Best mods for Avowed

Avowed is finally out, allowing players to explore the world of Eora from up close. But as with any game resembling those made by Bethesda Game Studios, mods are where all the fun is. So, here are the best mods for Avowed available now, listed in one spot for your convenience.

The best mods for Avowed, listed

Avowed is a young game, having been on the market only briefly at the time of writing. Therefore, the scope and scale of its mods won’t be on the levels of Skyrim, but there are still great options to choose from, whether they’re gameplay, performance, or other improvements.

Optimized Tweaks AVD

Avowed, not unlike many other modern games, suffers from significant performance issues, most notably stutters. Its graphical fidelity is also hindered by poor temporal solutions that blur the image and cause consistent ghosting and shimmer to occur. The first point is easily fixed, which is where Optimized Tweaks AVD by VynnGfx comes in. The mod aims to reduce the amount of stutters in the game and make your overall experience smoother and with fewer bugs while preserving the fantastic art and graphics of the game.

The mod also reduces load times, makes the game boot up faster so you can explore Eora sooner, and smooths over latency and lag. If you were having issues like these, which many players have, then Optimized Tweaks AVD is an essential component until the developers issue official fixes.

Better Companions

The companion system in Avowed is overall nice and very reminiscent of what we saw in Baldur’s Gate 3. Not only do they provide company and great conversational partnerships, but they’re also quite helpful in combat. But perhaps not as effective as they are when the Better Companions mod is installed. This mod, made by Caites, makes the companions much better in combat by boosting their weapon damage, reducing the cooldowns of their special abilities, and giving them more HP. This last was a major issue for me, as my companion kept going down in tight situations, forcing me to risk everything to go in and revive them so we could continue the fight.

The mod can also be customized to make the companions even stronger, making them carry you through most of the game with 10 times the damage and five times more HP.

Better Attributes

Another mod by Caites, not the last on this list, aims to make the Attribute system much more rewarding in Avowed. Better Attributes reshapes how the Attributes boost your character, tweaking the numbers for each and every available Attribute in the game. For example, Resolve grants twice as much Stamina per level than it does by default, with Intellect also providing double the Essence. These stat gains can be tweaked, with the mod offering you several Attribute points per level instead of one, allowing you to quickly level up and become a real beast.

Better Carry Weight and Encumbrance

The final Caites mod on this list is related to a topic you all might have expected. Encumbrance and Carry Weight are some of the most annoying RPG systems ever conceived, and mods removing or making them more manageable are always made for games that have them. Caites’ mod gives two times more carry capacity, or 240 instead of 120. Leveling Might is also more worthwhile as it’ll increase the carry capacity by 24 per level instead of 12. There’s also the option of setting the carry capacity to 12,000, which is more-or-less unlimited, given how many items you’ll find in the game.

Goth Envoy preset

Making a good-looking character in games like Avowed is never easy and requires a ton of meticulous craftsmanship and understanding of the character creator options. In this case, presets are a godsend, and the Goth Envoy preset offers you some of the best-looking characters I’ve ever seen. The presets are for the female Envoy, so you might be disappointed if you’re a big guy or a sword-enjoyer. But other preset mods exist on the game’s Nexus Mods page; this one just happened to be the most striking one.

No-Intro

It’s nice to know who worked on a game, who published it, and what tools they used, but seeing them for the 100th time becomes quite jarring. The No-Intro mod helps with that by removing the splash screens and introductory videos from the game, allowing you to boot up and play as soon as possible. Paired with the tweaks mod from above, the time from when you launch the game to when you’re actually in it will be drastically reduced, and you won’t suffer the annoyance of long loading times and unskippable videos.

Truly Realistic Colors

Avowed looks mighty pretty (when there’s no temporal anti-aliasing ruining the image), and its colors, particularly, are what’s the most striking about the game. Obsidian’s art direction with this iteration of Eora is breathtaking, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. The Truly Realistic Colors mod greatly enhances the colors of the game, especially if you have an HDR-capable screen. Even if you do not, the mod will make the colors less washed out and blurry, as the game does take some artistic choices that may make the colors look a little bland at times.

How to download and install mods for Avowed

You can get mods just about anywhere, but the best and safest way of getting Avowed mods is through Nexus. All you have to do is download the Vortex Mod Manager and navigate to your game’s path, leaving everything else up to the manager.

If you want to install mods for Avowed manually, this is how:

• Open your game’s directory.
• Navigate to Alabama, then Content, and then Paks.
• Create a “~mods” folder with the tilde and without the apostrophes.
• Extract the downloaded mod’s .pak file into the ~mods folder.

And that should be it. Most mods currently available for Avowed are installed in this manner, though some mods that go much deeper into the game’s inner workings might require a manual install, which is often specific to that mod itself. Always make sure you read the mod’s description page in case it has a specific installation that cannot be handled via this standard method or the Vortex Mod Manager.