How to Modify UI for Unsupported Resolutions

A guide on modifying the UI scale in Civ VI for resultions which do not support in-game scaling.

File Location

Navigate to: Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization VI
*your file explorer should appear like the image below

AppOptions.txt

Open the AppOptions.txt file in an appropriate software (notepad) and push Ctrl+F.
*your document should appear like the image

UI

With the box open, type "UIUpscale" (excluding quotation) and the appropriate text to modify will appear.

Modification Guide Lines

Although the setting states UIUpscale it is possible to type in a negative value to down scale the UI. The default UI scale value being 1, by entering a minus value the UI will shrink as seen here; entering -0.25, the UI scale value will be modified ingame to 0.75 without requiring a resolution change. The only detriment appears to be slightly blurred text, however graphically there is no lesser quality allowing UI scaling without the lack of graphical phidelity of increasing resolution above the native.

Share!

Please share this guide; having a lower resolution I suffered through Civ V using either largly intrusive UI or poor resolution settings and was pleased to find it was at least possible to modify the UI in Civ VI while retaining the fidelity of using a native resolution.

This helped me enjoy the game more, hope it helps others!

[Atom Smashing Supercollider]

Looks like those files were moved to %LocalAppData%.
Check "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization VI".

That's where my AppOptions.txt was hiding.

[metronome]

I'm unable to find this file in this location, or any location in Civ6. Maybe it's been folded into another file? I just want to adjust my UI scaling between 1.0 (far too smal) and 1.5 (far too large). How can I do that now?

[tjgoldstein]

After waiting for 2K game support to help me inregards to the ingame UI suddenly tripling in size overnight, I gave up after 3 weeks and decided to Google some ideas on how to fix it. This was the second solution I tried, apart from the usual.. ' fix the ingame resolution!' advice and wow, it worked!! Reducing the UI scale to -0.25 was too much and made things very fuzzy so after some fiddling, I found that -0.11 is almost exactly what it was originally.

This may be only a temp. fix as there is, obviously, an undiscovered reason *why* the UI increased in size between turning the game off on Saturday night and turning it back on Sunday afternoon.

However, major thanks for the advice and it was so simple.. even a 50 year old woman can follow it.

[JBBdude]

I can't get this fix to work on a 1080p display. Every time the program opens, it resets the UIUpscale value to 0.000000.

[Shamis]

I can't say thank you enough! My UI was getting cut off on the top and bottom of the screen due to it being too large. The options menu wasn't letting me change the resolution. For some reason the drop down menu was staying hidden behind the other options below. Needless to say I tried everything. Searched google for the past two days and finally found this thread. I could kiss you my friend, thanks again.

[mpbMKE]

Sorry, I just got the notification of your response today!

The UI scaling affects everything except the game objects themselves. Menus, fonts, backgrounds, everything except the pieces on the board. Scroll bars show up correctly for things that go off-screen, like the government policy selector. I haven't had any glitches with things becoming inaccessible or unreadable.

And for some reason, UI scaling is often disabled in the options menu even on UHD and greater screens. Makes it especially difficult when you're running a UHD+ laptop display, haha.

[Whimper]

Interesting. Isn't the scaling slider for UI available in the options menu for systems running 4K?

Maybe there's something about me running in 1080p that makes scaling up not work.

Which elements do you see growing and shrinking when you alter the setting? Fonts? Buttons? Overlays? It's mainly font size I'm looking to increase, but the old trick of modifying the XML causes the Production window for cities to not show up.

[mpbMKE]

Whimper--

I set it to 2.0 on my laptop's 4k display and it works exactly as expected.

[Xairo]

Sorry Whimper, I should've specified down-scaling because it's a problem I'd noticed people having that hadn't been identified, seems wanting to down-scale is a problem in the minority.

[Whimper]

This might work for downscaling the UI, but I tried adding a variety of values from 1.0 to 2.0 to upscale the UI, and noticed no differences at all. Fonts, icons, UI elements were the same each time.