The Fallout games, at least since Fallout 3, have been absolutely massive games in both scale and popularity. The post-nuclear-war setting is rife with interesting stories to experience and monsters to kill. Fallout 4 was the last single-player entry in the series before Fallout 76 took the game into a persistent multiplayer experience. A large appeal of these games is how you are able to actually role-play and immerse yourself in the game world, which isn’t so easy with other players jumping around in their underwear. Thanks to mods, it has never been a better time to revisit the last “pure” Fallout game.
Just like Skyrim, Fallout 4 mods are incredibly popular. Some are inspired to fix the numerous bugs and glitches Bethesda games have become famous for, while others look to add new features. As open and dynamic as the base game is, mods just open the door to an almost endless supply of tools you can use to extend the life of your game. With so many mods available, it can be a little overwhelming to know where to start. We’ve sorted through all the best Fallout 4 mods out there and came up with the best ones you should install before stepping out of the vault once again.
Full Dialogue Interface
One of the major complaints players of Fallout 4 had, both from the hardcore and casual fanbases, was about the dialogue system. The scope and versatility of conversations had admittedly been going down ever since the original two titles, but by the time Fallout 4 came out, all we were given were four vague (sometimes just a single word or two) approximations of what your character will say. This led to many instances of players misinterpreting the tone or meaning of what option they were picking. For an RPG, that’s a serious immersion breaker. Enter the Full Dialogue Interface mod.
The mod is simple. So simple, it’s a wonder it wasn’t just the default. Rather than give you a hint at what your character will say, this mod will write out what your character will say in full. It also redoes the conversation UI so that the text is displayed in a vertical list format, just like it was in previous games. The mod comes in two versions: Full and lite. Both versions work with both keyboard and gamepad support, with the difference between them being that the lite version retains the original conversation UI from the base game.
LooksMenu
Admit it — we all spend way too much time in character creators. Or we would like to, anyway, but often run up against the game’s limited options when trying to either recreate ourselves or craft our ideal vision of who we want to role-play. When you’re going to be embodying a character for dozens upon dozens of hours, you should at least like what your character looks like. The default options are by no means limited, but there can never be enough options.
The LooksMenu mod improves character customization in a ton of ways. Right away, you’ll notice the feature list is much larger than the default, making it that much easier to move through the list and find what you want to change. You can also now adjust specific features on your character via a list rather than selecting it from the face model, which can be finicky at the best of times. Other than that, you’re getting new skin forms, colors, and hair colors, and you can even adjust the resolution of face textures.
True Storms
Originally made for Skyrim, the True Storms mod has been added to Fallout 4 with even more enhancements and features than the original. This mod is all about making the frankly underwhelming dynamic weather system much more impressive. But even beyond just improving the look, texture, particles, and sounds of existing weather, the mod also adds in brand new forms like radiation rain, heavy dust storms, heavy fog, and more. There are better-looking lightning flashes in the distance and 20 new thunder sound effect variations to make each strike and boom feel unique.
While the mod could’ve been left at that, the modder went an extra step and even gives players sneaky bonuses during storms and an increased chance for Feral Ghouls to come out during radiation storms. The mod works in both the Commonwealth and Far Harbor areas and finally makes the weather feel like an actual element in the game you need to pay attention to rather than just a cosmetic change that happens every once in a while.
Fallout 4 HD Overhaul
Even after the console versions of Fallout 4 got their next-gen enhancements, you still can’t a better visual upgrade to the base game than the Fallout 4 HD Overhaul. As you can no doubt glean from the name, this mod improves all the textures in the game to reach anywhere between 1k and 8k resolution. Everything from environments, weapons, items, and monsters has been given a massive visual upgrade to look almost on par with games released today. This kind of mod does require you to have a powerful PC to run the game at this level, so make sure you check out the requirements before installing.
Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch
Somebody had to do it, right? It is only a matter of time after a Bethesda game comes out that some brave soul takes it upon themselves to fix as many of the bugs and glitches as possible. The Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch describes itself as an all-in-one patch that aims to, over time, address every single bug within Fallout 4 that the developers haven’t fixed themselves. At least, all the ones possible to fix via modding, anyway, which is still quite a bit. You do need the latest version of the game to run this mod, as well as all of the officially released DLC expansions, but otherwise, this mod is made to be as easy to use as possible.
Listing all the changes this mod makes would be overwhelming. What you can expect are hundreds of bugs related to quests, NPCs, objects, items, gameplay, and text placement fixes, and no changes that can break the game. It is made to run with as many other mods as possible, making it an easy recommendation to start with, and is even created by the same modding team that made the Unofficial Oblivion and Skyrim Patch mods. Clearly, this team has the knowledge and passion for this kind of thing, and it shows with this mod.
Armorsmith Extended
You will probably swap to first-person mode when in combat, but most of the time Fallout 4 is best enjoyed from a third-person perspective. This gives you a better view of the world as well as the character you spent so much time creating. Just as important as making your character physically look like you want is dressing them in the best outfits. The Armorsmith Extended mod removes some annoying limitations the base game has with clothing and armor by letting you wear any outfit under armor, wear hats and bandanas or gas masks, and a huge range of ways to mod your clothes. You can finally make your Vault dweller look as cool, or as silly, as you can imagine.
Everyone’s Best Friend
The first friendly face you encounter in Fallout 4, excluding your robot butler, is the loyal pup Dogmeat. He’s your introduction to companions and can stick with you through the entire game. (Or so long as you don’t have another companion.) For whatever reason, Fallout 4 denies you your loyal pupper if you have another companion. After some digging, the modders discovered a lot of evidence in the game’s code that Dogmeat wasn’t originally intended to count as a companion in the same way other NPCs do. Because there were systems already in place for this to work, this Everyone’s Best Friend mod was able to be made using only in-game functions.
Emotional reasons aside, it makes no sense for Dogmeat to be treated as a full companion in the base game. He doesn’t have Live or Love, doesn’t affect your Lone Wanderer perks, and there are even other characters with affinity interactions with him for healing that cannot happen unless both are in your party. There are other mods that go the other way and try to make Dogmeat have all the functions of a normal companion, but why should you have to choose between your dog and anyone else?
Place Everywhere
One of the somewhat contentious parts of Fallout 4 was the settlement-building aspect. Even for those who loved it, the limitations on where you could build kept it from being as fun or useful as it could have been. Place Everywhere eliminates all boundaries on building and placing structures in the Fallout 4 world. This includes clipping objects to place them inside of one another, placing them in mid-air, or on water. This opens up entire worlds of possibilities for building massive and otherwise impossible creations in Fallout 4, almost turning it into a Minecraft-like experience. It also includes some handy shortcuts and object manipulation enhancements to make building even smoother.
Outcasts and Remnants
Now that we’ve covered the fixes, improvements, and enhancements, let’s get into some actual new content. The Outcasts and Remnants mod is a massive, full-DLC-sized quest that can add around 20 hours of gameplay to Fallout 4. This mod will introduce new quests, obviously, plus brand new locations, factions, and companions that are all fully voice-acted. Without giving too much away, the plot revolves around answering some lingering questions in the series, such as how Gunners got access to such advanced gear and if the DC Enclave in Fallout 3 had a backup plan. There is a main story to beat, but also repeatable quests for more content.
There are five new factions added in (though you may recognize one if you’ve played previous entries in the series) and two new companions, and it’s automatically triggered after beating the quest called Reunions in the game’s main quest. If your character is already past that point, there is an alternate way to access the quest. You don’t need anything but the base game for this mod to work, but there are a few other recommended mods made by some of the same team members that work well together for even more content.
Vault 1080
For a completely different mod expansion that caters more to the horror fans out there, check out Vault 1080. This is a more story-focused adventure, heavy on atmosphere and setting while light on any real combat. It is also a far shorter experience, taking about an hour or so to get through, but it’s a memorable hour for sure. There’s just one new quest here that will lead you through four new areas. You trek through a dark and moody marsh, into a dilapidated church, and onto the multiple floors of the titular Vault 1080. The story you piece together is as horrifying as the setting but leads to a satisfying conclusion.
This mod includes a slight lighting update as well, specifically to volumetric lighting. That extra work makes the misty, dark, and gloomy environments much creepier and immersive to wander through. There’s no need to be any specific level to tackle this narrative expansion. Just download the mod, and the quest Church of the Valley will be added to your objectives. Follow the marker and get ready to be spooked.
America Rising
Much like the plot of the original game, America Rising has your character awakening after 200 years of being cryogenically frozen. Your goal is to go on a quest across seven acts to restore the world to what it was if that’s even possible. On the way, you will meet two new companions, go to multiple locations built from the ground up, face new random encounters, and hear over 1,000 newly recorded lines of dialogue. The tone, style, and music of this mod fit perfectly into the base game and feels like yet another potential expansion Bethesda itself could have made.
