plenty of interesting options for you to spice up your next play-through.

It’s worth noting that, at the time of writing, the Civilization VI mods seems mainly to be about smaller UI or quality of life mods. There aren’t the sweeping overhauls of say Total War or Paradox games; it’s a bit like when you look at our XCOM 2 mods guide, where the main highlights are smaller content packs or UI improvements. These things can make all the difference though with a game a big as Civ.

Please note that, for the moment, we’ve only looked at the Steam Workshop to compile our initial list of Civ 6 mods – we will be looking at non-steam sources as well for future updates to see if there are still any interesting mods worth checking out that aren’t on the Workshop.

These are the best Civilization 6 mods:

If you were ever a fan of the throne rooms from Civ II, or Civ III’s palaces, then this mod is for you. Thrones and Palaces adds new visual UI spaces where you can upgrade not only your own palace-like building, but the throne room within it, offering the bet of both worlds.

Sukritact strikes again with another brilliant mod. The average Civ 6 player may not spend a lot of time thinking about the game’s oceans, but if you stop to look closely they’re actually pretty dull. Sukritact’s Oceans is here to fix that, introducing a new game mode that adds more resources, features, and even gameplay mechanics.

We all know that the one thing Civ 6 needs is hillier hills. I mean, what is this? Age of Empires? Luckily for you one hero has stepped up and given us the phat gradients we’ve all been longing for for so long.

Given the amount of modes you could potentially be downloading and installing, the vanilla mod manager screen can sometimes get a bit cumbersome. The EMM Mod’s changes are modest, but they can make a huge quality of life difference when dealing with your collection.

Religion Expanded is a content mod that enhances the religious aspect of the game, first and foremost by upping the religion cap to 16, although you need the Gathering Storm expansion and another mod to make it work.

Civ modding legend Sukritact completely changes the game of international diplomacy with their global relations panel mod. A port of a similar mod from Civ 5, this is an information change that allows you to see how every civ in your game feels about other civs, without having to bring up their diplomacy menus one by one to check manually.

This is a collection of mods that add a wide variety of new World Wonders to the game from five different authors. These new WW include things like the Brandenburg Gate, the Globe Theatre… even the Itsukushima Shrine.

Leugi & p0kiehl’s Latin American Resources mod is, again, fairly straight forward. It adds five new luxury resources and a bonus resource that were commonly found in central & South America, such as Capybaras and Yerba Mate. Each resource comes with its own unique benefit.

This is a successor to the original ‘Moar Units’ mods which is no longer being updated (and shouldn’t be used at all anymore).

The first two are recommended for a complete experience and represent the original, total functionality of the original Moar Units mod. The developer decided to split them up for the sequel for ease of use for those who don’t want the entire package.

This is an open source mod that’s maintained by the community at large that tries to offer the player more information in a way that’s easier to access. It completely overhauls the UI and enhances it, and has teamed up with some other UI mods (one of which is mentioned below) to form a complete package.

This mod improves the trade screen interface so that it’s easier to read and sort, as well as offering some automation quality of life functionality. For starters, you can sort routes based on yields (Food, Production, Gold, Science, Culture, Faith) or turns remaining, and you can even sort via multi-levels or criteria at the same time.

The most popular Civ 6 mod of all time (at the time of writing), despite Civilization 6 firmly overtaking Civ 5 in terms of player numbers, it seems many still can’t escape their love for those older, slightly muddier Civ 5 graphics.

Civilization 6 has had Steam Workshop support since 2017, so thankfully it’s relatively simple to mod-up your copy of Civ 6 for the majority of us. Simply browse the Workshop find a mod you like and subscribe. There is an additional in-game mod manager-like area called ‘Additional Content’ to further manage which mods you have installed by activating/deactivating.

It is still possible to play with your favourite mod even if you’re using the EGS version of Civilization 6 (which launched back in May 2020). If you get the mod from a non-steam source like Nexus, you can simply throw it in the same user directory as above, although it may look like this with the EGS version: \Documents\my games\Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (Epic)\Mods. Again, create a new ‘Mods’ folder if there isn’t one.

With both methods, the mod will appear in the ‘Additional Content’ menu in-game, which will allow you to activate them at your leisure.