So I recently installed Fallout 3 and started playing it again on my PC. I never actually beat the game before because I started doing a whole bunch of side quests and wandering around. Anyways, I decided that I wanted to check out some of the mods for the game to see if any of them were any good. When I first started looking for mods I came across several websites, only two of which that are actually decent: Fallout 3 Nexus and No Mutants Allowed. NMA had fewer mods and were easy to sort while Nexus has what seems to be every Fallout 3 mod in existence.

The similarity between both sites is that they had mods that referenced something called “ArchiveInvalidation Invalidated!”. Of course I had no idea what this thing was and started reading into it. Everybody was saying that you needed it in order for some mods to work, you don’t. Well, technically you do, but the newest version of Fallout Mod Manager has it integrated.

The Mod Manager is one of the most essential tools, by the way. If you have any of the DLC and start to add more than a couple of mods, or any retexture mods, you need to have it. The Fallout Script Extender is also something you will likely need. It is only required for certain mods but I recommend going ahead and download it to get it out of the way, just in case. But, before you do any of this, I highly recommend updating your installation of Fallout 3 to the newest version as things will likely completely fail on an older version. You can update your game using LIVE but I recommend that you not because it takes way too long and has problems. Instead, go here and download the updater directly from Bethesda’s website.

Good, now that you have Fallout 3 updated you can get FOMM and FOSE installed. What you want to do now is go and download FOMM here. At the time of this writing the newest version is 0.9.15, of course you should downloaded the newest version that is available. The installer will automatically detect where you have Fallout 3 installed so just click through the install process and everything will be taken care of.

The last bit you need to do to prepare for getting mods running is to get FOSE installed; you can find both the stable and newest beta builds here. Personally, I am running the beta version right now, I’m not sure what the difference is between the stable, check the change log. You will want to download the .7zip file and copy it to your Fallout 3 directory and then extract the files. It shouldn’t overwrite any files but if it asks, go ahead and overwrite old files. Don’t worry, this won’t break anything.

Next you will want to launch the Mod Manager from the “fomm” folder. If you are running on a previous install of Fallout 3 and have the DLC downloaded over LIVE it will detect them and ask if you want to move the files into the Data folder, I recommend that you do this. The second thing you will need to do is click the litter button that says “Toggle Invalidation”. This will enable the ability to throw any custom skins and meshes into the Data folder and have them work automatically.

And there you have it, everything is now done to allow you to start downloading different mods for the game and it will be easy to enable and disable them easily. I recommend you head on over to Fallout 3 Nexus and take a look at some mods to try out. All you need to do is dump the files for the mod into the “Data” folder that is in your Fallout 3 directory and and then launch FOMM, which will have its own folder within the Fallout 3 directory. I have been checking out a lot of different mods and and going to be compiling a list of my favorite mods that I feel are essential to making the game even better. Until then I recommend checking out the Top 50 on Nexus.

Note 1: One thing I have noticed recently is every now and then my game will crash. It isn’t often, maybe once every 5 hours or so. My guess is that it is from the beta version of FOSE that I have so I save manually often.

Note 2: If you plan on using Games for Windows LIVE so you can get achievements then you have two options. You can just skip FOSE as most mods will work without it or if you have FOSE files copied over then just launch then you just want to enable the mods through FOMM, then close it and just launch Fallout3.exe. The reason being is that LIVE sees the FOSE as a cheat program.