Maybe I’ll finally stop getting lost in Fallout: New Vegas’ Bison Steve Hotel thanks to this new minimap mod

Earlier this month, modder Stentorious on the New Vegas Nexus graced us with one of those “oh my god, why hadn’t somebody done this already” quality of life tweaks for Obsidian’s open world classic: Modern Minimap, a handy, legible minimap for navigating the Mojave’s twistiest interiors.

New Vegas’ floating quest markers are good enough for navigating most of the time, but if you’re looking for something outside the bounds of quest objectives, some of the game’s areas can be a bit of a bear to orient yourself in. The Bison Steve Hotel’s upper floors, with their samey rooms and collapsed passageways, immediately spring to mind for me. Freeside and its neighbors are pretty bad offenders as well, split up as they are into multiple separate, nested loading zones.

And New Vegas’ local map on the Pip Boy pause screen, inherited from Fallout 3, is practically no help. The faint outlines of navigable paths and obstacles blend together with a confounding amount of clutter and visual noise on the monochrome screen, making the slight delay of bringing up the Pip Boy to orient yourself always feel like wasted time.

The Modern Minimap mod thankfully works with the Local Map Overhaul to help with all of those problems, presenting a far cleaner, more legible output than New Vegas’ default while still fitting the retro-futurist Pip Boy aesthetic, and all without having to pause your game. Modern Minimap has two versions, with minimalist and maximalist approaches to icons and other features. I’d probably stick to the “Lite” version, but I’m a bit of a purist stickler when it comes to mods. Modern Minimap has a fair number of dependencies that you’ll also have to download, but some of them, like NVSE and Johnny Guitar, are essential addons you should always just grab by default when reinstalling New Vegas.

It’s unclear if we’ll ever see the Mojave again in another Fallout game, but New Vegas fans have a lot to enjoy right now. The Fallout show’s next season looks to have the city of New Vegas and callbacks to its titular game front and center, while Obsidian’s latest game, Avowed, really carries a lot of that old New Vegas magic for me.