Update Done.
Unless you have a specific reason to use this old version, please use SALVO instead.
Introducing
A newly revised, refreshed, and more complete visual update guide for Fallout New Vegas and Tale of Two Wastelands.
Designed for the best mix of compatibility, stability, and performance with a keen eye towards ease-of-use.
For this guide and relevant mods to function correctly, it is assumed that you have followed (or will follow) one of the standardized, verified, and maintained setup guides for New Vegas or Tale of Two Wastelands. You will find those linked below.
This guide incorporates significant changes in the primary texture guide. The Legacy Version will remain available, linked in the header above.
Some people may not be happy with all the changes, or the mods I have chosen. Remember that taste is always subjective - while I believe I’ve come up with the most coherent and overall “best” setup, there is always room for change. Suggestions are taken via the discord, but be aware that changes will only be made with careful consideration.
Mods that are not mentioned should not be considered “bad” unless otherwise noted, and preference for certain mods over others should not indicate any personal animosity, dislike, shade-throwing, dolphin-tossing or other negativity towards those mods or their creators. Likewise, mod inclusion on this list does not indicate that I share the likes, dislikes, opinions, politics, or other generalities with the mods or their authors.
Lastly, regarding the future of these guides - I do plan to update these as needed. However, unless there is an emergency change due to mod removal or significant mod releases, there will no more full guide redesigns. These take a lot of work and playtesting. I plan for a yearly revamp to add or remove a few things here and there, but this should be at least feature complete going forward - if not always content complete.
I have added a Patreon along with this guide revamp. I will not be gating any content, and I will not be holding updates hostage behind Patreon targets or dollar amounts. I have added it because I am frequently asked by people how they can contribute - and the answer is that it’d be nice to have the hosting fees covered. If there are enough donations coming in that go above and beyond hosting, the remainder will either go to my coffee habit or to finding other ways to support the modding community in general.
This site is intended for desktop use since - well, since you’ll generally be modding the game on a desktop. As such, mobile optimization is not my priority, and I rely purely on Squarespace to automatically format things for mobile. I will not be doing any optimization for mobile, so please don’t ask.
If following all these guides in succession is a bit overwhelming (I get it), you can also just use something like Qolore’s Blue Moon guide - use it instead of those below and my guide. It won’t be as thorough a visual overhaul, but it’s a good all-in-one guide for modernizing and improving visuals.
A Note on Load Order
The majority of the mods in this guide do not have plugins, at least up through RENOVATION. In most cases, placement in your load order won’t matter. Generally speaking, any LOD-specific plugins (e.g. LOD Additions and Improvements) should go late in your load order, and your weather mod should be last (aside from any patches for it, or if there are special instructions).
I can’t really provide a simple loadorder.txt, since it would depend on what other guides you may have followed. Generally, keep the plugins on this list around the middle of your loadorder. Some may not let you move them - that usually means they are patches or rely on other plugins, so can’t be moved above those other plugins. I strongly recommend you check for conflicts yourself if you’ve gone outside the other guides linked below. Specific questions can, of course, be asked on my discord.
Viva New Vegas - the only competent, maintained guide for New Vegas. Use it for non-TTW installs.
The Best of Times - the official TTW installation guide. This should always be your baseline for TTW.
The Wasteland Survival Guide - the definitive modded guide for TTW. This should be your goto for TTW beyond vanilla.
The Performance Guide - for use with all NV installs whether TTW or Viva New Vegas. You need to follow this.
A quick note - these guides are designed to be stable when used together and alongside the above linked guides. If you’ve expanded upon those mod lists, I can’t make any guarantees. I’ve logged approximately 200 hours now with essentially this setup, and crashes have been extremely rare - and generally only related to NVR. The same has been a trend for the old texture guide - once bad meshes were removed from the guide, overall stability remains quite high. These new guides should increase stability and overall performance versus the old ones.
There will be a performance cost. Generally speaking, this is tested on modern PCs. A baseline of something in the GTX 960 4gb performance class should result in a stable 1080p60. NVR, if you choose to install it, will increase that load somewhat - I’d say a GTX 2070 class GPU is more in order as a minimum. The texture guides will increase VRAM load and loading times, and may add some stutter when traversing the open world.
Stutter can be mostly nullified by using the iTweakRCSafeGuard = 2 setting in NVTF (be sure you are using the Texture preset for NVTF). Load times can only be helped by making sure the game and MO2 mod folders are installed on a faster storage device (SSDs are basically a must, NVME - not a cheap cacheless drive - is best). It can also potentially be improved by packing all of the textures into BSAs. This is beyond the scope of the guide, but you are free to research and attempt the process.
Overall VRAM use can’t really be reduced. I would recommend a 4gb+ GPU as a baseline for 1080p, 6gb+ for 1440p, and 8gb+ for 4k.
A number of people are reporting issues with cards under 6gb - I recommend using this process at least on Fallout 3 HD Pack, and potentially on Nutscapes.
Again, this was designed and tested working for setups that have followed the guides above. Support can be difficult - if not impossible - if you’ve chosen to ignore them.
Please visit the official discord for this guide for questions and support.
Each of the following guides will cover one aspect of the game. Use all, use none, pick and choose - it’s up to you. These are what I’ve found ideal to aesthetically modernize the game - you may not like my choices, and that’s great. But at least you may pick up some ideas from which your own ideal aesthetic can be created. The main RENOVATION texture guide is meant to be installed sequentially, in the order presented, for best results. This also applies to the the other texture-focused sections.
This guide anticipates using MO2 as your mod manager. The file overwrite process in Vortex is a pain - whereas it’s as simple as dragging these in order in MO2 to handle overwrites, Vortex is more involved. As such, while you are free to ask Vortex-related questions in the discord, I will almost certainly not be able to provide support. Manual installation is totally and completely unsupported, and you will receive no help should you take that route.
Special Thanks
Please endorse any mods you download, use, and enjoy from the Nexus.
Credit for this guide goes not to me, but to all those who have helped compile, test, edit, and troubleshoot it. Even moreso, credit belongs to the dedicated modders who kept New Vegas fresh and alive, even more than a decade later.
Special thanks to The Many, for getting me off my butt more than once to initially create this guide. From a 20-line text file in the TTW discord to this entire site - it’s been a journey that I’d never have taken without Many.
Additional thanks to the entire TTW team, especially Callen, Matt, and RoyBatty. Props to Vish, master of all guides. Massive thanks to Cloudisms for great work on the video for the legacy version of this guide, and to Audley, Norvito, macintroll, and all the other textroids who have provided not only excellent mods, but a fountain of knowledge.
Thanks to NutnOff for gently reminding me that my wording wasn’t great and general texture knowledge.
More thanks to Wall_SoGB for being a crazy code monkey, as well as lStewieAl, karut, iranrmrf, and all the other madlads who stripped NV to the bones to make it work better than new.
If I’m forgetting to thank you - the sentiments are the same, even if I can’t remember it in the moment.
Lastly but not leastly, thanks to Lip and the earlybird discord crew (Shabby, Conzo, Cloudisms, Audley, Biggie, Norvito, Vish, Muffin, and Wall) for doing the final sanity check.
