Essential mods, tweaks and utilities for Fallout 4 VR

A list and guide of essential modifications and ini tweaks that are needed to make the game (in my eye) feel acceptable.

This will be updated as I find more things that I feel are very important to implemented into the game.

Introduction

So after messing around with FO4 VR a bit and doing much reading on Reddit, I have found quite a few fixes to absolutely infuriating issues. Some of which are ini tweaks and others are mods. But between them both, I feel that these are things that should have been done/implemented from the get-go to make this a more pleasant VR experience. I will be updating this as I find more tweaks or mods to make screwy things functional/more acceptable.

Please note all these are for the “release” branch of the game, not the beta branch as some mods are not tested/updated to work on the beta branch, I will also do my best to keep this updated to things you still need as patches fix things.

If steam blocks any of these links, search the name of the item on Google or Nexus Mods and hopefully that’ll sort the issue.

Lastly, before we start, MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP ANY FILES YOU MESS WITH/MAKE SURE YOU CAN REVERT CHANGES.

I am not responsible for any issues/undesirable effects you create.

I did not find any of these tweaks myself, these are all sourced from various places online, if you want credit for a particular tweak please let me know.

In Game Settings

Okay, so a few of the things that were highly recommended to be done within the FO4 VR config tool (mentioned later,) we can now do in FO4 itself. (In game options? What a novel idea!) We will start here with our tinkering since we should run the game first anyways to generate any additional files/folders the game & or mods need.

(Note you can do all these with a keyboard and mouse, just launch the game and use the mouse and keyboard in the window that pops up if you wanna adjust this while following along rather than do it all from within VR)

First off is Anti Aliasing, TAA is generally recommended by most, you can do FXAA if you wish or run disabled, but we can tinker TAA later on to make it less fuzzy while still providing AA (which we will be doing later on.)

We also probably wanna turn off Character lighting, this will remove an unnatural “godly glow” that is on NPCs and rather make them look like they are in the proper lighting for their environment.

The last thing we may wanna do, this is subjective entirely but I could not STAND the green flashlight. Unfortunately, the flashlight is tied to your pipboy light. We can still make the pipboy have a green tint while making its flashlight fairly white though. If you wanna check this out in under “Display” Go to Pipboy colour RGB values, (NOT the HUD colour.) and max out all values to the far right and below are the number of left key pressed from the right side.

(Please note, the way the Vive and Oculus work there are more green pixels then there are red and blue, by altering the colour of the pipboy screen it will be like effectively lower the resolution of the pipboy, with that said we are going to be adjusting pipboy resolution in a later step to make it much more legable. But if you want the absolute sharpest pipboy I would leave this alone.)

R: 7
G: 0
B: 9

And that should be it, the preview will have a very pale green. You can consult the below image if need be.

The other options are highly subjective based on the performance of your computer so I can’t help with that, but I do HIGHLY recommend trying your best to set up the in-game settings how you want now, any alteration to in-game settings MAY screw with the manual file tweaks we are about to do. For the time being though we can shut the game down, that’s all we need to be doing here.

Utilities

Vortex

For this guide I am recommending people move onto Vortex Mod manager, it is the “new version” of NMM and comes built in with LOOT, and more importantly built in support for FO4 VR. I am still in the process of learning Vortex myself, so if you come across a better way to do this, or have a lil write up on how to properly utilise it, please feel free to let me know, if you want further education on the manager there are likely youtube tutorials around for it.

Once download, run and install the utility and login to your Nexus account. It should auto handle Nexus mods. Once installed go to the “games” tab on the sidebar and then to “discovered” and allow Vortex to manage FO4 VR. If done correctly it should show up in the “Managed” tab.

Fallout 4 VR Configuration Tool

As strange as this may sound, I recommend you download this via the Mod Manager link rather than using the manual link because NMM (and I assume Vortex) can tell you when there is an update to this utility. Once installed right-click the entry in the “Mods” list and select “Open in File Manager” this will take you to the .exe and you can put it on the desktop or wherever else is helpful since we will be using it a fair bit.

While not as useful as it used to be when the old guide was written, there is still a ton of tinkering we can do with this application. For now launch it and make sure you hit the “switch to Fallout4VR” button so we are sure we are editing FO4, (be default it will be editing Skyrim VR.) After that we can shut it down. For the other utilities.

LOOT

As mentioned before LOOT (The Load Order Optimisation Tool) is integrated into Vortex so we don’t need to worry about this.

Google Drive Fallout 4 VR Mod Compatability List

Not much to say here other then its a Google Doc of pancake FO4 mods that are tested to be working for FO4vr, you won’t need this if you are looking to stick to this guide, this is only if you wanna mode the game beyond what “fo4vr was intended to be.”

Please note the above was written when I first wrote this guide, I don’t know (and can’t figure out) how to see an update history, so I am not sure if this chart is still actively monitored. If I can find out if it is I will omit this.)

INI Tweaks

Okay, so for our first out of game alterations we are going to be starting with ini tweaks. For the most part ini tweaks are a one time deal and things are over and done with and shouldn’t need to be touched again (at least assuming updates don’t screw with em.) So probably a good place to start.

Before we begin, all of these edits are on the files in C:\Users\*usernamehere*\Documents\My Games\Fallout4VR and not in the games install directory. So when I am referring to the below ini files that the location I mean. We good? Some/all of the files we will be tinkering with exist in our install directory as well, we are not touching those ones. This is important because they will not work if you do. With all that said we are going to be editing with the Fallout 4 VR configuration tool and not manually, but if you wanna do backups those are what you wanna backup.

So we are going to start with softening the blurring caused by TAA. (if you decide you want to use FXAA and have a way to soften that to make it less burry let me know!)

Open up the Fallout 4 VR configuration (if you have lost it open up Vortex, find the installed mod “\Fallout4VR and SkyrimVR Configuration Tool” and right click and “open in file manager” make a shortcut to this on your desktop in the event you need to open it again.)

Once open double check you are in FO4VR mode and not SkyrimVR (check title bar.) You will want to search for the entries below mentioned in the “ini paramiters” section of the table, and change the value with the number in the “edited value” section. You are searching using the “Filter” box. (Please note; some of these values are already set but I left them in for completeness sake/in the event they happened to have been screwed with, check “default value” to see if it is a stock setting or not if unsure.)