Introduction
Welcome to Viva New Vegas, a fully modular vanilla-plus modding guide for Fallout New Vegas!
IMPORTANT: Everything in this guide is written down for a reason! It is vital to read everything!
You can NOT skip any paragraphs/instructions and expect your game to function as it should.
Overview
Viva New Vegas is a modding guide for Fallout New Vegas that will carefully walk you through how to install all the mods you will need for a perfectly stable, smooth, and most importantly, enjoyable experience.
The guide is highly accessible for everyone, no matter your modding experience. It is still incredibly important that you read all the instructions very carefully, even if you believe you are experienced enough to skip them. There are many small instructions that are vital for your game to function, and could be easily missed if you aren't careful. Although you don't need any modding experience to use this guide, it is expected for you to be relatively experienced with operating a computer in general.
- Stability: The guide includes all essential stability enhancements and no placebo/dangerous mods.
- Performance: Every tool, setting, and mod in the guide has been carefully selected and play-tested to ensure maximum possible performance. No 4k texture mods, no ENBs, no poorly scripted weather mods, or any other un-optimized/broken mods.
- Better Gameplay: The guide includes many mods that greatly improve the gameplay, without drastically overhauling the core experience or straying away from the game's original intent. This section is highlighted by Real Recoil and Just Assorted Mods. There is also an optional Overhauls section that will make the game much more difficult and add some new vanilla-friendly content. This section is highlighted by JSawyer Ultimate Edition so it is not recommended for first time players.
- Customizability: The guide is partially modular, some mods are optional as indicated by their yellow name. Load order will be provided and it will work even if you left out any mods. For information regarding adding your own mods, see the Additional Mods section below.
- An English copy of the game with all DLCs from either Steam or GOG.
- Only the English version of the game is supported for maximum compatibility - translations can conflict with mods and cause issues.
- The Microsoft Store and Epic Games Store versions of the game are unsupported, as they do not work with xNVSE which is essential for most mods.
- German release uses a "No Gore" version, making it also incompatible with xNVSE. If you are on Steam, you can use DepotDownloader to download the international exe.
- At least 12GB of free drive space.
- Windows 8 or higher (64-bit).
- VC++ Runtime Libraries.
- Extract the archive and run the included install_all.bat as an administrator to install all of the required libraries at once.
- A text editor (I recommend Notepad++, but the default Windows notepad will work).
- An archiving tool (I recommend 7-Zip. If you use Windows 11 then NanaZip is a better option).
- The latest GPU drivers (Either NVIDIA, AMD or Intel).
- A Nexus Mods account.
Additional Mods:
If you are looking to add more mods to your setup, please wait until after you have completed the guide, or else we will be unable to help you on Discord should you need it. Unfortunately, I do not have the time or energy to provide support for setups that install extra mods on top of the guide. If you do plan on adding mods after you finish the guide, please reference this list of mods that you should avoid using. I can not stress enough that it is only recommended to add your own mods if you are an experienced modder and know how to manually make conflict resolution patches and sort your load order! You can't just throw a bunch of mods on top of the guide without doing any conflict resolution or use automated tools and expect your game to function as intended! A reminder that I will not support setups that have added any mods.
Recommended Specs
The guide will make the game run better than vanilla. The game is much more CPU-intensive than GPU-intensive, and it actually handles modern hardware pretty well. Installing the game on an SSD will drastically improve load times and decrease stuttering. Here are the recommended specs for being able to run the guide at 60FPS at 1080p:
- CPU: Any dual-core processor (2.5GHz or more).
- RAM: 5GB of RAM.
- GPU: NVIDIA 600 series card or an AMD 5500 series card.
Discord
Have any questions? We have a Discord dedicated to the guide. If you run into trouble, have any questions, or just want updates on the guide, be sure to check it out!
