New Vegas Rebuilt Guide - Collections Early Preview Release

[bobologs]

Hey guys! I've been lurking here for a while. It's time to (partially) reveal something I've been quietly working on for about 2-3 years now. Here's the opening for it:

 

I heard Fallout: New Vegas was pretty good. My first playthrough stopped at 50 hours with half of the map unexplored, 3/4ths of the DLCs unfinished and tons of quests still to do. It floored me. It's one of the best RPG video games ever made. New Vegas has a remarkably crafted world full of memorable characters, complex factions and fantastically written, interwoven quests offering dramatically different outcomes. It’s baffling how much content Obsidian Entertainment made in just 18 months.

But its infamously creaky game engine and console requirements held its vision back. I knew this when I decided to play it for the first time in 2019. I wanted to give myself the best possible first experience of the game, so I took a few days installing as many mods as I could to fix bugs, optimise performance and revitalise the visuals without touching the gameplay design. During subsequent playthroughs I found mods that restored the strongest cut content and added others enhancing specific gameplay systems without drastically changing the original feel.

New merge mods made several others redundant, more content was restored and new gameplay changes emerged. Now my mod list sits at 400ish reworking practically every imaginable aspect of the game in complementary ways. I think the mod list I’ve come up with really makes New Vegas shine as a masterful RPG experience with a busier world, more immersive UI and harder but more fun gameplay. I thought I could thoroughly note my modding journey as a guide for complete beginners to read through using Vortex as the recommended mod manager.

I'll be calling my guide New Vegas Rebuilt.

Whilst I was working on the guide, Collections became an incredibly useful feature for Vortex users. I'd already written the guide for it and it was already split into categorised sections focusing on different aspects of New Vegas, so I thought it'd make sense to make a Collection for each relevant section of the guide. They're designed in such a way that you should be able to mix and match the Collections to your liking without requiring any content from one another apart from compatibility patches. There's 11 in total.

The guide is now on the home stretch. It's currently a 35 page GDrive document with most of the content explaining in detail what each mod does for complete beginners. It also provides individual download links to every mod for people who don't want to use Vortex.

The next step is to do some more guide testing with new users, then if all is stable I think I'll be converting the guide into a website. However, before I do that I thought I'd release the Collections early. That way you guys, the NV players already familiar with the game, can give the Collections a test for me if you want to. You should also install Gopher's Stable New Vegas and Gopher's Darnified UI as I built my mod list/Collections on top of the mods already incldued there.

NV Rebuilt: Essential Bug Fixes

NV Rebuilt [3/10] - Restored Content

NV Rebuilt [4/10] - Gameplay HD

NV Rebuilt [5/10] - Gameplay+

NV Rebuilt [6/10] - NPC Expansion

NV Rebuilt [7/10] - Lighting

NV Rebuilt [8a/10] - Graphics

NV Rebuilt [8b/10] - Graphics Extras

FNV Rebuilt [9/10] - World Overhaul

NV Rebuilt [10a/10] - Patches & FPGE

NV Rebuilt [10b/10] - LOD Files

Feel free to add a comment to any Collections you check out via the comments rather than this thread to let me know if they work as expected, if you have any mod suggestions or if there's any mods you think could be updated/are redundant. Having you guys post your Collection-specific feedback via the Collection comments will make it easier to manage. I've been refining this for years and adding/removing mods as they were made redundant by better mods or included in compilation mods, but some things may have slipped through the net. Enjoy. :smile:

Update: You may receive a warning about my game version being different to yours. You can ignore this because it was caused by me accidentally generating LOD to the wrong folder which made Vortex recognise my NV install as a new game version. I haven't gotten around to fixing this yet since I'm still working on the guide and don't want to risk breaking my New Vegas install by wiping the LOD folder.

Edited August 25, 2023 by bobologs

[bobologs]

Hey guys. Been a while since I played New Vegas or touched this guide.

 

My approach has been every few months to start playing New Vegas again, update the existing mods, add new ones, then update the relevant Collections. I've started by updating the Essentials Collection. I've also removed the numbering system from the Collection title to not scare newcomers into thinking every single Collection is needed for it to work. I've also renamed it to Essential Bug Fixes to make its use clearer.

 

Essential Bug Fixes should nicely accompany Gopher's Stable New Vegas. It adds many additional small bug fixes for further stability alongside UI upscales. Expect the other Collections to be updated soon.

Edited August 25, 2023 by bobologs

[Mackintoke]

Looks cool. I used Viva New Vegas mod guide for my current playthru, which is still going strong after 600 hours LMAO. Just gotta beat Lonesome Road and then do the final missions. Next playthru I'm either gonna check out your guide or install the DUST mod.

 

Only things I can think of to recommend for the guide is MORE LEGION CONTENT! Also, after quarry junction is cleared of deathclaws, it'd be nice to see the workers from sloan going back to work in the quarry. Just something simple where they sandbox in the area. Maybe they can use the pick-axe animation in certain spots too. I have yet to find a mod that does this.

[listenwater4]

Going through this all now, cherry picking mods that look good.

So far its looking like the best FNV modding guide I've seen to date.

[Mackintoke]

Going through this all now, cherry picking mods that look good.

 

So far its looking like the best FNV modding guide I've seen to date.

Even better than the Viva New Vegas guide?

[listenwater4]

Even better than the Viva New Vegas guide?

The Viva New Vegas guide keeps the game vanilla while fixing bugs and adding a minimal amount of content.

 

This guide is just as organized/refined and yet brings alot more to the table.

 

After looking through this guide and going back and looking through Viva New Vegas again, Both guides are good but this one seems like its bringing New Vegas closer to the ultimate vanilla experience instead of just polished vanilla like VNV.

 

I haven't tested either guide and build my own modlists using the method but from what I have seen so far, If I was going to recommend a guide for modding new vegas in 2023 this would be the one I recommended.

Edited October 31, 2023 by listenwater4

[CliffSedge]

I've been trying to compare and contrast Viva New Vegas and New Vegas Rebuilt.

I made separate profiles in Vortex, and have followed each guide separately to test them out.

I first used VNV in the default profile, testing after each batch - utilities, bug fixes, UI, gameplay, etc. and it all worked very well.

I then went a little crazy and added hundreds of more mods until my game wouldn't work anymore. Instead of starting over with VNV, I decided to try NVRebuilt. It suggested the multiple profiles for testing, which I thought was a good idea. I have a "Vanilla Virgin" profile, untouched by mods; a "NVR Essentials" profile, which only uses the first two collections; a "NVR Core" profile for the recommended collections 1-4 and 7; and am now working on the "NVR Enhanced" profile for collections 1-7 and 9 (I'm going to ignore FPGE from 10a for now).

 

Here's my thoughts so far and some questions:

1. I followed the guide on GitHub before I realized the different collections were on Nexus. It looks like the mods listed in the guide collections are very different from the Nexus collections. The Nexus Collections look a lot bigger. Is this because the guide was written after creating the collections on Nexus, and many of the mods were removed from the guide during editing? Which would be better to use - the GitHub guide or just download all the NVR Collections from Nexus?

2. I have an old laptop not meant for gaming. It has a 60 Hz monitor, 4GB graphics card, and max 1600by900 resolution. As such, I can't do much to improve the lighting, textures, graphics overall. I want the game to look as good as it can, but I'd rather have smooth gameplay, less lag and freezing and see 8-bit graphics than have 1080p or 4k graphics, but have jerky controls and 5 frames-per-second refresh rate.

Are there general recommendations which visuals mods to use / not use from each guide?

* Following the guide, I noticed that I can't use DXVK with my graphics card, and VUI+ works much better than Darnified anything.

3. There are a lot of mods in collections 3 and 4 - Restored Content and Gameplay - that I'm not sure I need or want. Are there certain mods there that are must haves, and which ones are completely unnecessary? I really don't care about Philip Lem's glasses or if the Lucky 38 has the poster from the intro, for example.

4. Lastly (and probably the question I'm most interested in right now) there is a lot of overlap between the two guides; many of the utilities and bug fixes are the same in both, but there are a lot of differences too. are there mods in VNV that NVR should also have and vice versa? If I wanted to mix-and-match to create my own guide, what are the best mods from each?

[rhermansen]

First of all thank you for the huge effort over a long time to collect, evaluate, and organize all these mods.  What difficulty level is ideal when using these collections?  Would hardcore still be a good idea given what these mods are doing?