Prefabs are the assets that come with the game and its DLCs - this includes buildings, props, vehicles, trees, and networks.

(There are other prefabs, too, such as citizens, disasters, and others, that aren't relevant here, so we'll ignore them for now).

When you skip a prefab that you don't need, it will not be available in game, saving some memory, preventing it from appearing in-game, and reducing the clutter in your menus.

You can skip buildings, vehicles, props, trees, and networks using this mod.

Start the game (to the main menu) and open the Options dialog of this mod - under the 'General' tab you will find the 'Prefab skipping' section. Enable skipping by selecting the checkbox, and click the button to create a new text file in this location (you can also change the file location and/or name here).

This will create a blank skipping file. Now you can add the prefabs that you want to skip to this file, like this:

Note how this file works. The file is divided into sections marked by headers such as 'Buildings:', 'Vehicles:', etc. The prefabs that you want to skip MUST be in the relevant section (i.e. after the relevant header, and before the next header) or they won't be skipped.

Don't just add new prefab names to the end of the file and expect them to work! They MUST go into the correct section.

The skipfile can also handle wildcards, such as the asterisk (*). For example, to skip all prefabs starting with 'Bamboo' , you can use:

You can skip entire categories as well in the skip file; categories are distinguished by using a colon (:) after their name. For example, to skip ALL vanilla Residential buildings, you can use:

See the prefab lists at https://lsm.thebugfix.net/. Not only does this site list all the available prefabs (including with pictures), you can also use it to generate your skipfile for you! Simply select the prefabs you wish to skip and a skip list will automatically be updated at the bottom of the page (there's a shortcut button at the top of the page to save you scrolling all the way down).

To execpt a prefab from being skipped, you can have a line starting with the word 'Except:' followed by the name of the prefab (or the prefab category, as usual (including wildcards). This can be useful when you want to keep only a subset of prefabs but skip all others.

For example, to skip all vanilla residential buildings EXCEPT for the Green Cities, Campus, and Plazas & Promenades residential buildings, you'd use something like the following:


They are simply removed from the game (and from any buildings or networks that might contain them) - EXCEPT FOR any buildings and networks that are in-use in the map (see below). Note that vehicles, props, and trees will be skipped regardless of whether they're in-use or not.

Skipping will NOT apply to any building already placed in your city (as doing so will cause a bunch of errors). You CANNOT remove existing buildings via the skip file; you'll need to delete them in-game first (of course, there's nothing wrong with adding them to the skip file first and then deleting the existing buildings later).

if you use the * pattern to skip all buildings, the mod will keep these buildings anyway to prevent errors:

• Statue of Shopping: because the game will crash on load if there isn't at least one unique building (unless you have Ploppable RICO Revisited installed to fix this issue).
  
• Electricity Pole: required for powerlines and electriicity transmission.
  
• Wind Turbine: because the game requires at least one electricity source.
  
• Dam Node Building and Dam Power House: required for dams.
  
• Water Pipe Junction and Heating Pipe Junction: required for water and heating pipes and transmission.

Skipping will NOT apply to any network already placed in your city (as doing so will make your save unplayable).

There's also an inbuilt safety mechanism for network prefab skipping to automatically exclude the 'special' in-game invisible networks required for basic building functionality.

However, outside of this, everything is fair game. This includes things like railway/metro station tracks, so yes, you can make your railway stations non-functional if you really want. Skipped networks will simply be removed from buildings.

The mod puts info like this in the log:
Open your output_log.txt to see them.

Any errors in your skip.txt are also reported in the log.