Hello, my name is Aubergine, and I'm addicted to subscription buttons...

When CO/Paradox released Cities:Skylines, they actually said on several occasions words to the effect of "We treat users like responsible adults".

So, like an irresponsible child I went round subscribing to just about everything in the Workshop. 2,000 subscriptions later, and my game was taking 30 minutes to load and crashing on a regular basis.

The time has come for me to act like a responsible adult and tackle my subscription addiction!

I realised it was a psychological issue. Why was I so unwilling to unsubscribe assets? Why was I subscribing so many assets in the first place?! Because they look awesome and I must use them... one day! Maybe... Well, probably never, but they just look so awesome!

I thought about using the Favorite button to mark nice assets, but then I end up promoting a list things that I'm not using. It just didn't seem right; favorites should be the best of the best, things I rate so highly that I want the whole world to know. Things I actually use! This approach just wasn't going to cut the mustard.

That's when I turned my attention to asset collections. Let's give it a try....

There's two ways to get started with creaing a collection - Option A and Option B (see below for both).


Thanks to tcgames65, you can now click this link to immediately start creating a collection.

See "Filling in the forms" section for next step...


This is the old, manual approach to creating a collection...

Find any asset in the workshop that's part of multiple collections - the "Most popular items this week" are almost always put in multiple collections. In the sidebar on the right, you should see something like this:


Click the link to display the list of collections, and in the top-right you'll see a button for creating your own collection:

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/workshop/editcollection/?appid=255710


You'll get taken to a screen like this:



I named my collection "Stuff to try later" - this reassured my addicted brain that I'm still going to get my asset fix, just later.

Here's the image I used:



Feel free to download that and use it yourself, fellow addict.

In the description I just mentioned that these are things I will subscribe later. Yes, brain, you will definitely get to subscribe these things later. Honest.

I set the collection as "Items that users should choose between", because I want to make sure each item is subscribed separately.



Continue the process and you'll end up at an ugly screen like this:



It's a nightmare to work with. You need to add at least one thing to your collection before you can save it - so I just added the very first asset on the subscriptions tab (it's easy to remove later).

Once you're done, save the collection.

It appears not many people know this, and I didn't until recently: You can list all of your current subscriptions in the Steam Workshop, here's how...

Go to the Workshop tab at the top of this page, and hover the mouse over the Browse link...



See that?! Click "Subscribed Items" and you'll get a list of all your subscriptions:



You can filter to specific workshop categories too, using the options in the right sidebar.



So, where to start? Well, for me there were two obvious choices:

• When I first started playing C:S, every asset looked awesome and I subscribed to loads of stuff that wasn't very good - these things I can probably just unsubscribe completely without too much pain.
  
• I've subscribed to loads of unique buildings, yet hardly ever use them. Also, many of those unique buildings are huge resource hogs - both in file size and model complexity. I can make my game run much better if I... uhm, put them in a list of things to subscribe to later. (don't think of it as unsubscribing, think of it as a list of things to subscribe to in the future)

So, I filtered my subscriptions to Unique Buildings, and went to the last page in the list (oldest items).

I set myself a little rule: Anything above 10MB file size should be added to my future subscriptions list, unless there's a very, very good reason not to. After all, I will be subscribing to all this stuff in the future, so there's no real reason not to put stuff on the list.

One by one, I went through each asset - clicking it's title and looking at the file size and the thumbnail.

If it wasn't an asset I recognised, or looked like something I was more likely to use in the future than the present, or if the file size was huge, it would meet the criteria for my future subscriptions list.

Under the preview image, there's a button to add to collection:



Click it and then tick the collection you want to add to:



Note: I don't unsubscribe the asset, because my brain wouldn't like that. I just add it to the list of things to subscribe to in the future.

Once it's on the list, use the back arrow button in the tool bar at top of screen to go back to your list of assets, and keep going through them one by one choosing which items to add to the list.

Remember, we're not unsubscribing these assets, we're simply making it possible for us to subscribe to them in the future...

Hover over your Steam username at the top of the page, and choose "Content" from the drop-down menu, then click on the Collections tab.



Click on the collection and you'll get a big list of all the items in it like this...



See all those big tick (check) buttons? Clicking ticks is fun, right? It's like a to-do list, I'm ticking all the things that I want to be able to subscribe to in the future! Go ahead, click the ticks! They turn in to scrumptious "+" buttons meaning that the assets are ready for future subscription. It's my stash of things to subscribe to at a later date.

And why stop there? Now we have this list of things to subscribe to in the future, it would be wrong not to add more stuff to it. So I went back through other sections of my subscribed assets - parks, intersections, etc., and added a load of new stuff that I wanted to be able to subscribe to in the future.

Also, when I'm browsing the workshop, if I see anything I like I can just add it to my stash. I don't need to subscribe straight away, I can add it to my stash of stuff I'm definitely going to subscribe to in the future. Whenever I need a subscription fix, I know it's right their in my stash!

That, my friends, is how I overcame my subscription addiction.