GB Mario 2 in full color
Tale of Two Wastelands for Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
Gregtech: New Horizons
Technically a modpack rather than a mod though. I love grinding through technological advancements.
promods for ETS 2 and ATS 2
Mekanism, hands down.
Followed VERY closely by Fallout 2 Restoration Project.
I love mekanism, often run it as my only mod
Sven-Coop for Half-Life 1.
I’ve played, almost daily, since the mod was released in January 1999. Over a quarter century. I’ve got admin in a number of servers, so a lot of days I’m just hopping on briefly to make sure the servers are running smoothly and no one is trolling. New maps are still being regularly released, many by people who have been mapping for it for a solid 15-20 years.
No idea of total hours. It wasn’t added to Steam until 2016, but I have multiple thousands of hours logged since then. I’ve got to be over 10-12k hours since the beginning. Easily.
Everything else in my life has shifted. Sven-Coop is my rock.
I couldn’t pick a single one, but I got endless joy from all the Quake mods back in the day. Not just level designs and sprite replacement, but complete weapon changes that made everything different, Quake Kart, Cujo, etc. It seemed the sky was the limit.
I don’t know if time has been kind or not, but when I discovered Fall from Heaven II for Civilization VI I never launched the base game again.
I think I haven’t played a single skirmish round of Company of Heroes 1 without the Blitzkrieg mod in the past 15 years.
Terraria - Calamity.
Expands the game to 2.5x the content.
Absolutely amazing, would recommend buying Terraria just to play it.
Garry’s Mod
It’s hard to think of any one mod that got remotely close to changing a game the way GMod did for HL2/CS:S/source engine titles. I spent thousands of hours in GMod as a kid, it added infinite teplaya ility to the HL2 campaign, forums like Facepunch and PHWOnline became my second home. There was a ton of content to be loaded from there and FPSBanana, the thriving webcomic scene was truly special.
Gigastructural Engineering for Stellaris… the megastructures included in the game and DLC are great, but they lack a certain insanity. Plus the mod allows you to terraform any planet (even gas giants).
Sky UI. Not the same game without it.
So mandatory that mentally I don’t even consider it a mod.
Better Than Wolves it’s a minecraft overhaul that was started by the veteran game designer FlowerChild who was pissed at Mojang that they are adding useless features that don’t improve gameplay loop (wolves being the breaking point). So he spent many years making Minecraft challenging survival and interesting tech game.
While I haven’t beaten the dragon once in that game (not many people have) it still gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment.
Enderal, a whole new game built ontop of Skyrim. Offers an entirely different setting, map, class system, enemies, spells, and has an actual story that you will not soon forget.
Enderal and also its predecessor Nehrim are absolutely amazing! They’re so fantastic, I don’t even consider them mods, I see them as full games.
PS: Yes, I know Arkwend exists. But I’ve never played it because I personally dislike Morrowind and its gameplay systems. Especially the god aweful random hit chance system Oblivion got me into RPGs so that will forever be my gold standard for RPG games.
I had genuinely forgotten about it without playing it. Thanks for mentioning it.
Just started that recently, very good so far.
