Tale of Two Wastelands for Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
Gregtech: New Horizons
Technically a modpack rather than a mod though. I love grinding through technological advancements.
Mekanism, hands down.
Followed VERY closely by Fallout 2 Restoration Project.
I can’t believe I blanked on them in my own reply, but to piggyback off your Restoration Project nomination: the Talking Heads Addon and Talking Heads Actually Talk Mod for Fallout 2 Restoration Project (updated) are both absolutely insane, and breath some new life into the game while seamlessly slotting in next to the existing art and voice acting.
I love mekanism, often run it as my only mod
GB Mario 2 in full color
promods for ETS 2 and ATS 2
Sven-Coop for Half-Life 1.
I’ve played, almost daily, since the mod was released in January 1999. Over a quarter century. I’ve got admin in a number of servers, so a lot of days I’m just hopping on briefly to make sure the servers are running smoothly and no one is trolling. New maps are still being regularly released, many by people who have been mapping for it for a solid 15-20 years.
No idea of total hours. It wasn’t added to Steam until 2016, but I have multiple thousands of hours logged since then. I’ve got to be over 10-12k hours since the beginning. Easily.
Everything else in my life has shifted. Sven-Coop is my rock.
Rimworld multiplayer.
I really want to check that out, but it is incompatible with my favorite mod: Save Our Ship 2. I refuse to give up SOS2 just to play with another human.
Its pretty smooth but I’ve had a lot of desync issues because I have a long list of mods I try to play with.
They do PvP on the mod. Its pretty cool you have 4 teams and each player controls 1 pawn and the fight for objectives and capture and craft their way to victory.
I couldn’t pick a single one, but I got endless joy from all the Quake mods back in the day. Not just level designs and sprite replacement, but complete weapon changes that made everything different, Quake Kart, Cujo, etc. It seemed the sky was the limit.
Terraria - Calamity.
Expands the game to 2.5x the content.
Absolutely amazing, would recommend buying Terraria just to play it.
Sky UI. Not the same game without it.
So mandatory that mentally I don’t even consider it a mod.
Enderal, a whole new game built ontop of Skyrim. Offers an entirely different setting, map, class system, enemies, spells, and has an actual story that you will not soon forget.
Enderal and also its predecessor Nehrim are absolutely amazing! They’re so fantastic, I don’t even consider them mods, I see them as full games.
PS: Yes, I know Arkwend exists. But I’ve never played it because I personally dislike Morrowind and its gameplay systems. Especially the god aweful random hit chance system Oblivion got me into RPGs so that will forever be my gold standard for RPG games.
I had genuinely forgotten about it without playing it. Thanks for mentioning it.
Just started that recently, very good so far.
I don’t know if time has been kind or not, but when I discovered Fall from Heaven II for Civilization VI I never launched the base game again.
Garry’s Mod
It’s hard to think of any one mod that got remotely close to changing a game the way GMod did for HL2/CS:S/source engine titles. I spent thousands of hours in GMod as a kid, it added infinite teplaya ility to the HL2 campaign, forums like Facepunch and PHWOnline became my second home. There was a ton of content to be loaded from there and FPSBanana, the thriving webcomic scene was truly special.
I think I haven’t played a single skirmish round of Company of Heroes 1 without the Blitzkrieg mod in the past 15 years.
There are so many… I’ll just go with a couple
Fallout 3 Wanderers Edition always comes to mind for making that game so much better to play and more stable than the base game. I wouldn’t replay FO3 any other way
Elden Ring Seamless Co-op is what ER co-op should have been to begin with. God it’s so good I put another couple hundred hours in to replay every inch of ER+DLC with a friend.
The Elden Ring Seamless Co-op is probably the only way I would have been able to finish the game and the DLC. It allowed myself and 3 others (who probably wouldn’t be able to complete it either) to beat most if not all the bosses.
I’ll check out Fallout 3 Wanderers Edition.
