Summary

• Installing mods can enhance Fallout: New Vegas, fixing bugs and adding unique improvements for a memorable experience.
• Essential mods like LStewieAl's Tweaks and Engine Fixes help address game issues and improve gameplay elements.
• Mods like Desert Natural Weathers and NMCs Texture Pack make the game look better than ever.

Fallout: New Vegas is a great game under any circumstances, but it can be a much better one with mods. Released in a buggy state after a rushed development cycle, the various shortcomings of New Vegas originally cast a shadow on all of its incredible strengths. When playing New Vegas on PC today, however, it's possible to fix it up, and even try out unique improvements and overhauls to make for a maximally memorable experience.

Installing mods for Fallout: New Vegas isn't especially difficult, particularly for anyone with experience modding The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and other Bethesda games, but it can require a couple of basic pre-requisites. The New Vegas Script Extender, ed to Nexus Mods by korri123, is necessary for scripting functions that many mods require. Equally important (and also on Nexus Mods) is RoyBatterian's FNV 4GB Patcher, which allows the game to access more memory, which some mods can require.

10 Vanilla UI Plus (Axonis)

It's hard to deny that Fallout: New Vegas has a cool approach to UI, which all stylistically feels like a genuine part of its universe. It isn't perfect, however, and it doesn't take much time to start noticing some of the problems. From awkwardly placed text on the Pip-Boy to conversation boxes that require an absurd amount of scrolling, there's a lot of room for improvement in the New Vegas UI.

Vanilla UI Plus by Axonis on ModDB is the perfect fix for any UI problems, maintaining everything that's great about the official design while tweaking the rough spots. Some changes will obviously come down to personal preferences, but none are so major as to possibly cause offense. It's a perfect mod to add little improvements to every playthrough, whether the game is heavily overhauled in other aspects or not.

9 Havasu Blues (kungkobra)

Fallout: New Vegas has received a lot of interesting and memorable quest mods over the years, adding new adventures to take on without overhauling the main story of the game. One relatively recent addition to the canon is Nexus Mods kungkobra's Havasu Blues, which released in 2022 and includes a similar amount of content to most of the game's official DLCs (which it also requires to run).

The main attraction of Havasu Blues is a new location, Lake Havasu City, which comprises both an urban area and its surroundings. Even more impressive than the location, however, is the voice acting, which can often be lacking in fan-made quest mods. With over 60 voiced characters that generally sound like professional work, Havasu Blues comes to life in a way that fits in nicely with the official New Vegas experience.

8 LStewieAl's Tweaks & Engine Fixes (lStewieAI)

Before looking at how to change Fallout: New Vegas to suit personal preferences, it's important to get it in the basic shape that it should have been in to begin with. LStewieAl's Tweaks and Engine Fixes, predictably created by Fallout: New Vegas cheat codes can stand to benefit from graduating to this mod.

This New Vegas mod can be used to do a wide variety of functions, from simply cleaning up engine problems that cause slowdown to adding quality-of-life features not found in the game. It also has some optional additions that are just fun, like the ability to cook grenades before tossing them. Anyone who wants to really start micromanaging things can make all kinds of direct tweaks to game settings after installing, but getting into the weeds is best avoided for newcomers.

7 The Living Desert (ELPascal)

The wasteland is, by nature, a largely desolate and barren place, but it doesn't have to be quite as empty as it is. ELPascal's The Living Desert adds a lot to flesh out the Mojave Desert in Fallout: New Vegas, making it feel more alive than ever before and offering plenty of additional incentive to explore. If fast travel feels like an immersion-breaker, this is the perfect way to make journeys by foot feel worthwhile.

The biggest change is that The Living Desert adds a lot of NPCs, but they aren't just standing around. Different scripted events and reactive behaviors prove that there's a lot more to the mod than first meets the eye. That being said, there is an atmospheric value in the desolate nature of the vanilla desert, and although the mod definitely doesn't destroy that, it's worth thinking about the trade-off.

6 Uncut Wasteland (sandbox6)

Fallout: New Vegas's launch problems weren't all left unaddressed, but the methods of addressing them ended up having their own side effects. Although cut content usually refers to material abandoned in development before release, New Vegas ended up having content that was cut post-launch. It's mostly environmental detail that was contributing to poor performance on consoles and consequently had to go.

A number of mods seek to restore things that were removed from New Vegas, but Uncut Wasteland by Nexus Mods creator sandbox6 is probably the most straightforward option. The work put into bringing back what was lost is pretty exhaustive without ever dipping into revisionism, which some comparable mods lean toward. Uncut Wasteland is a mod worth considering for even an essentially vanilla playthrough, as it ultimately just brings the game closer to its original form.

5 Wasteland Flora & Terrain Overhaul (vurt)

Like The Living Desert, Wasteland Flora and Terrain Overhaul by vurt (via Nexus Mods) is a mod that seeks to address misconceptions of the desert as an empty destination. Although it may not be rife with lush greenery, it does have plenty of plant life, and the variety that can be found there is largely under-represented in Fallout: New Vegas.

Wasteland Flora and Terrain Overhaul not only adds new plants, but also replaces existing ones with higher-quality versions. Just how sparse the game remains can be chosen from among several options, and even the most extreme of these doesn't run the risk of making the game as inaccurate to its original design as, say, Skyrim mods that focus on adding lush fields of grass to snowy landscapes.

4 Desert Natural Weathers (clayvn)

Weather plays a big part in making a world feel immersive and visually engaging, and there's no shortage of mods that add more variety to Fallout: New Vegas in this regard. Desert Natural Weathers by clayvn is a good go-to option, shaking things up a fair bit without going overboard on extreme effects. Anyone looking for the sky to look like a supernova one day and an apocalypse the next might be better served by something more radical, however.

The best thing about Desert Natural Weathers is that it's become a fairly reliable standard despite not being as old as many other mods, so there are some other strong mods that use it as a basis to build on in different ways. One possible add-on makes Desert Natural Weathers fall more closely in line with the vanilla game's color grade, while others add more effects or go for a more vibrant look.

3 Tale Of Two Wastelands (pintocat)

Tale of Two Wastelands is as ambitious as it sounds, cramming the wastelands from two different Fallout games into one. This mod, ed to Mod:Pub by pintocat, makes it possible to play through Fallout 3 inside a New Vegas game, hopping between locations through the use of a train line. Tale of Two Wastelands requires a copy of both games, but Fallout 3 is on steep digital sales often enough for this to be a minor ask.

The biggest advantage of this system is arguably the simple addition of New Vegas mechanics to Fallout 3, as the spin-off makes a number of refinements that are appreciable in its predecessor. It also makes some changes to incorporate both experiences into one game, tweaking balance and more to keep the sense of progression from losing its proper scale. This may not quite fill the hole that Fallout: New Vegas 2 would, but it does add a whole new game to the existing one.

2 JSawyer Ultimate Edition (PushTheWinButton)

One common concern with mods is that they could be overwriting the original intentions of the game design in careless ways, as someone's proficiency at implementing mods doesn't necessarily mean they have the vision of a thoughtful game designer. JSawyer has a uniquely strong pedigree that easily clears it of such concerns, as this particular mod was created by Fallout: New Vegas (and Pentiment) director Josh Sawyer. The JSawyer Ultimate Edition by PushTheWinButton on Nexus Mods hones it further by stamping out some issues the original mod had and increasing compatibility.

The focus of JSawyer is on implementing ideas from development that never made it into the game, often because they could have been alienating to fans whose idea of the series was based on Fallout 3. Its overall impact mostly makes the game a bit more challenging, although not in a way that's designed for punishment. It's a good idea to take a look through some of the changes before deciding on using it, but it does represent the most complete vision of a key figure in the game's development.

1 NMCs Texture Pack (NMC)

Fallout: New Vegas's art direction generally holds up nicely well over a decade after its release, but it obviously can't compete with newer titles in of raw graphical fidelity. NMCs Texture Pack by Nexus Mods NMC provides a key assist in this regard, replacing many of the game's low-resolution textures with more detailed alternatives. The mod is almost as old as the game itself, but the difference it makes is as night and day as ever.

NMC's Texture Pack replaces textures with close equivalents based on high-resolution photographs rather than higher-resolution versions of the same assets or upscales, so the look of the game can change slightly with the mod installed. In general, however, it strives to match the textures as closely as possible, and it might even match memories of Fallout: New Vegas more closely than an unmodded version would.

Sources: Nexus Mods (korri123, Roy Batterian, kungkobra, lStewieAI, ElPascal, sandbox6, vurt, clayvn, PushTheWinButton, NMC), Axonis/ModDB, pintocat/Mod:Pub