The Living Desert for New Vegas, because I could follow those guys around and see what they do forever. It’s so cool to give the game more organic interactions.

Gonna keep it to things not already mentioned.

Big standalone fangame/total conversion:

• Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos, built off of Gothic 2. Was my GOTY when it came out, and I consider it better than anything the actual developers released since Gothic 2. I really dig the way it expands the original game’s systems, like apprenticeship. I have some complaints about it but it’s nothing major, and I overall greatly enjoyed my time with it, planning a new run when the big 2.0 update drops.

Mod packs:

• Morrowind Sharp, it’s like Viva New Vegas for Morrowind, I always use it as a base for my own setups, but it’s great as is for new players to get a patched, QoL enhanced and face-lifted vanilla-like experience.

Individual mods:

• Global Escalation for Squad - just a huge expansion-sized load of content
• Beautiful Cities of Morrowind, for bringing the game’s settlements closer to their concept art, implementing a lot of the new fan-made resources to make places more distinct and detailed while having a clear scope and keeping within vanilla-like territory
• Kenshi Kaizo, touches up and expands the existing content without bloating itself by filling the map with all sorts of new factions of varying quality and lore-adherence
• The Stardew Valley mod that adds a whole bunch of cat skins so I can have my irl cat in the game. And on the topic, SDV Expanded and Ridgeside Village when I just want more Stardew Valley stuff.

Requiem Overhaul for Skyrim completely revamps how the game is played, you need to mostly pick an archetype, casting spells with armor on institutes a huge penalty in mana cost etc unless you pick talents for it that aren’t available until late game, damage has been tuned way up for everyone so you have to ideally dodge most attacks and enemies drop loot that makes sense like their heart and some claws instead of finding 50 coins and a mace on a wolf.

Just installed it yesterday but the Multiverse mod for FTL basically turns it into a sequel and improves every aspect of the game. Go from 10 playable ships to around 100, have to actually consider choices instead of “I will blow everyone up for marginally more resources” and just an overall more Star Trek vibe with races having different factions etc.

too many to list.

modding is praxis

nobody mentioned Long War so i’m mentioning Long War. ever think 30-40hrs wasn’t enough for your XCom 2 campaign? ever thought it was kind of immersion breaking that these incredibly well equipped aliens couldn’t swat down a ridiculously high-profile smash-n-grab resistance op foolishly headquartered in a single hovercarrier? Long War turns your chaotic gunfight missions into guerilla insertion and extraction missions, broadens your conflict from a months-long to a years-long endeavor, makes it MUCH harder to eject the aliens from earth while simultaneously making it a much slower process for the aliens to complete their doomsday plan, really makes you undertake missions on a global scale as opposed to the one- or two-region conflict that the base game tends to become, extends the available troop roster while forcing you to actually use more than an elite core of troops (because you have way more bases to cover), extends the max troops on a mission from 6 to 12 while allowing the aliens to field a LOT more forces (think 40+ enemies in some situations), making for some really HUGE fights near the endgame. really a spectacular rebuild mod, two thumbs up.

another really good mod for Stellaris is the Star Trek: New Horizons mod, a total conversion mod that was so good paradox got the envy and put out Star Trek: Infinite, which is just their own stab at a total conversion mod for Stellaris except they expect you pay 30 bucks for it, plus DLCs. New Horizons very worth it, give it a shot if you like trek and already have Stellaris

Enderal for Skyrim was real good

DFhack probably. The best mods in my opinion are the lightweight ones that should be base game.

Fall from Heaven for Civilization 4 is a fantastic overhaul mod that turns it into a fantasy world with interesting factions and characters and mechanics.

Last time I got a copyright letter was for torrenting Civ 4 in 2015 without a VPN. The game came out in 2005.

There are too many good ones. Enderal, the entire Viva New Vegas modding guide, Tale of Two Wastelands, it’s truly difficult to nail one down as my favorite. I play Bethesda games entitely modded these days and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Deus Ex has a few great ones, Nihilum, 2027 & The Nameless Mod are all pretty good if you’re looking for more imsim content

Half-Life of course has a pretty massive modding community, and they’ve made a lot of good stuff over the years - Echoes and Field Intensity for the 1st game and Entropy Zero 2 for the 2nd are basically on the level of proper expansion packs. Minerva, Mission Improbable, Uncertainty Principle and Downfall (all for HL2) are somewhat shorter, but still really good. There’s also new campaigns for the Portal games, but I haven’t gotten around to playing those yet.

Mount & Blade has a ton of total conversions, for various historical periods and fantasy settings

Medieval 2 was already mentioned, so some other cool mods for it are The Italian Wars and 1648, for the pike-and-shot fans among you

The Blizzard RTS games have a ton of custom campaigns, although I haven’t played many yet. StarCraft 2 in particular has recently been having a ton of new campaigns made (although mostly in the format of overhauls of the existing campaigns, rather than being entirely new missions, but they can still be pretty extensive with the new units and mechanics)

MGS V has had a decent amount of modding done to it too - nothing too massive, since the modding tools are very limited, but Infinite Heaven allows you to tweak a whole bunch of stuff (and, in combination with some other mods, significantly lighten the grinding, which I probably wouldn’t have been able to stomach the game without), and allows people to add new custom side-ops

I really liked the RTS mods for the modern Fallout games. Building towns and collecting resources is my SHIT

There’s a mod for New Vegas that adds item descriptions to any item that you can pick up and they made up lore for all of them and a lot of the unique items have jokes in their descriptions. It really adds a lot to the game

I like all of Drayano’s Pokemon ROM hacks. Essentially just puts all of the content you would want from a Pokemon game into it. All Pokemon catchable, more challenging trainers but not overwhelmingly so, side content the works. Storm Silver is probably the best one. If you’ve thought about replaying a Pokemon game, play the Drayano version of it

Regarding Stellaris mods, Gigastructural Engineering & More gives you the ability to build absolutely super high sci-fi structures.

Other great Stellaris mods include Ancient Cache of Technologies and The Zenith of Fallen Empires. There are a ton of great Stellaris mods, really.

Im not a big fan of Hearts of Iron 4 but by god does the My Little Pony mod - Equestria at War slap hard.

Hm. Stalker Anomaly is up there, if it counts. I played the originals to death and Anomaly brought GAMMA eventually, which is probably the most up-to-date and approachable way to play stalker nowadays.

My favourite has to be Vanilla Psycasts Expanded, though, for Rimworld. The vanilla psycasts are very meh, and only the player is able to use them. VPE adds new psycasts and reorganices the ones already available and the new ones into new trees, allows enemies to use those same psycasts, and allows you to set certain psycasts to be used when ready. Makes it a bit less micromanagy, and gives you a chance to give more personality to each of your pawns if you’re into that kind of thing.