1. Euclid's C FinderM (Fallout: New Vegas) The Archimedes II orbital laser releases a huge amount of heat energy, capable of reducing many foes to ashes. In order to use Euclid's C-Finder, the player's character must complete the quest 'That Lucky Old Sun' and choose to direct power to Archimedes II at the end of the quest.
2. The Tops casino in Fallout: New Vegas offers a classic kind of casino feel. The casino plays rat-pack music and has an entertaining, fun-loving vibe. Although The Tops only offers three games (blackjack, roulette, and slots), you’ll stick around for the added entertainment, which includes a theatre, restaurant, and a courtyard with a pool.

• Benny New Vegas

Las Vegas does have a small monorail system, but the portion of the monorail connecting the Strip to McCarran is only in the planning phase. This list is incomplete. Anyone can edit it to add or correct stuff. To look for entries to add, go through the list of F:NV locations at the Fallout wiki. There should be a note if it's a real world location.

1.) Take Your Time - It's a complete and utter understatement to say that Fallout: New Vegas is a time-suck. In reality, it's much, much more than that. New Vegas isn't something you can just pick up and optionally put a lot of time into. Really, you're going to be required to dump time into New Vegas if you have any hope of getting through the game's main narrative, which really only makes up for perhaps five or ten percent of the entire game. With that said, journeying through New Vegas will require patience and a willingness to lose time playing the game. We highly recommend you take your time with the experience, and see and do everything in the game that you possibly can. Some of the game's greatest gems, in fact, are ancillary quests and location explorations that you don't even have to undertake to get through the game. New Vegas isn't for someone who is looking for a ten or twenty hour experience, or even a fifty hour experience. Set aside a hundred hours or more if you really, really want to experience Fallout: New Vegas the way it was meant to be experienced. Otherwise, you're missing out.

2.) Experiment - Your experience in Fallout: New Vegas won't be a static one, even if for some reason you want it to be. The game is meant to be played and experienced differently by different gamers. Because of this, the one thing you're going to want to do as you go through the game is experiment, and this rings even more true if you intend on playing through the entire game more than once. If you're going to do the latter, you should bring the experimentation level up to a whole different echelon. Try talking to people in different ways, try befriending different factions and making enemies of other ones, and try to build out your character in different ways. For instance, a strong character that uses melee weapons and his fists to fight is a far different character than one who stresses energy weapons and stealth abilities. Fallout: New Vegas is all about drawing out these various permutations, so be sure to succumb to this aspect of the game's design, as it will no doubt maximize your enjoyment.

3.) Scour For Experience - Fallout: New Vegas is a lot of things. It's a sandbox, open-world game that stresses combat and character interaction. But at its very core, it's also a statistically-based game of numbers, and you know what that means... it's an RPG! Virtually all RPGs have some sort of leveling-up system, and Fallout: New Vegas is no different. Experience points will allow your character to level up from level 1 to level 30, and in between each level, you'll get to use skill points to make your character stronger (and occasionally get to swipe a new perk, too). These skill points are key, because dumping them into one of the game's skills will allow your character to do various activities more effectively. Therefore, you should be sure to scour for experience everywhere you can. All quests give you experience for completing them, as does killing enemies and creatures. But keep in mind that successfully bartering or completing a speech check, discovering new locations, hacking a computer or breaking through a locked door can earn you experience too!

4.) Lockpick and Science - We stressed this earlier in the Basics section, but stressing it again for good measure can't hurt or hinder... it can only help. Lockpick and Science are absolutely, positively amongst the most important non-combat skills in the entire game, and building them up steadily as you level up is integral if you want to see and do everything the game has to offer you. With a high Lockpick skill, locked doors will become easier and easier for you to unlock, while a high Science skill allows you to hack through the defenses of even the most ardently-protected computers. Be sure to dump points into Lockpick and Science from the get-go, and you won't be sorry. If you neglect these skills, however, expect to find increasingly numerous amounts of locked doors and sealed computers that you won't be able to do anything with. And that would be your loss if that happens (and make your life a whole lot more difficult, too)!

Benny New Vegas

5.) Speech and Barter - Just like with tip #4, which stressed the importance of the Lockpick and Science skills, here, we're going to stress another two skills we already discussed earlier in the Basics section, Speech and Barter. Speech and Barter are essentially just as important as Lockpick and Science, albeit for different reasons. Thus, you'll want to dump whatever skill points you can into these two skills, too. The Barter skill will allow you to purchase items for cheaper than you otherwise would, and sell items for more money. But the Barter skill will also allow you to force negotiations with many people who give you side quests and other tasks to earn more money and better loot and prizes for your hard work. Speech, on the other hand, has a much more straight-forward use, and it's to convince various people to see things the way you do. The higher your Speech skill, the easier it will be to tell people to do things and act in a way that you want them to, which will be hugely beneficial to you. Thus, in addition to Lockpick and Science, tent to the Speech and Barter skills, too. You won't be sorry that you did... you'll really only be sorry if you didn't. You've been warned!

6.) Don't Over-Extend - Okay, it's true. Fallout: New Vegas is all about exploration. You can quite literally do whatever you want in the game (though there are consequences to be had with just about every choice you make, which you will ultimately find out for yourself). But you don't want to get too crazy with the exploration, especially very early in the game. While you're still weak, try to stay close to safe areas, chipping away at weaker enemies and completing simple tasks and quests. Later, when your character gets stronger, and when you have more powerful equipment at your disposal, you can begin to work your way further and further out of your comfort zone. Either way, you should save as often as you can, because you never know when you're over-extending until it's too late... well usually, anyway.

7.) Side Quest With Regularity - A quick addendum to this tip would be to side quest with regularity and as early as you can. The reason you want to side quest regularly and early is simple. Not only is side questing a great way to earn lots and lots of experience points, but it's also a good way to start making friends with many of the game's towns and settlements, and most importantly with the Mojave Wasteland's various warring factions. As you work your way further and further through the game's main plotlines, you'll inevitably start making enemies, which will start pitting you against certain factions in the name of other factions. This will end up cutting you off from a great many side quest, so this is really the most important reason to side quest regularly and early. Because if you wait too long to undertake many side quests, being able to complete them or not may depend entirely on whether you're in good standing with a certain faction or not. So why not try to please everyone early, and then go from there.

8.) Make Choices Carefully - We've already established the many things Fallout: New Vegas is. But another thing it happens to be is a game where choices prove to be of the utmost importance. How you conduct yourself everywhere in the game has repercussions, and it's important that you carry yourself in a way that's compatible with how you're trying to work your way through the game. Good or bad, you should try to remain consistent, or you'll muddle your experience. But either way, you'll be making choices a lot where it's not even clear that you are, especially during conversations with the game's hundreds upon hundreds of NPCs. Because of this, you'll want to carefully navigate the game's conversation trees and their surrounding events. The best way to be sure you're making choices carefully, however, is to simply save often. If you don't like the way something turned out, whether it be an event, fight or conversation, you can simply reload a recent save and try things in a different way.

9.) Tend To Your Gear - This is easy to overstate, but then again, it's easy to understate, too. You'll really want to be cognizant not only of the condition of your armor and weapons, but also just what you're carrying with you as well, and what the condition of those items are. Remember -- you're bound to a strength-weight ratio that will only let you carry so much (dependent on your character's strength in S.P.E.C.I.A.L.), so you can't carry everything you want, snag everything you find in the environment, or more. You'll be encumbered before you know what hit you. What's most important to remember here, though, isn't only to carry only what you need and sell or drop everything else, but to make sure your gear is in good repair, too. A weapon that's on the verge of breaking won't be able to give you its full damage potential, and armor that's wearing down will provide less and less protection. There are few things more important than dealing damage and protecting yourself from damage, so tending to your gear (even apart from the obvious inventory management aspect of this entire ordeal) is integral to your success.

10.) Explore Locations - And finally, we've come to the final tip in our Ten Tips for Fallout: New Vegas. This one may seem obvious, but let us explain. The Mojave Wasteland, where all of the events in Fallout: New Vegas take place, is absolutely rife with locations. There are scores and scores of them to uncover, from big buildings, compounds and camps to the most minor of locations, like destroyed caravans, cave entrances and abandoned shacks (and everything in between). Scouring the map for new locations won't only earn you minor amounts of experience points, but it will allow you to find new people and new things of interest to explore. And better yet, the more locations you add to your map, the more locations you'll be able to quick-travel to. And as you'll find out (or already know if you're a veteran of Fallout 3), quick-traveling is absolutely vital if you want to get around the Wasteland in as little time as possible. So explore, explore, explore!

Fallout: New Vegas is a great game; arguably the best of the franchise. The issue is the game is unfinished in both a literal and figurative sense. It was a rush job that Obsidian did their best with but wasn't given enough time to realize their vision fully. Unlike a lot of Bethesda games, mods feel less like an extra and more like a necessity to keep the game fresh after a single run through, since everything in New Vegas is nearly inextricably hooked into the main quest. Almost every quest that first appears to be optional is still related to the main conflict in some way, with few exceptions. Some are even mandatory; you can just choose to do them out of order.

However, from that flawed yet amazing shell, a lot of modders have created mods that push the game closer to its more definitive version. Many fix bugs and common crashes or add extra content or even things that were intended to be added but were never finished. In any case, from the simple quality of life improvements to necessary bug fixes, and fun gameplay tweaks, here are the top New Vegas mods.

Fallout New Vegas Script Extender

If you want more, bigger, and more complex mods, you need the New Vegas Script Extender (NVSE). It's only technically a mod, since it's more like an extra bit of software modders use for most complex New Vegas mods, but deserves a spot for how ubiquitous it is and how much it improves the modding scene.

FNV 4 GB Patcher

Sadly, a necessary mod rather than a fun one. New Vegas is an excellent game, but clearly rushed and unstable. The 4 GB Patcher allows it to use more memory, increasing stability and reducing script lag and crashes from memory overload, a problem New Vegas shares with Skyrim where save bloat increases over time (exponentially so with mods) until eventually a given save file is too large for the game to process.

New Vegas Anti Crash (NVAC)

Another necessary one, this mod (NVAC) does what it says on the tin. The game will crash less. Mind, it only reduces a specific kind of crash (though it is a common one), but combined with the 4 GB Patcher and NVSE you're in pretty good shape.

NMC's Texture Pack

Now that the game is more stable, why not upgrade its looks? Let's be honest, New Vegas is an old game and wasn't particularly a looker at the time of its release anyway. Given the limited time Obsidian had to work with, it's understandable they focused more on gameplay than visuals, but modders have no such time constraints. While I never dive deep into heavily modded visuals for Bethesda games (I don't even use ENBs), I do appreciate a little upgrade after all these years, and NMC's Texture Pack hits the perfect middle ground between being easy to install and having wide-reaching changes to the game's visuals. Taking the game to vanilla Skyrim levels is quite the achievement, and looks plenty good enough for me. Plus if you want more, it plays well with most other graphic overhaul mods, as long as they don't replace the same textures of course.

Fallout Character Overhaul (FCO)

What NMC's Texture Pack does to most textures, FCO does to the people of the Mojave. Given you spend a good 40% of this game zoomed in on these people's faces, it's a pretty good idea to make sure you like what you're looking at. Similar to NMCTP, this boosts New Vegas to roughly vanilla Skyrim levels in terms of what each NPC (and your own character) looks like, which is perfectly tolerable for me.

EVE-Essential Visual Enhancements

One last boost to the visuals and we're good to go. This one (EVE) is primarily about weapon effects. Not weapon textures themselves, but bullet impacts, explosion textures, lasers, ash and goo piles on kill, and even character reactions to being shot. Given the lion's share of the other 60% of this game besides talking to people is shooting them, this will be sure to make your experience more enjoyable if you like seeing people get killed in flashy ways, like seeing brief skeletal outlines of people that get ashed by your laser criticals!

Project Nevada

All right, we're into the fun stuff now. Project Nevada is the overhaul for New Vegas. It expands on existing mechanics (the cybernetic implants available from the Clinic, for example), adds a boatload of new ones (like using explosives to unlock doors and chests), and also functions as a rebalance to the game, making combat more challenging and inventory space more precious.

The best part about it? It's fully customizable. Every feature can be changed, activated, or deactivated at will from its mod page. I don't like the reduced carrying capacity, so I crank it up, so I never have to worry about it again. You can make your movement speed faster, change how much health you get from Endurance and leveling, and everything else the mod touches.

It's the one mod I recommend everyone install because there's something there for every kind of player. For a while, it was the only New Vegas mod I ever installed since it did so much of what I look for in other modded Bethesda games already.

The Someguy Series

This is a master mod for all of the quests and companion mods made by someguy2000. Which mods you install after are up to you, but all are great. His quests and companions are fully voice acted and are quite interesting plot-wise after the first (New Vegas Bounties I is pretty bare bones) and just keep getting better both in voice acting quality, complexity, and plot as time goes on. It's very fun to play from the start and see how the mods evolve as he gets better at creating the quests.

New Vegas Uncut

Like the Someguy series, New Vegas Uncut is not one mod, but a collection. The entire purpose of this mod series is to complete and add content that was meant to be added to New Vegas, but was never released, usually due to lack of time on Obsidian's part. From weapons to entire quests, this nine mod series adds a lot to the game that's all lore friendly and could even be considered canon content. The only one I don't recommend is Freeside Open. While a very cool mod that interconnects all of Freeside's parts so there aren't so many loading screens to go through (similar to the Open Cities mods for the Elder Scrolls games) it is notoriously incompatible with a lot of other mods. Basically any mod that adds new quests, areas, some items, or NPCs to Freeside (which is a lot) breaks with Freeside Open in the mix. This includes one quest deep into New Vegas Bounties I (mentioned above) and makes the quest impossible to complete without going into the mod's files, sifting through the quest stages, and using the console to move the quest ahead.

Other than that, though, they're all worth a look.

Beyond Boulder Dome

Wait wait wait, before you let the silly name throw you off, hear me out. Beyond Boulder Dome is an excellent, DLC sized (about the size and quest length of the official Honest Hearts DLC) quest and locations mod based on the Boulder Dome location from Fallout: Van Buren (a sadly never realized third Fallout game from Black Isles Studios before they went under, that has extensive notes on what a lot of Fallout's world looks like and was the partial basis for New Vegas itself) that has an interesting and disturbing atmosphere. Definitely worth at least one playthrough.

Weapon Mods Expanded (WMX)

This WMX mod adds more weapon customizations for existing weapons, and even adds a few new ones. This is another mod I consider almost official content. The mod author (Antistar) is actually the reason why weapon mods are in New Vegas at all! He made a mod adding weapon mod kits to Fallout 3, and Obsidian liked the idea so much they implemented them as a base part of New Vegas. That makes this sort of a third generation mod; a modification of a core system based on an original mod. Which is pretty cool to me.

Moreover, it greatly expands the limited weapon mods of New Vegas (there were only three per weapon before if that since some weapons were left out entirely) and adds a lot of new variety and options to weaponry. Only three mods can be added to any one weapon still, so rather than adding the only three mods to a weapon and calling it fully kitted and never touching it again, there are actual trade-offs to modifying a weapon, since adding one mod means precluding another. It's not a deep change, but it adds enough, and in such a way that I sometimes forget it's not part of the base game, in much the same way I feel about Project Nevada.

Yukichigai Unofficial Patch

New Vegas is a buggy game. No fan will deny that. But thankfully, there are patches. A lot of them, in fact, making New Vegas pretty unique among Bethesda's games with active modding scenes. Oblivion and Skyrim, for example, have one big Unofficial Patch team that made it their mission to patch as many bugs as possible. New Vegas, perhaps fittingly, was more like the wild west, a bunch of dedicated individuals stomping out problems as they came across them.

YUP is but one of many extensive New Vegas patches, but it is my preferred for one big reason: it's easily compatible with the last mod on this list. If you don't use the below, then any of the other patches will do you pretty much just as well.

A Tale Of Two Wastelands

Recreating a previous game in the series in the newest game's engine iteration is kind of the holy grail of Bethesda game modding. The Elder Scrolls series has had many failed, abandoned, or stalled projects from Morrowblivion to Skyblivion and Skywind, and several others that have produced little results over the years. Even the New Vegas recreation in Fallout 4's engine has borne little fruit since it was initially revealed.

A Tale of Two Wastelands is the exception. To be fair, they had it a little easier: Fallout 3 and New Vegas use almost identical engines and assets, and they got permission early from Bethesda to work on the project. That isn't to undersell their accomplishment though; successfully linking two games (Fallout 3 and New Vegas in this case) into one enormous, seamless game is no small task.

Still updated, this is the way to play the previous generation Fallout games in my opinion. Starting in Vault 101 and making your way to the Mojave is quite satisfying, especially with its compatibility with certain other mods (Project Nevada being the big standout). You can always go in reverse as well, though that gets a bit weird, narratively speaking.

It is an excellent, ambitious mod and improves on both games by applying New Vegas' new mechanics and more interesting perks to Fallout 3's gameplay, and let you enjoy an improved version of 3 while carrying over many of the fun weapons and other items from 3 to its sequel.

And that's the list! Happy modding!