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Stella's guide to playing Fallout New Vegas in 2026

This guide comes with a lot of links served with a bunch of alt text (hover), following this guide is recommended on desktop devices (duh). This is a small guide/opinion on how you should play New Vegas. (Please don't play the base game without any mods, it's not worth it. Unless you're into that... Sicko.)

QUICK COUPLE OF DISCLAIMERS

This is all coming from personal experience and these guides will at least some use to you. But it's your own goddamn computer and you can control what you put on it, you don't have to sit here and download each and every mod here cause mommy Stella told you to. Aside from the necessary dependencies of these modlists, you can pick and choose whichever mod you want from these packs and that's the beauty of these guides, be wary straying off the beaten path though cause it will be harder for people to give you support in times of need. KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!

I will be breaking down my personal modlist in Part 2 (not up yet) so you can see how far you can take your setup yourself. The guides will escalate quickly in terms of system requirements but if your computer can at least RUN New Vegas I 100% recommend the first guide on the list to at least get the game running stable and mostly bug-free*!

Anyways, to the guide.. list... thing.

How I've Played Fallout New Vegas for 12 years

Stella standing on a hill overlooking D.C. with a buggy to the right.

New Vegas has always been a soft spot for me since I got it on an actual computer that I could play it on in... oh wow... 2014! (cries in old 😭) I've done many ventures in the Mojave, my first of course on an actual Xbox 360 base game until I found out it had a huge modding community growing on Nexus in those years with projects like Project Nevada, New Vegas Bounties and when Tale of Two Wastelands really started to pick up. The latter being the most preferred version of New Vegas that I've become more accustomed to instead of an ultra modded base game. Therefore in 2014 I picked up the Ultimate Edition and Fallout 3 Game of The Year edition from Steam, thus beginning my one and only personality trait :3.

I did have a few good runs of base game mods, of course in famous trans girl fashion, reluctantly downloading an abundance of the best female armor mods I could find to fabulously construct my dream courier to marry famous companion mod Willow in a badass crime-fighting duo to stomp across the wasteland with. I guess you could say now after ~8 runs of alternating between New Vegas and Tale of Two Wastelands modlists I would have an aquired taste on how you or anyone else should mod thier copies. 2010 was 16 years ago now and New Vegas has definitely had some growing pains since then, especially now that everybody knows that the combat is complete and utter sh*t, it's definitely not as timeless as people (apparently a lot of trans woman, including me) talk about.

Fallout New Vegas modding scene has come a very, very long way since the dark days of Nexus Mod Manager and even Fallout Mod Manager. Modding nowadays can be done in a single click (with purchase of Nexus Premium) and as simple as Plug & Play at the behest to your knowledge of using a computer. Now saying Plug & Play is a neat way of putting it, I do recommend however that you stay away from the Nexus Premium Collections feature. For the fact that Vortex is very complicated if you don't know what you're doing and leaves very little room for actually adding your own mods and how to troubleshoot for when things go wrong. Also waiting for Vortex to 'create' it's virtual filesystem takes way too long for 1000+ long modlists each and every time you add/remove a mod. It has left a permenant blank folder on my hard drive so f*ck you Vortex!!! If your time is precious, you got a beefy computer and you might still plan on buying Nexus Premium, I whole heartedly recommend Wabbajack! But if you're anybody like me, unemployed, wasting away during current events and can't compete with rising RAM prices... now's the time to introduce you to the efforts of more compentent game modders such as the teams behind Viva New Vegas, The Best of Times, Wasteland Survival Guide and SALVO 2.

VIVA LAS VEGAS!

Viva New Vegas.

This will be the plain base for your modding ventures and what I assume most people will leave this guide with, I recommend this at bare minimum if you're just able to run New Vegas and looking for a modern touchup of New Vegas 'without' the bugs and mess that comes with the base game. Your go-to will have to be Viva New Vegas. This requires Fallout New Vegas Ultimate Edition (with all DLCs) and baseline computer knowledge. It's the definitive way to mod New Vegas, backed by a team of experienced modders and insider knowledge. It will give you a very good starting base for you to put your own mods on, it even has a list of recommended mods in the Extended Finish that I would also recommend if you don't know where to start! The Wabbajack installation of this guide will automagically install the extended finish if you're feeling lazy :3. Viva New Vegas also provides the tools and resources to jumpstart your modding journey with for example, how to create your own merges if you're really starting the 255 plugin limit (yes there is a limit, theoretically and resource-wise) and Mods to Avoid that comes with recommended alternatives! This is a performance focused modlist and doesn't touch textures aside from performance-enhancing vanilla ones, if you're looking for an All in One visual overhaul you can also add SALVO 2 to your list with a simple one-click installation* with Wabbajack!

If you're looking to take your setup further please continue onwards but before you leave I shall give context to the abbreviations I'll use from here on out.

Two!? Wastelands Modding

Tale of Two Wastelands.

If you're really looking for something to kick your ass with how long and arduous (lovingly) the actual modding process is and you have copies of both New Vegas Ultimate Edition and Fallout 3 GOTY, I would definitely recommend my favourite, Tale of Two Wastelands! Now for those who don't know Fallout New Vegas had a really rushed development cycle (clearly) and most of the assets used in New Vegas were originally from Fallout 3, including the engine!!! So in turn, modders figured out a way to merge both of the games together, giving Fallout 3 a little bit more polish benifiting from the new engine and voila! TTW was born! Now I'm a huge fan of both games, Mothership Zeta left a lasting impression when I first played it, but it was a little impossible to play Fallout 3 on PC with the Games for Windows Vista fiasco that happened back in the day, it left Fallout 3 in quite a worriesome state. Fortunately for us it isn't anymore, with the added treat of being able to play New Vegas whenever you want too! How it works in connecting the two games is that there's an added train station you can take from Central DC to New Vegas thus connecting both wastelands seamlessly.

If this is interesting to you, The Best of Times is a little like it's sister VNV though missing a Wabbajack installation. It again gives you a great base for modding the game yourself, and if you're looking for the extended finish version of TBoT then look no further than Wasteland Survival Guide. WSG is to be completed after TBoT, and again gives a a different flavour of both Fallout 3 & New Vegas while keeping the plugin count low. It is my go-to in terms of stability and getting the most out of my 2 favourite games.

What I've covered still doesn't scratch the surface of what FNV modding really is all about, texture modding and visuals. Sure your game would look fine but it would still look like it was made in 2010 and we don't want that do we? Texture modding and all that is subjective and has been subject to some controversy in the modding scene (IIRC), so I definitely wouldn't have you spend hours and hours trawling through guides downloading 100s and 100s of texture mods that most of which would only cover one thing each, like Dinky the Dinosaur toys for example. We've got something much better for you in store and long gone are the days of texture guides like SALVO...

SALVO, too

SALVO 2.

Long Live SALVO 2, brought to you by ScarletArdere and PhilSwift (and I assume many others), this Wabbajack installation can be added to any of the guides I've mentioned before: VNV, TBoT, and WSG, or even to your special New Vegas installation yourself. Built after years and years of texture modding, headed by Salamand3r, this pack is mostly a top-to-bottom* retexture of New Vegas (aside from weapons, creatures, and armors, those are kinda iconic and a touchy subject to mod, but we'll get to them in a bit), this pack is mostly the reason why every modded installation of New Vegas you see on content platforms look the same, disregarding any post-processing cause that is also left to personal preference. Now if you don't have the money for Nexus Premium, you will have to sit there and babysit the installer manually downloading every mod but I've been through it, it's not that hard, play a game on the side or something.

Before starting SALVO 2, I recommend making sure you have the recommended amount of VRAM (It's not mentioned anywhere but I recommend at least 4-6GB) and if you haven't already done so to use the FNV Performance Guide, it's crucial to getting the game running as fast as and as reliably as it can.

PhilSwift has also compiled Wabbajack installations in the same form as SALVO 2, Weapon Replacers AIO and Lore Friendly Armor Replacers covering weapons and armor/bodies respectively. If you enjoyed the process of SALVO 2, these installations are theoretically the same and are easy replacers for weapons and armor that SALVO doesn't touch and not quite as long, pretty good bang for your buck I'd say. If you don't like the look of LFA, I do recommend STARS TTW if you are on TTW, a mod by Sweet6Shooter that also comes with a Wabbajack installation from Phil, it's a comprehensive rebalance of armors and new armor replacer for some armors in the same vein as LFA, but gives a little bit more flair that I am looking for in my modlists.

Wabbajack

Wabbajack.

Now, Wabbajack... I know I just put nexus collections on blast but that was mostly because of the shitty mod manager, I'm sure those collections are good and if that's your fortay sure... play that collection that has the entire bible snuck into it... I'm here to tell you that is most definitely not my cup of tea and it shouldn't be yours either. Wabbajack is different in that it is community-run, it has lists for the games that Nexus does too! But Wabbajack lists are way more in-depth than Nexus collections. The software is way more robust and leads to more interesting modlists, automatice BSA packing, conflict resolution, all that good stuff. I even played a Skyrim modlist using Wabbajack and had way more fun with that than ever touching Vortex again, Wabba even auto-endorses the mods you download so you still end up supporting the mod creators. I do recommend you still get Nexus Premium just for faster download speeds cause these modlists are upwards of 30GB most times, just please, PLEASE avoid nexus collections. If you don't think you like the look of any of the guides I've shown you here, I definitely recommend any Wabbajack list you find interesting, it supports the mod creators and you'll find way more robust setups than anywhere else. You will at least need a more than decent computer to run some of these setups so get to reading the descriptions of these lists to see if your setup can run it. If you have only New Vegas I recommend Wild Card FNV, though if you can go the extra mile with TTW I recommend Nuclear Sunset.

That's all I have to say about modding Fallout for now! However if you're interested in perusing my modlist please continue to Part 2 (out soon) and I'll go in depth with content recommendations and more personal opinions! Thank you for reading my guide and stay tuned for more!

Signed, Stella.