List of useful mods that fix, stabilize, or expand Fallout New Vegas

Here

The most important here was the most recent FNV BSA Decompressor. Just by installing it I was able to lift the framerate of my rather heavily modded New Vegas, on my really shitty ancient laptop, though because it would overheat too easily and caused many framerate issues with games not light enough to run by the rig, it didn't last long.

Iirc, you don't need this if you use Mod Organizer, since the manager had built-in function just for that.

Paging @Risewild if you have any other good stuff for this.

 

A note, if you have the game from GOG.com, you don't need the 4GB patcher. The GOG versions of FNV and FO3 already come with LAA out of the box.

Improving performance in FNV?

I might be able to add a few things:

• FNV Mod Limit Fix - This mod is one of the greatest FNV mods to come out recently (or even ever). It fixes the broken plugin limit that has plagued Bethesda games from Oblivion to FNV (it even plagued Skyrim, until Bethesda actually fixed it in that game). With this mod you can reach the normal 255 mods limit that all these games were supposed to be able to reach.
  • Now, why am I suggesting this in a performance post? This mod has the side-effect of boosting your FPS by around 10fps, it's more noticeable in some heavy fps areas. Why does it improve FPS? No one knows yet, it's a total mystery, since it shouldn't affect FPS at all. It's another Bethesda Gamebryo mystery that will need to be cracked in the future.
• New Vegas Tick Fix - This is the modern successor of New Vegas Stutter Remover. NVTF is better made, up-to-date, and works perfectly even on modern OS.
  • A Note for FNV players: Don't use NVSR anymore when there is a better successor readily available.
• lStewieAl Tweaks - This is a highly customizable NVSE plugin, everything can be turned on/off or set to whatever the player wants. I'm suggesting this because it contains several fixes that are not found anywhere else (like the double caravan pay, fix some vanilla crashes, prevents the menu lock when leveling up and having no skill points to assign, and many other stuff).

Those are the things I can remember from the top of my head.
I would have mentioned other stuff like NVAC and Ogg Vorbis, but if I remember correctly, the Gamerpoets video goes over all of that and other stuff I would be mentioning, so I advise people to watch the video.

A couple of notes in relation to the Gamerpoets video:

• NVSR is quite outdated and even broken, so use NVTF instead (as I already mentioned in this post).
• Since any FNV player should be using JIP LN NVSE Plugin, you should make all the ini changes, edits, additions, etc. in your falloutcustom.ini instead of your game inis. This will keep your changes from being overwritten by things like the FNV launcher, Steam or GOG Galaxy.

About things "planned for the original experience", Josh Sawyer Mod is indeed the original experience by the creator of the game. This is the original JSawyer Mod, do not use JSawyer Ultimate, since the "Ultimate" version is not what Josh Sawyer envisioned for FNV, because a lot of things were changed, added or removed from the original mod due to the "Ultimate" mod creator changing it to be his vision and not JSawyer's one.
One of the things that might turn off players from the JSawyer's mod is that it locks the Courier's max level to 30 (since FNV is not a leveled game and was made for max level 30). If a player wants to play the base game as it was planned, but wants to increase or decrease the maximum level, then lStewieAl Tweaks (mentioned before on this post) allows to change the maximum level.

 

In the topic of expanding

Mojave Raiders increase raiders number in their spawn location as well as fortify their "hideout locations". Like Mountain Shadow Campground, for example. There're 6 over there, forming a notable strongpoint for raiders. It also introduce a platoon of jackals to Nipton after visit it once, to simulate jackals retake that massacred town.

Mojave Wildlife increase spawns of wild animals. I use a specific mod of MW, to spawn creature in the way of F3 (robots, more mutants, more scorpions...).

On the one hand, it make Mojave less empty. On the other hand, loading increase significantly.