Finding mods for games is the easy part. Regardless, there are all kinds of sites and services that host mods for gamers to download and use. Here are some of the largest repositories. The Nexus sites are primarily community-driven, with free hosting and distribution of mods made by just about anyone.
Mod DB is one of the oldest modding resource sites out there. Game developers can support the Steam Workshop for their games, which then allows communities to create and change the game, while handling all mod hosting and sorting through Steam directly.
Steam Workshop makes modding dead simple. Curse , recently acquired by Twitch, is a multimedia organization that holds a wide range of gaming-centric media. At E3 , game publisher Bethesda introduced the Bethesda Creation Club , a curated marketplace for mod creators to be able to make and sell content for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition. The idea of paid mods may be a touchy subject for some, though. Several games and series have specific community sites where most of their mods originate.
The popular mods from these sources may be rehosted elsewhere, but these niche sites tend to be the primary community for the games.
Here are some examples:. On the other hand, some especially useful mods support many different games. They show you the mods you have installed, include abilities to enable or disable individual mods, and can help let you know when an update is available. That said, there are some mod management tools available that help in specific games. If your game of choice has enough mods, chances are someone has developed a manager for them. Here are a few popular ones:. Because of that, modders also created several key Bethesda-focused management tools.
LOOT helps you organize your mod list and load order, saving you the time and energy of having to learn what most of the order needs to be yourself. Additionally, LOOT can help point out opportunities for optimization in some mods, such as redundant components or dirty edits that will only slow things down.
Wrye Bash helps you get into the thick of things in terms of mod management by helping you access the parts of mods that might need cleaning or even file merging. Modding is about fine-tuning games to suit your tastes, making changes and alterations to games based on whatever you and mod creators see fit. You could change something visual, you could change how your character gains power, or you could swap out the entire game soundtrack for a fan-made orchestral version.
The most popular mods for the most popularly modded games tend to be aesthetic mods that tweak the look and sound of a game. Take Skyrim , one of the most heavily modded games of all time, and take a look for some of its mods. But a picture is worth a thousand words. Click the images to enlarge them if you want to bask in all the improvements.
Audio mods are only popular in some games, but they can do interesting things. Some mods focus on decreasing visual quality, to allow games to run better on underpowered hardware or simply increase the frame rate for a more buttery feel.
Many competitive players reduce graphical quality just enough so that the important details are still visible, but the framerate can be as high as the hardware will allow it to be. Fixing bugs and enhancing system compatibility are the key reasons for technical modding. Sure, it may feel like every classic game is getting an HD remaster this week, but not all fan favorites are so lucky.
A supportive modding community can help add a much-needed layer of modern polish. Playing the older games on modern monitors results in ugly black bars surrounding the picture, or worse, visual stretching and distortion. Big difference, eh? Some mods take aim at player-discovered bugs. Other games, such as Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords , may contain unfinished content, causing some weird dead ends in gameplay and storytelling.
Communities have banded together to resolve these in different ways, such as The Sith Lords Restored Content mod , which utilizes unused assets in the original game as well as original efforts to effectively close off the loose ends. Gameplay mods change how you play a game, covering aspects like difficulty scaling, character progression systems, control schemes, adding or removing certain mechanics, or even interface changes.
If you've never used mods before, a great place to start is the Steam Workshop. PC Gamer is going back to the basics with a series of guides, how-tos, and deep dives into PC gaming's core concepts. We're calling it The Complete Guide to PC Gaming , and it's all being made possible by Razer , which stepped up to support this months-long project. Thanks, Razer! Typically the mods in the Workshop are categorized by type, and you can use keyword searches to look for something specific.
Mods are also voted on by users so you can see what's most popular and what's been downloaded the most by other players. The best part is that installing mods in the Workshop is almost always a one-click process. Just click the subscribe button on any mod you'd like to install, and they'll be added to your game the next time you launch it. To remove a mod, you just need to click unsubscribe. Some games, such as recent Civilizations, have in-game menus where you can activate and deactivate mods you subscribe to.
It's an easy way to add and remove mods from your games, and there are new mods added all the time. The simplicity of the Steam Workshop is great, but when mods are bigger and more complex they may need more than a single click installation. You need to create a free account to download mods, but if you're into modding it's absolutely worth it. Nexus Mods has its own mod manager called Vortex , which helps you manage the mods you download, makes installation much easier, and lets you know when there are new versions available for updating.
Once installed, it'll even detect which games you own that it supports, making it easy to get started with modding them. Nexus Mods has a massive and highly enthusiastic community—there are over 15 million members who have collectively downloaded nearly 3 billion files. The site also publishes mod spotlight features created by the staff, and even has a rewards system for modders that can earn them a bit of money for their hard work paid by the site, not by the users.
If you want to really get into modding your games, get familiar with Nexus Mods. It's an outstanding and reliable resource of the best mods ever made. Mod DB is a long-running modding community website, first established in Since then it's amassed thousands of mods and over a million downloads. It's an excellent resource to hunt for mods for older games that might not turn up at the Steam Workshop or Nexus Mods. Mod DB provides a voice for modders, and there are many who post developer blogs and news about mods in progress.
It's also the site of the Mod of the Year Awards , a contest that's been running for the past 17 years, where users can vote on their favorite mods. The three sites listed above should provide you with mods for just about every game you're looking for, but there are still other places to look for mods for specific games.
And if you're looking for a place to jump in, we cover mod news regularly here on PC Gamer, and we've got lots of articles to point you at some great mods for great games:. While we wish modding were always a simple affair, it can often be complicated and require a bit of work on your end. Here are a few tips to keep in mind. Back up your saved games Using mods can have an effect on your saved games, and you may run into problems further down the line.
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