New Vegas: First playthrough

[Wolfskin75]

Hello,

 

This is will be my first time playing New Vegas and I was looking at the mods I will use and realized very quickly I have NO IDEA about New Vegas mods. So, could someone please lay the groundwork for me. I am have played Fallout 4 vanilla and Super heavily modded (255+). I tend to work with appearances (CBBE, Bodyslide, KS hairdo... etc) but nothing looks the same for New Vegas. Any suggestions or super helpful tips to get me going with New Vegas mods?

[dubiousintent]

I recommend you read the entire "FNV General Mod Use Advice" article to understand the differences between this game and others you may have experience with; especially if this is your first attempt to mod FNV or it's been more than a year since you last did so.

"Texture packs" (and other "beautification" mods such as "body replacers") don't usually show up in the "load order". (They are replacing vanilla assets; thus they overwrite existing files.) And the issue with them is what size/resolution of the images you are using. Larger/"hi-rez" textures require more pixels, and larger screen display monitors multiply that requirement in a non-linear way. While your hardware may technically be able to handle it, the game was published in late 2010, designed for Windows Vista with maximum screen displays of 1920x1080, with default image sizes of 512x512 pixels. The game engine texture cache tends to be the bottleneck: "leaking memory" and causing "stutter". Please see the wiki "Display resolution versus Image Size" article.

 

The upshot is: get a stable, playable game first before you apply "beauty" mods, and prioritize and add (and TEST) them one at a time.

 

-Dubious-

[madmongo]

Fallout New Vegas technically can have up to 255 mods. Personally I think it has some sort of signed vs unsigned number bug, which would give you problems at anything above 127 mods, but it usually doesn't break immediately if you go over. More often, it's somewhere around 135 to 140 mods or so where it will break. The game doesn't break completely (usually). It just starts misbehaving in very weird ways. Always have less than 128 mods if you want to be safe.

 

FNV is a 32 bit game. The default for the game is that it can only access 2 GB of RAM. It doesn't matter if you have 40 GB of RAM in your PC. The game will only access 2 GB out of that. There's a 4 GB patch that you'll probably want to install so you can at least double it's memory usage, but that's as far as you can take it.

 

As Dubious said, the texture caching system tends to be what gets you, as it seems to leak memory. The more you play, the slower the game will get, until finally it crashes. Or you'll enter an area with a lot of textures to load and it will crash immediately without getting slow first. Using higher resolution textures will make your game look prettier, but you'll put more stress on the texture subsystem and the game will crash more often. Personally, I stick with the default textures and have the graphics options set down a notch. That, plus New Vegas Anti-Crash, makes for a much more stable game.

 

FNV does not have body morphs like FO4. You get a body. That's it. There are no sliders for the body. There has been some work to port some of the bodyslide stuff to FNV, but that is fairly recent and hasn't been adopted much by the FNV community. Mostly, you find a body type that you like, install armor and clothing mods along with it, and you play that body type. Roberts and Breezes are the two most popular male body replacers. Type 3 is one of the more popular female body replacers, and it has numerous variants like Type 6, etc. There are quite a few hair mods, more for females than males, but there are some male beard and hair additions available.

 

Save often. The game doesn't auto-save periodically like FO4 does. There are a lot of auto-saves when you transition through doorways, but if you spent the last 5 hours outside and the game crashes, there probably aren't any auto-saves for those last 5 hours. That's a lot of game-play to potentially lose.

 

What I personally do is download the base game without any mods, then copy the entire Fallout New Vegas folder (under Steam) somewhere so that I can easily get back to that and don't have to download the entire game again if it gets completely borked. Then I add mods one by one and test them out. Once I get a configuration I really like, I copy that entire folder somewhere as well, so that I can easily get back to it if I install another mod later and that ends up completely borking my game. This uses a lot of disk space, but most PCs these days have gobs of disk space so it's no biggie.

 

As for mods, start with YUP, NVAC, and New Vegas Stutter Remover. A lot of mods will require NVSE (New Vegas Script Extender) and some newer mods may also require JIP or Lutana. Get the game working correctly without NVSE or JIP/Lutana first, then add those in as needed.

 

Installing mods isn't as easy and foolproof as it is for FO4. Make sure you look up how to manually install mods. Many mods won't download and install correctly using mod managers, so knowing where things are supposed to end up can help you troubleshoot what went wrong.

[madmongo]

I hate to double-post to the same thread, but since you are coming from FO4, here is some advice about the two games.

 

Fallout 4 is a shooter. It has a story, but the story is only to get you from one place to another so you can go shoot stuff. Fallout New Vegas is a true role playing game. All of the conversation options end up at the same place in FO4. They don't in FNV. You can easily piss someone off and have them refuse to talk to you just by clicking the wrong conversation option. If you try to be as rude and sarcastic as possible, some NPCs won't like you and won't give you their quest to do.

 

Unlike FO4, a lot of what you do really matters. Don't go into it thinking that you can just click away on different conversation options and not think about what you are doing. In FO4, you really only get one choice, which side you want to win. In FNV, you get more choices than that in the first non-tutorial quest you come across. You can be good. You can be evil. You can be everything in-between.

 

There aren't sarcasm options for every conversation, sadly. That's one thing I liked about FO4. But one thing I hated about FO4 was that nothing you did mattered. You could be as mean and sarcastic as you wanted, and no one would treat you any differently. That's not the way FNV works. Say the wrong thing to Veronica Santangelo, and she will pretty much refuse to talk to you afterwards. Talk too much to Joe Cobb, and the entire town of Goodsprings will no longer trust you, and they won't let you do the quest to save the town. What you say and do matters. That's what makes FNV such a better game.

 

Another important difference for FNV is that the main quest ends the game. If you go through the final stage of the main quest, that's it. You're done. It's not like FO4 where you can keep playing afterwards. You do get the option to go back to where you were right before you went into the final stage, but you can't actually complete the main quest and keep playing.

[dubiousintent]

Minor amendment: You can't continue playing ... at least not without a mod for that purpose such as "CAGE - Continue After Game Ending" or "After War Nevada (AWN)". But they just let you continue in the Mojave with mods.

 

-Dubious-

[Wolfskin75]

Hello,

 

I FINALLY was able to start up FONV. (had the "Installer" issue) but Thank you for your help.

[Wolfskin75]

Fallout New Vegas technically can have up to 255 mods. Personally I think it has some sort of signed vs unsigned number bug, which would give you problems at anything above 127 mods, but it usually doesn't break immediately if you go over. More often, it's somewhere around 135 to 140 mods or so where it will break. The game doesn't break completely (usually). It just starts misbehaving in very weird ways. Always have less than 128 mods if you want to be safe.

 

FNV is a 32 bit game. The default for the game is that it can only access 2 GB of RAM. It doesn't matter if you have 40 GB of RAM in your PC. The game will only access 2 GB out of that. There's a 4 GB patch that you'll probably want to install so you can at least double it's memory usage, but that's as far as you can take it.

 

As Dubious said, the texture caching system tends to be what gets you, as it seems to leak memory. The more you play, the slower the game will get, until finally it crashes. Or you'll enter an area with a lot of textures to load and it will crash immediately without getting slow first. Using higher resolution textures will make your game look prettier, but you'll put more stress on the texture subsystem and the game will crash more often. Personally, I stick with the default textures and have the graphics options set down a notch. That, plus New Vegas Anti-Crash, makes for a much more stable game.

 

FNV does not have body morphs like FO4. You get a body. That's it. There are no sliders for the body. There has been some work to port some of the bodyslide stuff to FNV, but that is fairly recent and hasn't been adopted much by the FNV community. Mostly, you find a body type that you like, install armor and clothing mods along with it, and you play that body type. Roberts and Breezes are the two most popular male body replacers. Type 3 is one of the more popular female body replacers, and it has numerous variants like Type 6, etc. There are quite a few hair mods, more for females than males, but there are some male beard and hair additions available.

 

Save often. The game doesn't auto-save periodically like FO4 does. There are a lot of auto-saves when you transition through doorways, but if you spent the last 5 hours outside and the game crashes, there probably aren't any auto-saves for those last 5 hours. That's a lot of game-play to potentially lose.

 

What I personally do is download the base game without any mods, then copy the entire Fallout New Vegas folder (under Steam) somewhere so that I can easily get back to that and don't have to download the entire game again if it gets completely borked. Then I add mods one by one and test them out. Once I get a configuration I really like, I copy that entire folder somewhere as well, so that I can easily get back to it if I install another mod later and that ends up completely borking my game. This uses a lot of disk space, but most PCs these days have gobs of disk space so it's no biggie.

 

As for mods, start with YUP, NVAC, and New Vegas Stutter Remover. A lot of mods will require NVSE (New Vegas Script Extender) and some newer mods may also require JIP or Lutana. Get the game working correctly without NVSE or JIP/Lutana first, then add those in as needed.

 

Installing mods isn't as easy and foolproof as it is for FO4. Make sure you look up how to manually install mods. Many mods won't download and install correctly using mod managers, so knowing where things are supposed to end up can help you troubleshoot what went wrong.

 

Thank you for this. I am going to miss bodyslide and uniques. I tend to play with smaller chested MC's then is normally the case. but. I hear the game is good so I will suffer through it. lol

[dubiousintent]

I tend to play with smaller chested MC's

 

Take a look at the "Type 3 Berry" bodies. (There are actually several versions of the smaller "Berry" form.)

 

Also, the attempt to port "CBBE Bodyslide" is for the Type 3 "Berry Cali" body. Heed the advice that it is for "EXPERIMENTAL INTENDED FOR ADVANCED MODDERS!!!!".

 

-Dubious-