The best Fallout 76 mods | Digital Trends (2024)

It’s fair to say that Fallout 76wasn’t exactly what fans were hoping for when it launched. Instead of being a single-player RPG like Fallout 4, 3, and New Vegas, 76 was a pseudo MMO where you joined multiplayer servers to play in a persistent world. Amultiplayer Falloutsounds great on paper, but the execution wasn’t what people were looking for. Many years and updates later, the game is in a far better state, but not quite up to the standard of some hardcore fans. However, Bethesda games are among the most famous for the quality of mods made for them, and at this point, there are thousands of mods available for Fallout 76. We’ve scoured every inch of Appalachia to collect only the best Fallout 76 mods.

Ultimist’s High Detailed Map Plus

The default map in Fallout 76 looks ripped right out of a tourist’s guide. That’s cool for theming and everything, but not so useful when trying to find anything besides major locations. The map is surprisingly bare in detail considering how much walking around and exploring you do. Ultimist’s High Detailed Map Plus rips up that old map and replaces it with a much more detailed and appealing map to navigate. It marks all the normal locations you need, plus every vendor and 440 resource deposits (which you can toggle on or off to reduce clutter). It might not sound like a big deal, but any Fallout fan knows how much time you spend on the map menu.

Better Inventory

If there’s one screen you’ll be in longer than the map screen, it’s the one for inventory. You will be constantly picking up items, using consumables, and swapping weapons around in that clunky menu that makes it take way too long to do simple tasks. Once you install Better Inventory, you can streamline much of your item management and save hours of time. The main feature of this mod is the filter that puts weapons, food/drinks, clothing, and notes into different tabs. Each tab also shows that category’s weight so you know what to check when you get too encumbered. There are also a few handy inventory shortcuts that let you skip through tabs and go to the first or last item in a list with ease.

Glowing Items

Bethesda loves to litter its worlds with hundreds of items all around. Usually, you don’t even know what you can or can’t pick up until you try, and then you need to know if it was even worth it. Due to its postapocalyptic setting, trash and debris are scattered all over, making it hard to notice any useful items but Glowing Items is here to guide you. This mod lets you select items from a huge list that you want to glow, as well as one of eight colors that stands out best for you. It’s a great accessibility mod, as well as one that anyone can find useful.

High Resolution Texture Pack

There are a handful of visual mods out there, but we think the High Resolution Texture Pack provides the best bang for your buck. This mod is a port of a similar mod for Fallout 4 that adds a ton of detail and quality to everything in Appalachia. The only downside, as is the case with almost all texture mods, is the load it puts on your PC. This mod suggests you have at least 10GB of VRAM to run it, but ideally 16GB. If you have the hardware to make it happen, this mod will push this game’s visuals up to their maximum.

Appalachia Warfare

While visual mods are made for almost any game that has mods, you hardly hear about audio mods. Appalachia Warfare takes all the base sound effects for guns and explosions and replaces them with higher-quality and more dynamic sounds. Explosions have more depth and leave a ringing in the ear, while bullets unleash powerful cracks and cause hair-raising whizzes when they barely miss. If you never thought proper sound design and realistic effects could make a big difference, just try this mod and see how much more intense the game feels.

Text Chat

Even for PC players, there’s no way to communicate in Fallout 76 through text. This is inconvenient for a number of reasons, mostly if you don’t have a microphone, but even when you do, the game uses proximity chat so you can only hear people close to your character. Instead of using an outside program to talk to your fellow players, Text Chat adds a simple but effective chat box to the game. With it, you can talk globally on all servers, only on your server, in trade chats, with groups and clans, and more. You can even see who is also using this mod in the chat menu based on the color of a player’s name.

Fallout 76 Load Time Fixer

The name of this mod is a little misleading since Fallout 76 Load Time Fixer doesn’t focus specifically on cutting down the game’s loading times. It does claim to reduce that by a bit, but the real time savings comes from the 10 or so seconds where you can’t control your character immediately after loading. Any time you enter the game from the main menu or load after fast traveling, the game plays out an animation of the screen fading in that you have to wait to complete before you can move. Saving even a few seconds every time you fast travel or load into the game will add up very fast.

Winter in Appalachia (early access)

West Virginia in Fallout 76 has been in a perpetual summer for its entire existence. There are some weather effects, like rain and ash storms, but nothing close to a true winter. Winter in Appalachia brings the chilly months to the wasteland with snow and holiday decorations all across the world. This mod is still being worked on, but already has new animations for collecting snow-covered plants and sound effects for walking in the snow. Even in its unfinished state, just covering the world in a blanket of snow makes it feel almost like a new map to explore.

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