But as I walked the Wasteland, staring at the same old textures and washed-out color palette, it hit me – I was stuck in the Commonwealth for at least another six years. And I needed to spice things up if I was to have any fun. I scoured the Nexus for days looking for just the right things to make the game look crisp, appealing, and, in some cases just different. During this time I found a lot of great mods – ENBs, ReShaders, and improved textures and effects galore. I obviously didn’t install them all to build my perfect game, but I thought I’d share my findings with other seekers of visual enhancement so that they, too, could build the Fallout 4 of their dreams. So without further ado here are my top picks for the coolest graphics mods to throw into your game play.
20. PipBoy Shadows
Check Out This Mod We start off our list with a mild but smart change made to enhance the impact of your character’s presence in the environment by allowing the PipBoy’s lights to cast shadows. It’s much more realistic and immersive, not by making the environment look more real though. But by giving your brain feedback from your actions. No longer is the Wasteland a canvas, but a 3D space that you inhabit. It also applies to headlights, so exploring dark areas will be a whole new experience.
19. Aviator ReShade
Check Out This Mod NexusMods user ZorkyTheDude is a fan of Michael Scorsese, and is especially fond of The Aviator and its cinematography. This mod aspires to bring just that into the world of Fallout 4, highlighting the red and blue colors by turning up the saturation and giving the Wasteland a stylized new look. It won’t make anything any more realistic, and perhaps it won’t really look better. But it’s definitely a great way to shake things up if you’ve been playing Fallout 4 for a long time.
18. Radiant Clouds and Fogs
Check Out This Mod Do you know what people never talk about? Fallout 4’s sky and its clouds. That’s because they’re unremarkable, and this mod is here to change that. Thanks to modder Mangaclub you can now replace the boring old vanilla clouds for something a little bit more realistic, adding both depth and grandeur to the skies above the Commonwealth. Perhaps more importantly, this mod will modify fog for it to look thicker and more realistic.
17. Immersive First Person Settings
Check Out This Mod One of the most experimental mods in our list is Immersive First Person Settings by user Ppomme, a mod that promises to greatly improve the first-person camera… once all the issues have been worked out. It works by replacing the first-person camera for a modified third-person camera, letting you see your legs and arms, as well as cast a shadow, instead of becoming a disembodied will with arms to shoot with. You’ll feel as if your character has mass and exists in the world of Fallout 4. And as long as you don’t run into any of the mod’s bugs, you’ll feel much more immersed.
16. Enhanced Wasteland Preset
Check Out This Mod Some people prefer mods that present minor enhancements without messing with the spirit and original feel of the game. One such option comes by the hand of modder Raz3d, who’s put together this ENB to make the Wasteland look somewhat more vibrant, in contrast to the game’s default washed-out look. I mean, yes, it’s the apocalypse – but over 200 years have already gone by, you know?
15. Vivid Waters
Check Out This Mod Water is one of those things you can’t simply overlook in a Bethesda game. I’m sure the developers do their best with what they have, but it never stops looking notoriously fake and basic in comparison to their other graphical achievements. This mod by user Mangaclub promises to add better reflection, improved opacity and an overall spectacular look to the waters of the Commonwealth with only moderate impact on performance. After installing it, you’ll notice water won’t look like blue goo anymore, and the transition between water and land is much less jarring as well.
14. Vivid ENB
Check Out This Mod When I spend a lot of time playing the same game, I generally need it to be visually stimulating so that my mind doesn’t slowly drift away. It needs to constantly capture my attention, and the best way to do that is through my eyes. So when I have a game I love to play but its visuals are as washed-out as Fallout 4’s are, I’m always looking for a way to fix that. Thanks to NexusMods user CoolWave101z, the Wasteland can look much more appealing and even fantasy-like, with brighter colors, lush greenery, and radiant waters. It’s not realistic, but it makes the Commonwealth a nice place to be.
13. Vogue ENB – Realism
Check Out This Mod If rather than radiant visuals you’d rather have a moody, atmospheric Wasteland, then Vogue ENB might be the thing you’re looking for. Creator GameVogue focused on improving immersion by altering the Depth of Field, improving color correction and tweaking the Antialiasing settings. With this mod, nights are darker, textures look much sharper, and the color palette is more lifelike. The best part about it is how little impact it has on your fps. It’s all gain at virtually no cost.
12. Enhanced Lights and FX
Check Out This Mod Another mod to consider in your quest to improve your Fallout 4 game at little performance cost is Enhanced Lights and FX by Anamorfus. This mod overhauls all lights and related effects, increasing the amount of shadow-casting light sources and making darkness severe enough for you to need a flashlight. These changes make for a more challenging and realistic experience, while also creating a better mood for interiors.
11. Visible Galaxy 4K
Check Out This Mod Sometimes, something as simple as changing the sky’s textures can take nighttime from a pesky inconvenience to a breathtaking experience. This mod is a port from 4K Stars and Galaxies for Skyrim and all it does is replace the nighttime sky textures for 4K imagery of the Milky Way. Not only does it look amazing, but it’s also more realistic – over 200 years after civilization grinds to a halt, both artificial light and air pollution would be virtually non-existent.
10. Fallout 4 Enhanced Color Correction
Check Out This Mod If you’re not scared to step away from the vanilla game’s art direction, perhaps ChaosWWW’s Enhanced Color Correction might be worth checking out. It endeavors to make the Wasteland more vivid by improving contrast and the quality of colors – that’s to say, it makes the game look less washed out. Never has that vault suit looked so blue. Characters also look somewhat more healthy thanks to a subtle red tint on their skin, and both shadows and highlights have more impact on the game’s look.
9. Darker Nights
Check Out This Mod There’s a reason so many mods in the Nexus recommend you to install Darker Nights by Unforbidable – it’s amazing, and it costs you nothing in terms of fps. It simply makes the Commonwealth darker at night and indoors, to the point where the use of a flashlight is justified, in contrast with vanilla nighttime, which is essentially a permanent full moon. It may be a small change, sure. But it can deeply improve your experience, making nighttime more important and reminding you of the dangers lurking in the dark.
8. Ultra Interior Lighting
Check Out This Mod Once you’ve installed Darker Nights, it’s time to address lighting. Among my favorite mods for improved illumination is Ultra Interior Lighting by Gargorias, which takes full advantage of the engine’s capacity for unlimited shadow-casting lights by adding many more of them to every indoor area, mostly by hand. It’ll have a detrimental impact on performance, of course, but if you have the resources to run it, it’d be silly not to.
7. Ultra Exterior Lighting
Check Out This Mod Even better than our previous entry is Ultra Exterior Lighting, which does the same thing to outdoor areas. This will make you glad you installed Darker Nights, as it makes the Wasteland a much more immersive and realistic place to explore. It’s amazing how much work Gargorias put into manually replacing light sources for shadow-casting ones, and the amount of people endorsing this mod seems to show how much of a good job they did.
6. Ultra-Low Graphics Tool
Check Out This Mod There used to be a time where my less-than-ideal specs kept me from playing lots of amazing games. Fortunately, those dark times have passed, but I’ll never forget the struggle. To help anyone going through the same thing, I’d like to highlight the Ultra-Low Graphics Tool by Lyzik. Instead of taking Fallout to the max, this will take it to the minimum possible to allow anyone to run it on their toasters. Less shadow quality, disabled godrays, stupidly short draw distances and disabling a bunch of post-processing effects are the means to a considerable performance gain. It’s a small price to pay for the Fallout 4 experience on a $150 laptop.
5. FO4 Blurriness Remover
Check Out This Mod Due to my low-spec-gaming background, I’ve become an expert at finding the most efficient graphics settings to marry the best performance and looks. In Fallout 4, achieving this may be as easy as installing the FO4 Blurriness Remover from LasagnaTheories. To put it simply, this mod removes the blurry effect that’s cast over everything that’s far enough, and while you’re moving. This may make the Wasteland look a tad more videogame-y. But it’s a valid sacrifice to make the game look so much crisper without losing any fps at all.
4. The Enhancer
Check Out This Mod Another option aimed at those who’re at the exact recommended specs or slightly below is The Enhancer, which promises to improve graphical fidelity at a very low performance cost. It’s made by Looping, famous for their Photorealistic Commonwealth mod, and all it does is optimize textures and tweak some settings to make the game look more natural and a bit more colorful.
3. Photorealistic Commonwealth
Check Out This Mod However, after so many years, chances are your system far exceeds what’s needed for vanilla Fallout, and you’re hungry to take your system to the limit. That’s where Looping’s Photorealistic Commonwealth comes in, utilizing custom shaders and tweaked post-processing options to make the Wasteland look as lifelike as possible. The mod aims, quite simply, to make your screenshots look indistinguishable from actual photography, and it largely succeeds. To top it off, it includes an in-game user manual and a settings interface.
2. WET – Water Enhancement Textures
Check Out This Mod And if you still have some resources to spare, you have to give the WET mod a chance to take your aquatic experiences to the next level. Water Enhancement Textures by SparrowPrince is a work of technical ingenuity that employs textures generated from simulations of how real water would act to improve in-game water bodies. It gives them flow and motion, generally making them look not only realistic but jaw-droppingly beautiful. Along with that, it improves the quality of mist, fog and spray textures, as well as waterfall models, with spectacular results.
1. Uber Fidelity Suite
Check Out This Mod Some mods are so amazing they have a hard time staying bound to a single game. That’s the case with the Uber Fidelity Suite, one of the most appreciated graphics mods in The Witcher 3 history… which has been ported to Fallout 4 by user Xiorantha. The mod tries to stay true to the artistic direction and style of Fallout 4, while also pushing everything towards its maximum potential. It’ll imbue your game with a level of graphical fidelity not achievable by any other means, opening your eyes to a whole new world of details you never even knew were there. It makes your game highly cinematic, but since it was designed to be used in actual gameplay, the effects go beyond beautiful vistas and into the heat of battle. You’ll definitely need a high-end setup to run this. But if you have it, you won’t ever be able to go back to vanilla.
