The best Fallout 4 mods

As with Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3, creative modders remain dedicated to fixing, reshaping, and enhancing Bethesda's latest RPG.

As with Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3, creative modders remain dedicated to fixing, reshaping, and enhancing Bethesda's latest RPG. Here are the best mods we've seen so far, and we'll be updating these pages in the future.

First, a few words of warning . If you're not using Bethesda's official mod repositoryto install mods, be very careful modding Fallout 4, and read all of the instructions on the mod pages carefully before installing. Some of the utilities used to create these mods, like FO4edit and FalloutSnip, have been linked to corrupted saved games and crashes. Mods can also become disabled when the game receives official patches.

Let's start with some settling and crafting mods, then move on to visual tweaks, gameplay enhancements, and finally tools and utilities. For more, check out our list of Fallout 4 console commandsas well.

Basement Living

Need to get away from your crowds of dead-eyed settlers for a little quiet time? Basement Living adds 10 standalone basements and bunkers to give you your very own cozy retreat. You can attach a basement to any settlement you wish, and each comes with a fusebox that provides 100 power, and a workbench so you can decorate it however you like.

Conquest

You don't have to stick to the settlements Fallout 4 gives you, now you can make your own pretty much wherever you like. This mod adds campsites which can be placed in the area of your choosing, and if you're happy with the location you can turn it into a fully-functioning settlement. You can build as many as ten new settlements, and dismantle them as well.

Faction Housing Overhaul

It's nice that factions give you living quarters when you join them, but their offerings are typically not somewhere you'd really want to spend much time. These mods turn those faction dumps into more beautiful and spacious living quarters with workbenches, a gym, lovely decorations and plenty of extra storage space. It's available for Vault 81, Prydwen, the Railroad, the Castle, and The Institute.

Manufacturing Extended

If you've got the Contraptions Workshop DLC for Fallout 4, you'll definitely want this mod which vastly improves your settlements' factories. It adds a number of commonsense features, like conveyor belts that will take junk directly from your workshop's inventory and deposit completed items back into it. It also gives you new machines like looms for creating Vault outfits and faction gear, a power armor forge, a distillery for manufacturing cola and booze, and forges for melee and fist weapons. There's even an auto-butcher, for breaking down creatures (and people) into meat, bone, and leather.

Better Settlers

The settlers who answer to your radio beacon are typically a bit... well, dull. Most of them are dressed roughly alike, and they can be hard to tell apart without personally dressing them up differently. This mod adds over 150 new settlers so the vacant-eyed corn-growers who arrive on your turf will have a bit more personality. Another mod, Don't Call Me Settler, will give them unique names as well.

Looks Mirror

In case you want to tweak or change your character's looks after you leave your home at the beginning of Fallout 4, you can do so at a plastic surgeon. This mod gives you the option of doing it from any of your settlements as well, by adding a mirror to your workshop. Simply place the mirror on any wall you want, and using it will bring up the menu that allows you to change your appearance.

OCDecorator

Decorating your settlement can be irksome, and even after carefully placing loot items on shelves or tables they can and probably will be knocked over later by some clumsy settler or companion (or you). This mod not only makes placement of items easier (loot items are now movable just like static objects when using the workshop menu), but lets you lock them in place so they can't be toppled. Perfect.

Crossbows of the Commonwealth

This well-animated crossbow makes a great addition to your burgeoning arsenal, and it's not just a simple, static weapon. You can add attachments to it using your workbench, and craft a number of different types of bolts for it. The crossbow is silent, perfect for stealth kills, and its great damage is offset by its slow reload time so it won't unbalance the game.

Spring Cleaning

Even when you've scrapped every piece of junk in your settlement, it still pretty much looks like a dump, right? That's because there's all sorts of things you can't remove: mounds of dirt, piles of rubble, and weeds poking through concrete. Spring Cleaning makes all those eyesores removable, letting you really tidy up your town.

Any Mod Any Weapon

If you want to take wasteland warfare to a whole new level, this mod will let you build the weapon of your fever dreams. It allows you to put any weapon attachment on any weapon, so you can electrify a triple-barreled minigun, splice a Fat Man onto an alien laser pistol, or build just about any Frankenstein-esque weapon you can imagine. The video above by Tyranniconshows you just a few of the possibilities.

Higher Settlement Budget

The size of your Fallout 4 settlements is pretty severely restricted: they can only get so big and use so many objects. That stinks, though, if you're building a big 'ol base and suddenly have to stop. The Higher Settlement Budget mod fixes this, though keep in mind adding more object may lessen performance or even crash your game.

Craftable Ammunition

You can build a lot at your workstations, everything from weapon mods to medical items to grenades. Why not ammo? This mod lets you craft every single type of ammo in the game at your chemistry stations: shotgun shells, flares, mini nukes, flamer fuel, fusion cells... you name it, you can craft it (unless you're naming made-up ammo that doesn't exist, like moon-piercing tomato bullets). You'll still need higher level Gun Nut, Science, and Demolition perks to be able to craft the really powerful stuff.

Settlement Supplies Expanded

This mod was recently reworked (it originally used FalloutSnip) to lessen the chances of save corruption or crashes. It adds a ton of new items for inclusion in your settlements, like cars and military vehicles, furniture and decorations, and all sorts of other things that probably should have been available to builders in the first place.

Homemaker

In the same vein, the Homemaker mod gives you more options for your settlements. It includes two new plantable crops, more walls and fences, 30 new types of lights, and new containers like ammo boxes and lockers. You can even use meat bags, if you like storing your extra supplies in bags of meat. Some do.

Armorsmith Extended

The hell with road leathers, why can't I strap pieces of armor on over my nice natty suit? In addition to being able to wear any outfit under your armor, you can also wear hats and helmets with gasmasks, you can add ballistic weaves to hats, and even craft new outfits altogether. This mod was created with FO4Edit.

Working Food Planters

There's a settlement in Fallout 4 where you'll find robots tending to a garden. Unlike the other settlements, their crops aren't scattered on the ground but are organized nearly in planters. This mod lets you build planters in all of your other settlements, too. Your reaction to this is either "Uh, who cares?" or "Oh my gosh I absolutely, totally need this ."

Place in Red

If you've been building settlements, you've no doubt been gnashing your teeth from time to time when pieces don't quite fit together. "Why don't junk fences snap together like walls?" you've howled into the uncaring sky. This should help! It lets you fudge the edges of things together, and instead of the red warning glow you'll be allowed to actually place them there. Note: this is not exactly a mod, but a file for Cheat Engine, which you'd need to download to get it to work.

Continue to the next page for some visual tweaks!