By Jon Ryan
When it released back in the fall of 2010, Fallout: New Vegas was a fantastically detailed and incredibly fun RPG, and - spoiler alert! - it still is! And just like with Fallout 3 and Skyrim, the modding community has made the PC version of Fallout 3.5 look better than ever. Here are just a few of our favorite mods that will make your copy of New Vegas more vibrant and immersive than ever before.
A Prettier Apocalypse
One of the first steps to overhauling any game, be it New Vegas, Fallout 3 or Skyrim, is to update the textures for as many objects in the environment as possible. To that end, we installed a combination of NMC's Texture Pack and the OJO BUENO High Quality Texture Workshop. The largest version NMC's pack updates many in-game textures with 2K variants, and Ojo Bueno's mod ups the ante to 4K, and both packs do a great job of revitalizing much of the in-game world. If you're wary about framerate issues or overloading on too many textures, both mods have lower-resolution versions available. To upgrade the weapons, armor and miscellaneous clutter found throughout the wasteland, we installed Millenia's Weapon Retexture Project, Improved Heavy Weapons Textures by Tau34RUS, Macintroll's Wasteland Clothing Hires Retexture, and the Neat Clutter Retextures mod by Mental Gear.
To enhance our interactions with the various NPCs throughout New Vegas, we installed Drumber's excellent mod, the Fallout Character Overhaul. These files reshape and retexture almost every NPC you'll encounter, from Sunny Smiles and Easy Pete to each Poweder Ganger and Fiend. It also includes a 'Playable Races' option which can be activated if, instead of a boring 'normal' person you want to experience life in New Vegas as a Ghoul or mutated human. Another great option for revamping the in-game characters is FNV Redesigned, which gives the NPC character models a softer, more realistic quality. For our non-human (or formerly human) friends, we also installed Ghouls Hires Retexture and Securitron Hires Retexture (both from Macintroll) and the Improved Robots Texture Pack by Tau34RUS.
Wasteland 2.0
On top of all these extra texture mods and new character models, it's easy to add some extra detailed flair to the Mojave desert. As in Fallout 3 and Skyrim, a must-have mod is the Wasteland Flora Overhaul by Vurt. This mod adds more than 100 different trees, grasses, shrubs and other types of plant life to the vast expanse of the area surrounding the New Vegas Strip. In order to make the Strip itself seem more realistic and lively, we also installed The Strip Open by users Schizofriendlia and MoBurma - what this mod does is it removes the gates between each area of the NV Strip in the vanilla version of the game, allowing it to be one continuous street instead of three separate areas.
The next bit of our Wasteland overhaul comes in the form of a weather mod. There are two primary weather modifiers to choose from - JJC71's FNV Project Reality or the Nevada Skies mod by Yossarian. Both mods add a bunch of excellent dyanmic weather effects, including enhanced rain, sandstorms (supplemented by Drumber's HQ Dust Storms mod), radstorms and even snow, if you want to experience a bizzare and wintery Mojave.
While Project Reality is fantastic, we opted to install the Nevada Skies mod, as it not only adds in weather effects and enhanced lighting, but also has an excellent U.I. and several great 'moods' for the wasteland, which can range from lore-friendly templates to fantastical color palates - even a Silent Hills inspired setting that blankets the desert in a thick and ominous fog. Ultimately, though, the choice is entirely up to you.
ENBeautiful
In addition to updating the textures, the biggest - and potentially most intimidating - aspect of revamping New Vegas is adding a new lighting system. Starting with the base files for Boris Voronstov's ENBSeries, which modifies how the game renders light and visuals relative to the game's camera, we can then add one of dozens of ENB presets created by the community. The image above showcases the Midhrastic ENB preset, which was technically designed for Fallout 3 but still works with FNV, which gives the wasteland a warmer color palate and softens the inensity of in-game lighting and depth of field (which tells the camera what to focus on).
Again, it's entirely up to the user which ENB to install - if you're looking for a grittier, more realistic setup, consider the Oxide ENB or Shrutesh's ENB of the Apocalypse. If it's a brighter, more desert-appropriate upgrade you seek, check out Courier and xCamoLegend's NEVADA ENB or Xilandro's Blackout ENB. The Blackout ENB is great, since it also includes patches that make it compatible with your weather mod of choice.
These are just a few of the thousands of mods available for New Vegas - what do you think of our set up? Are we missing anything imperative? Are there other mods you'd reccomend to add for fun? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to check out our New Vegas wiki for our full mods list and install order.
Jon Ryan is an editor at IGN, who can usually be found on Twitter or in your nearest roadside ditch.
Posted byWhatever I did, I regret it!
3 years agoFor anyone who wants to use any of the three four old colors from 3 and New Vegas for their HUD, I've created a list of slider settings. I'll give each R, G, and B slider name a number that corresponds to the number of ticks you move the slider. All the way down is 0, all the way up is 20. So if you start from the bottom, the first time you move the slider, you'll count '1.' Understand? Good. Should also add that I am on Xbox One, but I can't imagine the PS4 version would use a different amount of tick marks on the sliders for no reason. Also, I should mention that have no idea how this works on PC, if the sliders have set tick marks or if you can move them freely, so the second number is the actual RGB value in case you need it. Also if you're wondering how I got the numbers, I took the RGB values of each color, found the percentages out of 255, and proportionalized them to the number of total ticks in the menu sliders.
Blue
Amber
Green
White
Edit: Added white because u/FaithfulMoose showed me up in the comments. :)
Edit 2: All values updated to better accuracy based on .ini files, thanks to u/hopper31
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New Vegas Script Extender
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
A number of mods, especially ones that overhaul entire game systems, rely on the New Vegas Script Extender in order to work. While the script extender won’t directly have an impact on your gameplay, the possibilities it opens up for other mods make it well worth the effort of installing.
4GB Fallout New Vegas Updated
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
New Vegas, by default, caps the amount of your system’s RAM it can use at just 2GB. Modern gaming computers have much more than that however, and with 4GB Fallout New Vegas Updated players can allocate up to 4GB of RAM to the game. This will increase the amount of your computer’s resources the game can access, increasing stability. The increased stability becomes more and more important as you add mods to the game, many of which increase the amount of resources the game needs to run.
Yukichigai Unofficial Patch
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
An unofficial patch that includes a number of bug fixes that the developers never got to themselves. YUP patches not just the vanilla game, but fixes problems found in the DLC as well.
Things fixed in this mod include changing Fixer so it cures addiction only temporarily, stopping NPCs who begin the game dead from automatically resurrecting, preventing the Brotherhood of Steel Explosive Collar from detonating when removed from your character’s neck, and much, much more.
If there’s only one mod you get it should be this one.
Mod Configuration Menu
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
Another mod for your mods, the Mod Configuration Menu brings a button to the pause menu which, you guessed it, allows you to configure your mods. Not every mod will be in the menu, but the MCM has become a standard for New Vegas mod creators who need an in-game options menu for their mods.
Project Nevada
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
Project Nevada is a highly customizable set of modules for the game. This allows users to pick and choose precisely which features of the mod they want to use. The core part of the mod adds features from other first-person shooters, such as sprint, bullet time, a grenade hotkey, and an inventory sorter.
Other modules in the Project Nevada mod add things to the game such as a variety of cybernetic implants, a slew of new weapons, and a rebalance to make the game more challenging by making combat deadlier and changing the timescale for your character’s primary needs.
Wasteland Flora Overhaul
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
The wasteland is a desolate place, but that doesn’t mean it all needs to look the same. The Wasteland Flora Overhaul mod adds more than 100 new trees and plants to the wasteland. Set your eyes on new desert plants such as cacti, desert sunflowers, junipers, desert candle flowers, and more.
The mod has a few versions available depending on your tastes. The Fertile Wasteland version adds some “foresty areas” near water and mountains, includes every new plant and tree model created for the mod, and populates the desert with more flowers, shrubs, cacti, and trees. The Dead Wasteland version of the mod makes fewer changes to the game and primarily uses the dead trees and cacti models with more withered grass and shrubs. Finally, the ESP-less version of the mod simply replaces the game’s original trees with more detailed versions.
Weapon Mods Expanded
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
Modding weapons in Fallout New Vegas is an enjoyable way to customize your character’s equipment to your liking, but Weapon Mods Expanded takes it to a whole new level. Giving each weapon in the game, including uniques, three slots with which to work for mods. This gives even low-tech melee weapons the ability to become more useful in the game with the addition of mods such as a silicone grip for your cattle prod or nails for your baseball bat.
Weapon Mods Expanded also allows you to find weapon mods in containers throughout the world and adds new crafting parts for use in creating some of the new mods yourself.
Fallout 4 Quickloot for New Vegas
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
Tired of opening a clunky menu each time you want to pick up some loot? Well there’s no need for that anymore thanks to Fallout 4 Quickloot for New Vegas. If you’ve played Fallout 4 then you know what you’re in for with this mod, which brings the newer game’s non-intrusive looting menu to the Mojave Desert.
The mod is even customizable, allowing you to choose exactly where on your screen the menu appears, and it matches the color of your HUD automatically.
CONELRAD 640-1240
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
If you’re getting tired of the music played on the radio stations around New Vegas, CONELRAD 640-1240 is the mod for you. Adding a whole new radio station to the game, 55 new songs are introduced to the wasteland alongside 29 new public service announcements.
The songs are themed well with the Fallout universe, and some will be familiar to fans of Fallout 4, such as Uranium Fever by Elton Britt and Crawl Out Through the Fallout by Sheldon Allman. What’s more impressive is these songs were added to New Vegas through this mod before they were in Fallout 4.
NMC’s Texture Pack
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
Changing many of the game’s textures, NMC’s Texture Pack comes in three flavors, one for high-end computers, one for mid-range systems, and another for those running New Vegas on less powerful hardware. The textures in each version are the same, it’s just the size of them that changes for each version.
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While this pack includes changes for graphics throughout the game, it doesn’t touch the sky, water, clothing, NPCs, foliage, and weapons, so any mods you want to use that change those graphical features should be compatible with NMC’s Texture Pack.
Useful Misc Items
Fallout 4 New Vegas Mod
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
There’s a lot of clutter in the Fallout universe, and not much to do with it in the vanilla game. Useful Misc Items looks to change that by giving every item a purpose. Junk found throughout the game can be turned into useful goods such as scrap metal, scrap electronics, and sensor modules at any workbench. Stop skipping over the trash in the wasteland and start recycling it with Useful Misc Items.
More Perks
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
Fairly self-explanatory, More Perks of course adds more perks and traits to the game. The number of these that have been added is impressive, however, at more than 120. The perks do a good job of retaining the Fallout feeling and don’t break the game by allowing your character to become too powerful.
Best Fallout New Vegas Mods
The clever Drink to Last! perk lets you fill up a water container from any toilet, for example, and the Jump to Conclusions perk helps you get out of tough situations by making your hits critical for 10 seconds after failing to convince someone in conversation. Be sure to check out the mod’s description for every perk included with it.
Extended Map Markers
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
This mod makes your life easier by putting more locations on your map once you’ve explored the world. Extended Map Markers will make it less difficult to refind locations throughout the world, and perhaps more helpful, will let you quick travel directly to them.
If you’ve already explored the Mojave Desert, the mod will even go ahead and retroactively add the markers to your world map for you. If you don’t want that to happen there’s an optional version to download that won’t add them automatically. There’s also a version without markers added to the Strip in order to avoid overly cluttering your map.
Combined Community Sound Pack
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
Where is rivet city in fallout 4. This compilation of user-made sounds from across the internet changes nearly every weapon in the game, including DLC weapons, to make the sounds more realistic. It also changes the sounds many weapons make when they’re fired a long distance from the player, so it’s easier to tell when combat is close by or far away. The game’s unique weapons that didn’t have their own sound effects are also given unique sounds as a part of this mod.
Four Legged Friends
Best Fallout: New Vegas Mods
What game couldn’t be improved with the inclusion of dog companions? Okay, I know there are probably some, but Fallout New Vegas isn’t one of them. Four Legged Friends adds four unique dog companions to the game as well as mole-rat and gecko companions. Each is very powerful in combat, with 10,000 HP each, so if it’s a challenge you’re after maybe stay away from this mod. If it’s pure entertainment and joy you’re after, Four Legged Friends can certainly help with that.