Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 doesn’t officially launch until Tuesday, but players have already assembled a laundry list of criticisms for the latest installment of the 4X franchise, many of them pointed particularly at the obtuse UI and lack of basic features from previous entries. Firaxis has already released a statement detailing plans for upcoming changes to the game. However, one particularly dedicated player, who has been trying the game during its early access window, has already released a mod aimed at alleviating some of these issues.
The Simple UI Adjustments mod, developed by Sukritact, adds a variety of tooltips when hovering over tiles, including descriptions of wonders built on specific tiles, smaller plot yield icons on undeveloped tiles, and the ability to initiate diplomacy with other civs by clicking on their city banners. The changes are relatively minor, but save you the hassle of opening up the Civilopedia or digging through additional menus to find specific information.
Civilization 7 isn’t available to all players just yet, so there isn’t a convenient Steam Workshop page for downloading or managing mods. But thankfully, downloading and installing this mod is a relatively simple process of dropping the necessary folder in your Civ 7 mods folder, which should be labeled something like “{user}AppDataLocalFiraxis GamesSid Meier’s Civilization VIIMods”. To confirm you’ve got everything in the right place, you can look in the Mods menu under “Additional Content,” where the mod should show up as enabled.
Even though the game has only been available to early access players since Feb. 6, Sukritact has also developed another Civ 7 mod that removes the unlock requirements for all of the civilizations, which are typically limited based on your chosen leader and hitting certain prerequisites during certain ages.
While it’s still disappointing that features like the ability to rename cities or units weren’t present in Civilization 7 at launch, at the rate the modding community is moving, I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long.
