Fallout 4 is quickly becoming one of my favorite games of 2015, but even I have to admit: there’s a lot of things about it that sort of suck. Like all open-world Bethesda games, it’s a big playground full of stuff to do, but a lot of the details need some work. Fortunately, an army of modders have been busy overhauling everything in the game. For every mod adding Red Sox underroos and a new set of night-time stars, there are a ton of mods offering real, practical changes to make Fallout 4 play a little better. This is our roundup of the best practical Fallout 4 mods (so far) that just make the game better and more fun to play.
Fallout 4 Mod Manager by Grasmann
Videos by VICE
For every Bethesda RPG, there is a Mod Manager. These programs pop up early after a Bethesda game release, and the modding community works to play well with them. Using the mod manager, you can install, uninstall, and temporarily disable mods with a single click. If you’re modding to make the game more fun to play, you might as well install a program to make the mods more easier and more fun to install.
Better Item Sorting by Xandarori
Bethesda’s menus are always a real pain in the ass, and Fallout 4 follows in that fine tradition. Eventually, someone will come up with a beautiful, polished, intuitive interface that will fix Fallout 4‘s nested menu maze from hell. Until that time, we can at least get better sorting. This mod adds a category prefix to any item, so all the drugs, ammo, bobbleheads, etc. will be sorted by kind. There’s no reason for a game to be next to a magazine just because they both start with the the same letter.
No More Fucking Encumbrance by You. Yes, you!
If you’re groaning under the weight of 700 baseballs, 17 suits of leather armor, and 34 pistols, I have good news. A quick console command can tweak your carry weight long enough to get you back to the nearest shop. Press the ~ key (top left of the keyboard) and type the following: “player.modav carryweight 99999”. This sets your carry weight to several thousand tons, which should be enough to lug your teddy bear and plastic fork collection back to Sanctuary. Congratulations, you’re kind of like a modder now!
Longer Power Lines by Puma
Fallout 4’s big new feature is the ability to rebuild the wasteland. Setting up settlements gives me the same satisfaction I got from Minecraft, with the added bonus of a wonderful retro-future aesthetic. Any electrical object needs a generator and a powerline, but Fallout 4‘s powerlines are absurdly short. Longer Power Lines fixes that so you can build and power your settlements as you’d like.
Easy Lockpicking by The Iron Rose and Easy Hacking by zilav
Cracking your way into somewhere that you shouldn’t be is one of Fallout 4’s finest pleasures. Unfortunately, a locked door is an excuse to trot out Bethesda’s tired hacking and lockpicking mini games, which haven’t changed in any substantive way since Morrowind released in 2002. No longer. If your character is sufficiently leveled and skilled to crack or lock or hack a terminal, this mod does it for you. No more fiddling with bobby pins or playing “hacking” computers picking random words from a list.
Configurable Power Armor Fusion Core Drain by RAWberry400
The Power Armor in Fallout 4 is wonderful. It’s like a walking tank, and I’m loath to ever climb out of mine. The trouble is that Power Armor runs on fusion cores, a rare and expensive miniature nuclear battery. These fusion cores can power a generator for hundreds of years, but a jogging suit of power armor will suck it dry in about two minutes. That’s bullshit. This mod rebalances power cores so that any amazing feat of strength (punching, sprinting, flying in a jetpack) will drain your power armor battery. Just walking around, though? You can do that for 200 more years.
Atom Bomb Baby by Trainwiz
OK, so this is not the most practical mod on the list. In fact, it’s completely useless. I love it, though, because weird and whimsical is what Fallout 4 is all about. This mod takes the miniature nuke model and swaps it with the model for your kidnapped baby, Sean. Sean is apparently made out of plutonium.
