The best Fallout New Vegas mods

What are the best Fallout New Vegas mods? Despite being over a decade old, Fallout New Vegas enjoys a thriving modding scene that has stood the test of time. In the 12 or so years since we first took our first step in the Mojave Wasteland, some talented people have been tinkering with it until it becomes an entirely different beast.

There are years of mods to sift through, but we’ve managed to round up our favorites, the best mods that Fallout New Vegas has to offer, and popped them into this useful little list. Some add new textures to the RPG game, while others add new quests or even entirely new campaigns.

Here are the best Fallout New Vegas mods:

Project Nevada

Project Nevada is made by the team behind Fallout 3’s Wanderers Edition, one of our essential Fallout 3 mods. It’s designed to make New Vegas a more challenging and enjoyable game through the installation of modules. You can choose which ones are installed, allowing you a degree of control about how far you stray from the ‘vanilla’ experience. The modules cover core systems like health, vision, and bullet time. For an instant change to the way New Vegas plays, Project Nevada is essential.

Third Person Aiming Fix

The third person aiming in New Vegas is practically unusable at close to medium range because your shots don’t line up with the crosshair placement. Thankfully, Wombat has addressed this glaring issue with the Third-Person Aim Fix mod, making the third-person aiming just as consistent as it is in first person, ensuring your shots always hit their target.

Wombat does note that while your crosshair placement is important, there are still factors to consider that may make your shots miss, things like recoil and weapon spread, so keep that in mind before you start blaming the mod.

The Inheritance

A fully voiced quest line with 1,300 lines of dialogue, The Inheritance sees a mysterious stranger approaching you to request that you deliver a package. This unfolds into a choice-heavy main quest and a series of more minor side quests designed to be lore-friendly and offer a balance of ultra-violence and finesse approaches. It includes some interesting ‘evolving dungeons’ which, if emptied of enemies, will be occupied by a rival force when you next return.

New California

Fallout: New California is more than a mod; it’s an entirely new campaign. You even select it from the New Game option on the main menu, and it has an opening cinematic and everything. You take on the role of an orphan from California’s Secretive Vault 18 and head out on a quest involving a war between the Super Mutants, the Survivalist Raiders, and the New California Republic. Six new companions can join you, and a whole new area in the Black Bear Mountain National Forest is available to explore. It’s a fantastic piece of DLC, all for free.

Dry Wells

Fallout London has been stealing the headlines since it launched, but there are plenty of noteworthy New Vegas mods that deserve attention, more specifically, the Dry Wells mod. Featuring the talents of more than 30 people, lots of hard work has gone into crafting the Dry Wells region, which is filled with more than 20 lore-friendly quests, 30 fully voiced characters, and over six hours of content.

This expansion has been integrated perfectly into the base game, so much so that you’re able to visit Dry Wells, finish all the content, and then blow the place off the map with a nuke in the Lonesome Road DLC. Please note that you will need a legitimate copy of New Vegas, along with all the official DLC expansions, to run this mod.

Fellout NV

Fellout NV is one of the most popular mods, based on the Fallout 3 mod of the same name. Thanks to its ability to wipe out the sickly green filter that washes over everything. The New Vegas variant takes a similar approach. However, it instead eliminates the cozy orange and replaces it with more varied colors with hot desert tones that make the desert feel much more unforgiving.

Oblivion Lockpicking

Have you been knee-deep in the Oblivion Remaster and absolutely love the act of breaking and entering? The Oblivion Lockpicking mod takes the often-infuriating minigame from the titular game and ports it straight over to New Vegas.

Consumables Widget

We always thought it was strange that New Vegas doesn’t tell you how long your consumables will last in-game. While you may be aware that the effects of dirty water will last for six seconds, you have to mentally keep track of this, along with all of your other consumables. KerosenileArsonist has fixed this problem with their Consumables Widget mod, adding a widget to the in-game HUD to show you how long you have left on your effects.

Mojave Scenery Overhaul

As with any open-world game, there are always going to be parts of the scenery that feel like they could use a little more attention. In the case of the Mojave Desert, mod creator Biggie404 spent two months touching up areas that they felt needed some love.

The Mojave Scenery Overhaul mod breathes life into parts of New Vegas that have gone untouched, adding in elements that would naturally suit each area. There’s even some hidden loot in some of these areas to incentivize players to explore the touched up locations.

Bullet Penetration and Ricochet

A feature that a lot of the Fallout modding community thought was impossible to achieve in the Gamebryo engine has been solved with the Bullet Penetration and Ricochet mod from Lowbeebob.

This mod does exactly what it says, giving your weapons more potential to cause some damage as you can now consider bullet penetration. Snipers, in particular, will appreciate this, as you can chain headshots with one carefully timed shot. There’s also bullet ricochet to think about, but as in real life, you need to be a geometry expert to factor in that when you miss your target.

Enhanced Locomotion

It’s okay, we can admit that the animations in New Vegas are pretty janky, but they can be fixed with this one mod. The Enhanced Locomotion mod by Woooombat addresses first-person animations: running, walking, sneaking, limping, holding weapons, landing, etc. We highly recommend watching the video we’ve included above to see the differences in gameplay. As soon as you’ve tried this mod, you won’t want to go without it.

Customizable HUD

Take your immersion to the next level with Gopher’s One HUD mod that gives you the ability to customize your view, allowing you to enable and disable specific parts of your view. Move around parts of the HUD or hide them entirely to get a better picture.

If you’re the type of person to take plenty of screenshots during missions, this is perfect, as you can hide all the noisy elements to take a clear shot. This mod has been designed to work alongside some of the most popular New Vegas mods, so you shouldn’t run into any incompatibility issues here.

Atmos Ambience Overhaul

Created by TheKetzku, the Atmos Ambience Overhaul mod aims to improve New Vegas by adding more than 1,000 custom-built sound effects to create a more immersive experience. If you’re familiar with high-end surround sound systems, the name Atmos should tip you off to what this mod is looking to do. Instead of focusing entirely on audio horizontally, Atmos Ambience’s directional sound system adds more sound vertically to make the Mojave feel more alive.

NMCs Texture Pack

There’s a lot of world in New Vegas, and NMC’s Texture Pack reskins almost all of it with high-definition textures that will make the Mojave Wasteland look sharper. It improves the details of roads, buildings, trees, and many items, making this a one-stop mod for overhauling a considerable percentage of New Vegas’s visuals.

Nevada Skies

Since you’ll spend so much time outside in New Vegas, you should ensure the blue sky is doing something interesting. Nevada Skies adds 320 new cloud variations to the game alongside fantastic weather effects such as sandstorms, rain, rainstorms, radiation storms, thunderstorms, and even snow.

Wasteland Flora Overhaul

Adding 101 different trees and plants to the wasteland, Flora Overhaul brings a subtle sense of beauty to the otherwise barren and sandy Mojave. The mod creator is aware that too much living flora could be counter to Fallout lore, so the mod comes in three different grades: Fertile Wasteland is the whole lot for a much leafier world, Dead Wasteland is a compromise between living and dead plants, and ESP-less uses just re-textured versions of the original withered tree models.

Electro City

Say ‘Vegas’ and the first thing that comes to mind is likely the neon lights, flashing LEDs, and burning bright bulbs. You’ll find barely any of that in New Vegas, but Electro City is the mod to add the shine the world needs. Hundreds of new lights are added, from streetlamps and signs to burning barrels. Lighting is often vital to an immersive graphical experience; this mod ensures the light is there.

Essential Visual Enhancements

The Essential Visual Enhancements mod addresses all the various animations and effects that occur in combat, be that the ejection of a bullet from a gun or the blood squirt as said bullet impacts enemy flesh. Explosions, particle effects, critical hits, and impact wounds are all reanimated and overhauled to look significantly more impressive and violent.

Weapons of the New Millenia

Weapons of the New Millenia adds 45 amazingly detailed weapons to New Vegas, with incredible high-definition models and textures. They’re all modern-day guns you’d recognize from Call of Duty and ARMA, so if you’re a bit of a weapons nut and would like to replace Fallout’s ragtag shooters with something more realistic, this is the mod for you.

Weapons Mod Expanded

One of the most exciting features that Fallout 4 has is the ability to modify weapons at a crafting bench, bolting on all kinds of additions like scopes, silences, and stocks. But you don’t have to wait for Fallout 4 for that kind of thing; grab Weapons Mod Expanded for New Vegas and strap a laser sight onto your revolver, a choke on your shotgun, or a variety of other significant and valuable modifications for many of the game’s guns.

Enhanced Camera

If you’re going for the immersive New Vegas experience, the one thing that’s going to get in your way is the camera. It makes you a floating set of eyes rather than a real person, for starters, and every time you do something like sit down or die, the game insists on pulling out into the third person. Keep your eyes firmly on a body with the Enhanced Camera mod, which gives you a physical body you can see working and won’t ever pull you out of it.

More Perks

Every two levels you progress in Fallout, you can choose a new perk to add to your ability-enhancing collection. But if the selection you must pick from isn’t good enough, this mod is for you. It adds, as the name More Perks suggests, more perks to the game, adding bizarre abilities such as being able to spontaneously grow fruit from your own body or become hopelessly addicted to stims.

Nipton Rebuilt

Nipton is one of New Vegas’s key towns, but rather than being a hub of life, it was razed to the ground. Nipton Rebuilt turns it into the town it could have been, and you can take control and become mayor. With some funding from your pocket, you can start adding new areas to Nipton and encourage its growth into a busy new location in the Mojave Wastes.

Bounties

New Vegas Bounties is the first of three questline mods that task you with hunting down and eliminating the Mojave Wasteland’s Most Wanted. A dastardly collection of rogue rangers, fiends, raiders, drug smugglers, cannibals, and Pistoleros, they all have a massive price on their heads waiting for you to collect. Be wary: they’re all mean and rigid and won’t come along quietly. When you’re done with part one, you can find parts two and three on their respective mod pages.

A World of Pain

Adding 114 new locations to New Vegas, A World of Pain is the right choice for challenge-seeking explorers. Alongside smaller outposts is a vast underground complex filled with challenging monster encounters and even a few quest lines. There’s plenty of loot to find, including MkII weapons to help you overcome these new difficult areas.

Wasteland Defense

While Fallout 4’s initial reveal inspired some mods, other mods inspired Fallout 4’s development. Undoubtedly, Wasteland Defense was one of them, a mod that allows you to build your fortress, rig up a set of defensive measures, and then trigger raid attacks that you must fend off. It’s one of New Vegas’s most exciting and accomplished mods, essentially a tower defense mini-game.

Realistic Stealth Overhaul

Playing stealth has always been an option in Fallout, but never a particularly good one. Realistic Stealth makes many changes to the systems to make sneaking about a far more effective approach, ensuring that detection is based on line of sight and that backstabbing works as it should.

JSawyer Ultimate

Josh Sawyer was the director and lead designer of New Vegas. When the game shipped, he wasn’t entirely happy with the final result, and so spent time tinkering and tweaking the game’s core systems in the months after release.

He went on to release the JSawyer mod, a set of significant fixes and changes that work to bring New Vegas closer to his vision. The ‘Director’s Cut’ of New Vegas, if you will. You’ll find your health is significantly reduced, how much you can carry is lower, and you can’t progress any higher than level 35. A distinctly more challenging experience for the hardcore Fallout fan.

Fallout: The Frontier

Fallout: The Frontier takes you to the brand-new region of Portland, Oregon. Set in a snowy wasteland, it’s designed to be super harsh. The weather impacts your health, so you must dress appropriately or risk death by frostbite and hypothermia. The total conversion mod adds a main quest, side quests, hunting, and a fire propagation system to the game.

New Vegas Anti-Crash

Unfortunately, New Vegas is a little on the buggy side and can be pretty susceptible to crashing to the desktop. NVAC is a simple mod that helps reduce the chances of crashing.

New Vegas Script Extender

Adding many mods to the game may require extending New Vegas’s scripting capabilities. This tiny New Vegas Script Extender mod sufficiently broadens the game’s script size to allow hundreds of mods to work simultaneously.

How do I install Fallout: New Vegas mods?

Installing a single mod into Fallout: New Vegas is easy, and here’s how you can do it:

• Place the new files you’ve downloaded into the ‘Data’ folder of your Fallout: New Vegas installation. If you have the Steam version, this will be in the following path: \Steam\steamapps\Common\Fallout New Vegas\Data
• Windows will alert you that you’re overwriting files, so press ‘OK’ to accept the changes.
• We recommend you back up your Data folder before you start modding if you need to return Fallout New Vegas to its original form.
• Download the Fallout Mod Manager and install it.
• Create a folder on your hard drive called ‘Fallout New Vegas mods’ or something similar.
• Download the mod .zip files into the created folder and use apps such as WinRAR to extract them.
• In Fallout Mod Manager, open the ‘Package Manager’ using the button on the right-hand side of the window.
• The new window will have a button labeled ‘Add FOMod’. Click this, then use the file browser to find your mod folder and select the mod you wish to install.
• After installing it, the mod will show in the Package Manager window with a tick box next to it. The mod will be active in your game if you tick the checkbox. Simply untick if you want to remove the mod.

Those are all the Fallout New Vegas mods we think you should try for yourself. If you want to break the open-world game some more, try out the Fallout New Vegas cheats and console commands to teleport yourself to specific NPCs, instantly gain or lose karma, or add items to your inventory.