When you’ve been frozen for a few hundred years following a nuclear holocaust, only to be let out to explore the ravaged wasteland, you’re going to need some good audio to accompany you on your trek.
Thankfully, the Fallout 4modding community has done a bang-up job of providing a ton of audio-related mods that can tweak your sound experience for the better. Here are 10 of the best so far, in no particular order.
10 50 Atom Cats Pippod Tracks
The 50’s-inspired soundtrack of the Fallout games has been a signature staple of the series for quite some time. The undeniable charm of these historic treasures continues to stand the test of time, providing an excellent backdrop for mowing down scores of wasteland horrors.
50 Atom Cats Pippod Tracks features exactly 50 tunes from the classic era of radio pop music, including tracks from Joe Turner, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, just to name a few. They meld perfectly with Fallout 4’s existing soundtrack to expand upon it.
9 Fallout Suite - Soundtrack Extension
If you lean more on the ambient side of the musical scale, you might be interested in Fallout Suite - Soundtrack Extension, instead. This mod features nineteen individually recorded and mastered tracks performed with the same feel as the Fallout 4 soundtrack.
With about 1.5 hours of music added to the existing soundtrack, you’ll be able to traverse the Commonwealth with more musical variety beyond the standard tracks included with the vanilla game. The mod triggers many of these songs at key points throughout the game, including weather phenomena and time of day.
8 Lush Ambience - A Green Soundscape
There’s more to audio than the right kind of music. To sell the notion of a war-torn wasteland, Fallout 4 requires a good set of environmental sounds to go with the visuals.
Lush Ambience - A Green Soundscape does exactly that. It creates subtle sound effects such as wind passing through leaves, chirping birds and creaking wood effects to give off the haunting, isolating feel of travel on foot.
7 Commonwealth Warfare - Explosions
When it’s time to light the fires, you’d best do so with the right explosion effects waiting in the wings. Commonwealth Warfare - Explosions adds a ton of extra punch to the game’s in-game explosive sequences, making them far more dramatic than the original.
Certain effects such as the Fat Man nuke explosion are appropriately realistic this time around, with a slight impact delay as the sound travels, before thudding your computer speakers with a muffled low-end rumble that is far more ominous and realistic than the original.
6 You Talk Too Much
Fallout 4’s NPCs aren’t scripted in a particularly realistic fashion, which means many of them pipe up the moment you so much as cross their eye-line. This is particularly irritating, especially in groups of several huddle together.
You Talk Too Much realizes the silliness of this trigger system, and works to expand it in order to reduce NPC chatter across the board, without sacrificing anything in terms of dialogue options or story. In also quest-friendly, and guaranteed not to break your travels.
5 Quieter Settlements
Beggars can’t be choosers, but how’s a guy supposed to get any sleep with all that racket taking place across your settlement? Hammering and jabbering are just a few annoyances, not to mention those nerve-fraying power generators.
Luckily, Quieter Settlements is here to put a stop to all of that by tweaking the sounds for generators, turrets, fusion generators and builders, to name just a few. This creates a far more peaceful settlement without the need to scour the wasteland for a clean pair of earplugs!
4 Realistic Weapon Sounds
The weapon sounds in Fallout 4 aren’t bad, but there’s always room for improvement. Realistic Weapon Sounds does exactly as its name suggests by overhauling the various weapons in the game for a more accurate depiction.
Reverb, ambiance and volume have all been given a ground-up treatment, allowing for far more immersive and engaging combat with realistic effects that add a ton of immersion to the game.
3 Classic Fallout Ambient Music
Diehard long-term Fallout fans will enjoy the opportunity to inject songs from the original two games in the franchise into Fallout 4. Classic Fallout Ambient Music is not a replacer mod. Rather, it pairs up the classic soundtracks with the Fallout 4 album to create a mix of tunes for your next play through.
24 tracks have been added to the game, and are programmed to trigger during specific scenes and events. Hopefully this adds a bit more nostalgia into your gaming experience.
2 Radiant Birds
Birds are an integral way of drawing you into the environmental soundscape of Fallout 4, which is why Radiant Birds is such a great mod. When paired with other environmental audio mods, it can make the Commonwealth feel simultaneously alive, and haunting at the same time.
Crows are spooky and ominous, especially when traversing through the shattered woodland areas, and seagulls dot the waterways to give a faint glimmer of hope at the last bastion of activity in a world gone relatively silent. Alternatively, you may simply be a bird person who doesn’t mind the constant cackling and cawing of buzzards waiting in earnest for you to drop dead, so they can pluck your eyeballs out of your skull!
1 P.A.M.S. - Power Armor Movement Sounds
If the original power armor sound effects were too light for your tastes, then you’re not alone. After all, you’re essentially piloting a bipedal vehicle. The sound effects should reflect that.
Luckily, we have Power Armor Movement Sounds, an overhaul of the power armor sound effects that makes each step feel that much more heavy and impactful on the ground. No more shuffling around like a bit of semi-loose metal plating. You’ll be concerned about the stability of the floor underneath of you, which is how it should be! It doesn’t drastically overhaul anything else about the power armor, but this mod alone can really change the way you feel when you finally slip into one.
NEXT: 10 Ways To Level Up Fast In Fallout 4
