Lots of new or returning Fallout 4 players. Been receiving some basic mod questions. This is an article attempting to address those:
Which Mod Manager should I use?
There are different schools of thought. First determine the bias of the person giving mod manager advice, then decide whether to follow it.
The thing about working on big, complicated mods with thousands of comments, here and on Discord, is I get to hear people’s mod manager problems every day- the heartbreak when a mistake with a mod manager destroys your save game, your mod files, and you have to reinstall Fallout 4 from scratch. Those of us who’ve been modding a while have all been there. It’s a rite of passage.
Personal Bias 1: Not a fan of doing unpaid customer support for mod managers that have trouble handling large files and/or large load orders. Thus I'm steering you away from mod managers that generate the most complaints per capita.
Personal Bias 2: You should use a mod manager that minimizes the chance of catastrophic failure in the event you make an installation or uninstallation error.
There’s only one mod manager that satisfies both those conditions: Mod Organizer 2
The MO2 download is on the Skyrim page, but it works for both Skyrim, Fallout 4, and the older Bethesda Fallout/Elder Scrolls games. MO2 won’t touch your data folder, and if a mod manager isn’t touching your data folder, it’s much harder to bork your game.
MO2 allows you to clearly see which mods are overriding files from another mod, manually adjust your loader order via drag & drop, and more readily forgive you when you make a mistake without needing to reinstall the whole game.
If you use Nexus Mod Manager, make sure to use the latest version off Github.
If you use Vortex, ask yourself a question: If Nexus wasn’t telling you to use it- if it was just some random mod manager on a website somewhere, would you still be using it?
Great mod managers sell themselves. Mod Organizer 2 has no marketing. People swear by it because it works better than anything else out there.
But Vortex or NMM is working fine for me
Then keep using it. Millions of people do. It’ll be fine until you go too far one day, everything breaks, and you’re not able to backtrack. When using Vortex or NMM, follow a few guidelines:
1) Read the instructions: Here are the installation and user tutorials for NMM and Vortex. Following them will save you lots of time in the long run.
2) When downloading a file, do not use the "Download Vortex" button on the main mod page. Don't use the "Mod Manager Download" button on the file download page either. It doesn't always work correctly. Instead, navigate to the files page, and choose the "Manual Download" button. Once downloaded, import the file from your desktop into your mod manager, and activate it. The mod will not work unless it is activated.
3) Run the mod manager in admin mode.
4) Make sure your game and your mods are installed on the same hard drive.
5) Verify that your anti-virus program isn't blocking your mod manager, and whitelist if necessary.
How will I know if Vortex or NMM didn't install the mod properly?
Signs include an NPC won't talk to you, or you talk to a companion and they don't listen to your dialogue choice (e.g. trade, follow, wait, etc.), or a quest won't start or advance, or textures are purple, or a body/outfit is invisible. These symptoms may indicate that voice files, scripts, meshes, or textures did not install. It could also indicate that loose files are not enabled (see below).
How do I install and learn how to use Mod Organizer 2?
Follow this video tutorial by Gamer Poets:
I’m not gonna watch that video
Then at least put your mod manager and your mods on the same hard drive as your game, and read the instructions on the MO2 mod page.
In general, where do I find good Fallout 4 mods?
Visit the Fallout 4 main Nexus page. Click on the “Mods” drop down menu, then Top Files. You’ll see a list of Top Files in the past two weeks.
“Top Files” doesn’t mean mods released in the past 2 weeks. It means of all the mods ever released, which have received the most endorsements over the past 2 weeks. In other words, this is telling you the mods that millions of Nexus users have collectively decided are the best ones, right now. Browse the top 200 or so, and download whatever looks interesting. (We’ll cover mod conflicts below)
What if I want to find a good mod in a specific category, like weapons?
Visit the Fallout 4 Nexus main mod page, then “Mods” drop down menu, then “Mod Categories”, then (in this example) “Weapons”. Then sort by “Trending”, in “Descending” order.
Out of all the weapons mods ever released, this will give you the list of weapons mods that users have endorsed the most over the past two weeks.
Sort by “Trending”instead of “Endorsements” so that you get the mods people think are the best right now, instead of mods that may have been popular a couple years ago but have since been superseded by something better.
What if I want something very specific, like unisex Catholic schoolgirl uniforms?
Visit the Fallout 4 Nexus main mod page. Locate the search bar in the upper right. Type “school" in the search bar, and press search. Four of the first five search results are schoolgirl uniform mods. Checking them out, we find that the mod School Girl Outfit for CBBE and Vanilla has exactly the unisex outfit we’re looking for.
I’ve been out the past month. What are the best mods released in the last 30 days?
Go to Fallout 4 Nexus main mod page. Below the “Hot Mods” section, there’s a “More Mods” section. Click on the “Popular (30 Days)” tab.
I’ve been out the past year. What are the best mods released in the past year?
Visit Fallout 4 Nexus main mod page, then “Mods” drop down menu, then “Mods of the Month”. This will give you the top 5 for each month in terms of votes received.
If you want more, Go to Fallout 4 Nexus main mod page, then “Mods” drop down menu, then “Browse all mods”. Sort by “Trending” in descending order. On the “Time” drop-down menu, choose “1 year”. Also expand the “Refine Results” tab and filter however you want.
People on places like Reddit tell me that popular mods aren’t very good
People posting on Reddit Fallout Mods often fall into one of three categories:
1) Noobs asking rudimentary questions, expecting to receive honest answers. I’m copy/pasting these from the New Post section right now:
- Are there any Fallout 4 mods that are found exclusively on nexus?
- Any recommended mods for a first time playthrough?
- It's me again! Can't get another cosmetic mod to work!
- Game crashing after a few seconds whenever I try to start a new save.
- Rage quitting, uninstalling, hope to come back in a couple weeks. What mods do I need next time?
2) Banned Nexus users (all unjustly banned of course)
3) Unsuccessful mod authors, or members of teams from one of the Fallout (insert name of city) vaporware projects, promoting their own stuff and talking smack or making up lies about any mods which compete with their own, because they can’t get attention anywhere else.
There is a cognitive bias whereby over 80% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. But relatively few online reviews are organic, at least initially.
Products launched on Amazon.com, for example, typically use paid shills, fake accounts, company employees, friends/family of employees, and reviewers bribed with "give it 5 stars if you want to keep getting more free stuff" (e.g.ILoveToReview before it got shut down), to get at least 500 reviews and a 4.5 star rating quickly.
Amazon discourages the practice, and sometimes they clamp down on it, but they want the positive reviews almost as much as the companies selling the products do, otherwise no one makes money. On the other side, if company A sells product X, company B who sells competing product Y will sometimes try to influence reviews of product X made by company A.
While there's no money in modding, it's unfortunately a similar process at times, with much of what you see posted on Reddit or YouTube or Discord actually being just mod authors talking up their own stuff and talking down everyone else's.
Because the Nexus Top Files rankings are the least imperfect system- the hardest to manipulate. No one is purchasing endorsements. If lots of people are presently enjoying a mod, it receives lots of recent endorsements. If not, it doesn’t.
On Reddit you rarely know who the person giving advice is or what their motives are. For example, one of the moderators on Reddit FalloutMods has released several dozen mods for Fallout 4, including several quest mods, none of which has broken 50 endorsements, nor do his mods show up near the top of any category in which he publishes, making them hard to find.
It is possibly frustrating for this person that his work doesn't receive the recognition he expects on Nexus, so he uses the most convenient platform he has available, Reddit, to promote his own mods, regularly chiming in on unrelated topics with links to his own work, encouraging users to download his mods, and complaining about the work of other authors, for example lamenting the other day that "people happily chow down on the most awful CTD generating mods, but not an (his name) mod."
This person is a moderator- someone who is supposed to be impartial and keep the peace. When the moderator of a community is not behaving in accordance with best practices, you can imagine the types of mod authors that attracts.
As for Reddit Skyrim Mods, they banned Arthmoor (i.e. the most successful Bethesda mod author of all time). There's more- it's arguably even worse there than on Reddit FalloutMods, but you probably get the picture. If Reddit is your source for mod advice, good luck. Maybe try the Steam forums? The advice might not always be on point, but at least it's more likely coming from a fellow user instead of a mod author, or a moderator, trying to promote their own work.
What about searching by tags?
Works great if mods are tagged correctly. Often they’re not.
What about watching YouTube videos to find good mods?
YouTubers attract views by covering popular stuff, not hidden gems. The average “Mods of the Week – Episode 93” YouTuber simply visits Nexus, downloads whatever is already on the “Hot Mods” list, and covers that, stretching the video to at least 10 minutes to please the YouTube algorithm. You can save yourself nine minutes of that by looking directly at the front page of Nexus.
I don’t want to find mods for myself. I want someone to tell me what mods to install.
The most popular option was BiRaitBec Modlist, but it stopped being updated in 2019. I published one in late 2019 called Thuggyfied, which is the top 500 mods based on trending popularity ('Top Files') - filtered to avoid conflicts and make installation easier, and finishing with a final count of about 250 mods that play nice together.
There are some lesser known mod lists as well. Even if you don't follow one of the mod guides, they can be worth a look. There are some "hidden gem" type mods, and it's healthy to get an alternate perspective. Just be careful though. Often the people publishing mod lists don't have any credentials (e.g. never published a substantial mod) and are just throwing stuff together that sounds cool without verifying what is under the hood.
It can take a long time to install all the mods on a mod list, possibly an entire day. Mod list publishers are human. Nothing beats verifying things for yourself.
How do I sort my Load Order?
Use LOOT to start, and then manually adjust from there. LOOT is the first step in load order, not the last. The best way to adjust your final load order is to load all your mods in FO4Edit and make sure you are comfortable with which mods are winning any conflicts (see below).
How do I detect mod conflicts?
First, the easy part: using Mod Organizer 2, look at the left pane for the green and red lightning bolts. These tell you which mods have conflicting loose files for things like Meshes, Textures, Scripts, and Material files. Drag mods in whichever order you want to win the conflict.
Now the hard part: Run FO4Edit. Load all your mods. Anytime you see an orange or a red record, your plugin file (the .esp file) has a conflict with another plugin file. Whichever mod is lowest in load order wins the conflict. Once you’ve run LOOT, it’s up to you to decide how you handle these conflicts.
It also helps to look at the green records (i.e. vanilla overrides). Many mods make “wild edits” that don’t need to be there and adversely affect your game. LOOT and FO4Edit automated tools will catch Identical to Master errors and Deleted Record errors. They will not catch wild edits. These must be identified manually.
I run over 500 mods in Fallout 4 (via merges) on good but not great equipment. The game looks beautiful, almost never crashes, with solid 60 FPS even in downtown, and load screens in downtown under 10 seconds. This is using zero compatibility patches.
The cost: For each mod installed, I verify each line in the plugin file, checking it for conflicts against all other mods installed. If I don’t understand what an override is doing, or if it conflicts with too many things, I undo the conflict, or don’t use the mod.
Not going to name the mods, but there are some large overhaul mods you simply can’t run with other large mods, unless you start editing those mods yourself to reduce the scope of what they do. There’s just too many conflicts otherwise.
When installing each mod, I run the “check for errors” function and correct any errors. If the errors can’t be corrected, I ditch the mod. I clean the mods for Identical to Master and Deleted Records. And I double-check that the mod is not breaking precombines in a dense area (like downtown), or messing with Previs, so as not to tank frame rates.
This process is time consuming initially. It usually takes at least 5 minutes to install and verify each mod installed. But this saves time, frustration, and headaches over the long-term. There’s no substitute for vetting each file and cleaning it in FO4Edit.
The good news: Relative to Skyrim, grabbing the top 200 mods in “Top Files” off Fallout 4 Nexus tends to work better than you might expect. With a few exceptions, all that stuff tends to work well together, so there aren’t too many hard decisions to make on which mods to use.
If I browse the 200 highest-rated mods in Top Files, what conflicts do I need to watch out for?
The Top 200 changes as new mods come out, and maybe this article isn't up-to-date by the time you're reading it, so take this with a grain of salt, but the mods you'll generally need to decide "one or the other but not both" are:
Weather: Vanilla vs. True Storms and Vivid Weathers vs. Natural Atmospheric Commonwealth
Scrap Mods: Vanilla vs. Scrap Everything vs. Spring Cleaning - Kinggath (Sim Settlements) has an opinion here you'd be wise to consider
Settlement Building: Homemaker vs. Settlement Supplies Expanded - although technically you could use both
Environment: Vanilla vs. Fallout 4 Seasons vs. Boston Natural Surroundings vs. True Grass
Texture Optimization: Vanilla vs. Optimized Vanilla Textures vs. Texture Optimization Project
Texture Upgrades: Flaconoil vs. Luxor8071 texture packs vs. SavrenX texture packs (you can mix/match, but some textures will conflict)
Multi-Follower Mod: None vs. Unlimited Companion Framework vs. Amazing Follower Tweaks
Female Body: CBBE vs. Fusion Girl vs. Enhanced Vanilla Bodies vs. Atomic Beauty vs. Jane Bod
Keep in mind, textures take up a lot of file size. The more you add, the more stuff your game has to load, and the longer it takes. You can mitigate this with Load Accelerator. If your rig can handle good textures, don't bother with the optimized textures. Go for the upgraded ones, most of which are also well optimized for the detail you're getting.
There's nothing wrong with starting small, testing things out, and adding more mods as you get comfortable.
I installed a mod, but there are floating heads and no one is talking to me.
First, make sure you have loose files enabled. This will allow loose files like meshes, textures, scripts, and voice files to start working. In Mod Organizer 2, you can adjust your Fallout4Custom.ini to enable loose files by navigating to the Tools icon, then INI Editor, then Fallout4Custom.ini, and add the following lines if not already there:
[Archive]
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
sResourceDataDirsFinal=
Once loose files are enabled, if the mod is still not working, reinstall the mod the mod by manually downloading the mod file to your desktop, and then importing the mod from your desktop into your mod manager and activating it.
Always put your game and your mods on the same drive. Run the mod manager in admin mode if you need to, and whitelist the mod manager in your anti-virus program if the anti-virus program is blocking it.
I had 150 mods installed and then I deactivated 140 of them. Why is my game acting weird?
Bethesda games do not support uninstalling or deactivating mods with an .esp plugin file (or scripts) in the middle of a playthrough. There are only a few narrow exceptions to this rule. Your save file will eventually become corrupt if you do it. The more plugin mods you delete, and the heavier those mods are, the higher the chance of save game corruption.
When you deactivate a plugin, data from that file can already be baked into your save game. If the game later tries to access information from a mod you deactivated, it can crash.
If a plugin file merely overrides a vanilla record, for example changing the jump height, and it doesn't add any new records to the game, you can deactivate that mod without problem. Deactivating any mod that adds records to the game (e.g. armor) comes with a risk of save corruption.
If you encounter a glitch in any mod, check if your save game is corrupt by trying to repeat the issue on a save game where you haven't uninstalled mods halfway through. Signs of save game corruption include crashing in random areas, and certain game functions no longer working as intended.
With very few exceptions, it is safe to add mods to your game midway in a play-through.
If you deactivated a mod and your save game is still fine, congratulations. It's like walking across the street without looking. You'll probably be fine, until one day you get hit by a bus.
So, um... I kinda like, didn't think you were serious about that whole save game corruption thing. What should I do now?
Option 1: Revert to a save before you started deactivating mods.
Option 2: Start a new game.
Option 3: Try Fallrim Tools. It has been known to work miracles in both Tamriel and The Wasteland, but think of it like major heart surgery, and try to avoid ending up on the operating table in the first place.
I’m having trouble with a mod. Where should I look for answers?
Step 1: Read the mod page and any mod articles to see if your question is answered there. If you type “Ctrl F” on your keyboard, you can search a webpage for keywords.
Step 2: Read the posts section. It’s searchable via the green “Forum Thread” button.
Step 3: Read the bugs section.
Step 4: Read the sticky post(s) on the mod comment page.
Step 5: If your question still isn’t answered, leave a mod comment. Or, some mods have Discord servers, and that’s usually a much quicker way to receive an answer.
Halp! My game is crashing randomly and I don't know why
Enable Papyrus Logging - (at least temporarily to diagnose) This won't tell you why the game crashed, but it may point you in the right direction and inform you if certain mods are causing issues by unnecessarily spamming the game with errors from bad scripts. Start by looking at the very bottom of the log.
Verify Integrity of Game Files, Check antivirus settings, Run as Admin, etc. - Do the stuff on this list.
Update your Graphics Card drivers.
In game settings (in game), disable auto-save, and avoid Quick Save. Use hard saves only.
Don't use the official Bethesda HD Texture pack. There are better looking and better optimized texture mods available on Nexus.
If your game is running out of memory, close other memory hogs while you play, like internet browsers.
Use reasonable graphics settings - If you're not going to read that guide and determine what is appropriate for your system, keep your shadow distance at medium or below, Godrays below ultra, weapon debris off, and don't set your uGridsToLoad above 5 (which is the default).
My game is crashing when I enter a particular interior cell, or a specific exterior area.
Could be a number of things including a corrupt save. Most common is a bad texture file, e.g. a painting replacer mod that used the wrong dimensions, crashing to desktop as soon as the game tries to load the bad texture. Disable half your texture mods at a time until you narrow down the culprit. Or look at which texture mods or other mods you recently installed that may be causing the issue.
Does anyone else here know why my player becomes invisible when I pull out my 10mm?
No, but asking random questions about bugs obviously unrelated to whatever mod you're commenting on generally won't get you anywhere. Try researching on your own first to narrow down which mod or game setting may be causing that, or whether you have a corrupt save game.