Typing “cozy” into the Fallout 4 section of Nexus Mods doesn’t bring you as many actually cozy mods as you might think. According to modders, a custom bedroom with an American flag, something called “visible rain,” and a busty sweater are all cozy. I realize that the nuclear post-apocalypse isn’t exactly chill, but mods are supposed to break the chains of a designer’s intent and let us enjoy a game how we want to enjoy it. I should be able to turn the entire game into a Stardew Valley dream.
I’m sure those mods are out there, but it would take a Ph.D. to understand all the different dependencies and versions you need to install to get them to work. So, I had to think outside of the box to make Fallout 4 cozy and find the mods that make living in an irradiated Boston as pleasant as possible.
This week on viraltrendingcontent, we’re looking at games that feel like vacations for your brain in a package we’re calling Retreat Week.
First on my list was finding a way to fix all that shooting you have to do. There’s nothing cozy about combat, so that had to go. The best mod I could find for this is called Violent Enemies Removed, which mostly does what its name implies. Every enemy in the game gets instantly killed when you get near them, and becomes invisible so you don’t have to look at all the corpses. Except robots, because the modder thinks “robots are really cool,” according to the mod’s description. They’re wrong: The robots in Fallout 4 are not cool; they shoot at you on sight and I don’t feel guilty for killing them. The mod does 90% of the job, though, so I can’t be too upset about it.
With combat out of the way, Fallout 4 feels slightly less hostile, but not enough to really be called cozy. The dead trees and desaturated everything aren’t particularly inviting. That’s where graphics mods come in. In order to mess with the whole aesthetic of the game, you need the ENBSeries mod and preferably a preset by someone on Nexus Mods. I used the Vivid ENB preset to crank up the saturation and add some life to the world. And by “life” I just mean prettier dead trees that aren’t so gray and have a lot of impossibly orange leaves. Nobody said a cozy Fallout 4 had to obey the laws of biology.
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That mod alone gets Fallout 4 pretty close to something approaching cozy. Brightening up the world does a lot to help you forget how bleak it is, even if all the wrecked buildings and cars haven’t gone away. I couldn’t stop thinking about Dear Esther while walking through the empty fields and highways. It’s kind of peaceful when you’re just out there alone with Dogmeat, appreciating life where you don’t have to live in fear of being mauled by a feral ghoul — and it’s even better with the radio on.
Settlements are what Fallout 4 brought to the series, and they’re perfect for our cozy transformation. Or they would be if all the building blocks weren’t so ugly. I should’ve known that building a base out of concrete slabs and moldy beds wouldn’t make for a particularly inviting atmosphere. Most of the settlement preset mods use the game’s default models to give you impenetrable fortresses or, alternatively, beachside fortresses. It’s all fortresses with high walls, no windows, and turrets on the roof.
Modder Elianora saved the day. Their Chestnut Lodge – Player Home mod drops a little cabin near Diamond City. It’s right next to a pond and mostly looks untouched by the whole nuclear explosion thing, and it nails the vibe I wanted. Inside there is warm lighting, music, and a little table with a bowl of ramen on it. The kitchen needs some cleaning — we’ll call it rustic — and there are shelves full of books. I’ll even put up with the “All you need is love and a good cup of coffee” sign. It’s charmingly corny, and I think in an absurd world like Fallout, it works.
1/3Image: Elianora, Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via viraltrendingcontent
Combine the Chestnut Lodge with the Place Everywhere mod and you have a recipe for a cozy Fallout 4 where you can take long walks to different landmarks and come home to a working settlement that doesn’t look like a brutalist hellscape. I didn’t have the time to dig into them, but there are plenty of mods that let you add custom settlement objects in too, which means there’s room for dialing up the cozy even more.
You could spend weeks massaging Fallout 4 into the ultimate cozy game, and you kind of have to if your goal is to erase everything in it that makes it Fallout. That’s not me, but I still installed a handful of smaller mods to round out the cozy experience. I grabbed a mod that stops all the Radstorms, a mod that makes the water unnaturally clear, a mod that lets you craft cats, a mod for clean beds, and a mod to paint your guns pink. I tried a few mods that rework and expand some of the towns, like Goodneighbor, but for whatever reason they kept crashing the game with my setup. Ideally, I’d want to be able to visit NPCs and maybe even recruit some custom companions.
Your definition of cozy may vary, but I like where my version of Fallout 4 ended up. It became a game all about touring the open world with good music on, almost like I was playing Euro Truck Simulator — you know, without the trucks. The Fallout series is already largely about roaming the countryside and seeing what you find, so this felt like a fitting way to convert it into something far less violent.
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Without all the bandits and radscorpions everywhere, Fallout 4 is a surprisingly pretty walking simulator. With my changes, I’ve actually had time to appreciate Bethesda’s open-world design. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring get a lot of praise for how they subtly lead you to points of interest and surprise you with tucked-away secrets to find, but Fallout 4 has a lot of that too. I found a diner with a skeleton lying on the table as if they died in a pancake coma and several camps of people trying to start their lives again. If anything, playing a cozy Fallout 4 made me realize how unbelievably empty Starfield is. No cozy mods could fix a thousand planets full of absolutely nothing.
Thankfully, Fallout 4 is still alive and well through the power of mods. My time with the original game was short-lived once I finished the main story. I’ve never been the kind of player who needs to wipe the game clean of every potential side quest and crafting material, so I eventually lost the drive to explore. With Fallout 4 as a cozy game, however, I enjoyed being able to return without the burden of all the RPG systems. No stolen children to worry about, no freaky androids, no ghouls; just miles and miles of a world on the precipice of life after a disaster. And in a world as bleak as Fallout 4’s, I think that’s about as cozy as you can get.
