Gamers love to hate the output of Bethesda Studios, the company responsible for the Elder Scrolls games, along with Starfield and the Fallout games from Fallout 3 onwards. But there’s one thing that keeps these games alive: they’re perhaps the most readily moddable games out there. For better or worse, the same janky-ass game engine that allows loot to fall through the floor and sends NPCs running into walls for hours on end also allows creative types the world over to implement their own weapons, characters, quests, and full-blown total conversions.
With the Fallout TV series driving renewed interest in the games on which it’s based, mod hosting site Nexus Mods has been holding a competition for Fallout mods, with the best new mod winning its creator a trip to Las Vegas. The competition attracted entries for all the Bethesda-era Fallout games—Fallouts 3, New Vegas, 4, and 76—and there are some really impressive pieces of work on show. We encourage you to download them and spend the next few weeks fiddling with your load order and tweaking records in xEdit to get them working with the rest of your mods, just so Bethesda can release another update that breaks everything again.
If that all sounds too much like good clean fun, though, you could also amuse yourself with some of the work of modders who took an, um, less orthodox approach to the challenge. Here are some of the funniest/strangest/most entertaining mods to be found lurking in the depths of the competition’s list of entries.
Let’s start with this little gem, which seeks to answer the question, “What if every time you got a kill in game, you teleported to one of 250+ locations?” What, indeed? As the mod’s creator says, “Hope you saved recently!” (This is solid advice for Bethesda games generally, it must be said.)
If your game’s feeling a little too safe, inject it with some chaos in the form of a script that randomizes the projectile every time a gun is fired. That’s right, every time you fire one of the guns you find in the Commonwealth—whether it’s the weird 10mm pistol you get in the starting Vault, one of the crappy pipe guns quickly that flood your inventory, or the unholy monster that somehow passes as Fallout 4’s assault rifle—you’ll have no idea what will emerge from the barrel! Will it be a whopping great armor-piercing .50 BMG bullet, a laser beam, or a railway spike? Who can say!?
Of course, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so the same applies to the guns wielded by people shooting at you. Have fun out there! (Also in the comedy ammunition department: Harpoon Plunger, which changes the projectiles fired from Fallout 76’s harpoon gun into toilet plungers.)
A quest mod that adds several hours’ worth of Lovecraft-inspired content to Fallout 3’s Point Lookout DLC. This looks legitimately good, but it’s on this list because it takes the game’s already creepy NPC models and gives them the Innsmouth look.
(As an aside: if you’re not familiar with Tale of Two Wastelands, it’s a mod that adds Fallout 3’s game data to Fallout: New Vegas, allowing you to complete both games in the same playthrough. This is possible because the two games use the same engine; New Vegas’s implementation is newer and includes features absent in Fallout 3, and it also plays nicer with modern computers, so many people prefer to play Fallout 3 this way. That means that while this is technically a mod for Fallout 3, it requires Fallout: New Vegas to run. See? That wasn’t confusing at all.)
Does your settlement need a day-glo representation of Bethesda CEO Todd Howard’s head? Look no further.
And speaking of Bethesda’s main man—with whom the community continues to have a complicated relationship—we’ll finish with a mod that you can’t actually download but deserves a mention anyway, largely because it conjures every the worst fear of anyone who’s ever spent time with a Bethesda game. Yep, it’s Todd! Or, more specifically, it’s an animated cardboard cutout of Todd (which is also a snail, somehow?) coming after them and all they hold dear. Who’s laughing now?
