What Fallout 4's Next-Gen Update Means For Your Mods

Mods are a big part of Fallout 4, and some might be impacted by the upcoming update.

By Hannah Adkins

With less than a week to wait until Fallout 4 receives a next-gen update, it's only natural for players who have carefully curated the mods they used on their save files to begin feeling a little daunted about what the updates are going to mean for them. While the update does include 60FPS mod support, PC players are only naturally concerned their mods may begin to create issues or possibly even broken altogether, and as it's an in-place update and not a separate download, these concerns have become numerous with the update approaching.

Naturally, Bethesda has responded to help put some of these worries to rest. In a post on X from the official Bethesda Game Studios account on April 19th, it's noted that the developers have "worked to minimize impact to the majority community mods." However, the post also mentions that some PC mods that rely on version-specific content may be affected.

Bethesda
(Photo: Bethesda Game Studios)

Spoilers for the Fallout television series below!

Mods in Fallout 4

A large draw to Fallout 4 has always been its hands-on aspect in rebuilding the Commonwealth, allowing players to utilize workshops, crafting benches, and materials to rebuild society upon 37 unlockable settlements across the map. A large part of this has been modding tools being introduced to the game in 2016, driving peak player numbers that haven't been passed until recently with the release of the Fallout Prime Video series driving gamers back to the games and encouraging first-timers as well. Mods have always played a large part in allowing players to craft the post-apocalyptic settlements of their dreams nightmares, from adding Nuka-themed content and more, to smoothing out the settlements to make them easier to build upon, to adding entirely new player apartments, mods are a large part of rebuilding the Commonwealth in Fallout 4.

Outside of enhancing the building capabilities of Fallout 4 mods are numerous and vast, allowing players to make changes to companions, unlocking S.P.E.C.I.A.L. perks and points, access to guns and armor otherwise unaccessible in the base game, allowing players to skip through the introduction scene if they've played through that particular sequence so, so many times already...and really so much more. Mods are a big deal to the Fallout 4 community, so much so that an entire DLC-sized mod, Fallout: London, is coming to the game soon as well (though it was just delayed due to this oncoming update).

A Nexus Mods community manager has also made a post discussing what the updates to Fallout 4 will mean for the modding community, noting:

"Firstly, it's almost certainly going to be incompatible with Fallout 4 Script Extender on launch, which will temporarily prevent the use of any mods that require F4SE to function. We're hopeful the F4SE team will get a sneak peek at the update a few days early to give them a head start. The script extender may not be updated to support the Epic Games release, depending on how different it is from the Steam/GOG builds. Next, advanced mods may need updating separately, even if F4SE is made compatible. This can happen if any hooks into the game they use have changed. Finally, any traditional mods (i.e. those created purely with the Creation Kit) may need some minor tweaks and updates based on the changes to the base game. This would be especially true for any mods that interact with the quests or locations that have been fixed by Bethesda."

If you're part of the way through a playthrough with mods that you'd like to ensure you can finish, you'll likely want to stop your game from automatically updating, which you can read how to do here. To help identify mods that are compatible with the update, Nexus is also adding two new tags for modders to use that will indicate whether the particular mod "Works with Next-Gen Update" or is "Broken in Next-Gen Update."

Related:

If you're amongst one of the many diving into Fallout 4 because of the Prime Video series, there are mods for you on Nexus as well including a mod that makes the player survivor look as close to Lucy as it gets, a mod that plasters Cooper Howard's pre-war face all over billboards, and an okey-dokey icon. 

The next-gen update is coming to Fallout 4 April 25th.

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