The Ultimate Cyberpunk 2077 PC Modding Guide: Looks, Performance & Customization

Now that Cyberpunk 2077 has finally navigated past its rocky release phase, hordes of players have been visiting Night City for the first time and discovering how far mods can truly take the game.

Here’s one issue, modders — this isn’t exactly a user friendly game to mod in many cases. I’ve spent the past several months modding my Steam copy (and breaking it, and reinstalling it). This guide is designed to give you the tips you need to avoid common mistakes and get the game to look and perform just the way you wanted.

Yes, this is Cyberpunk 2077. With some mods (of course).

Foreward: Nvidia vs. AMD, and What To Expect With Your Cyberpunk Experience

There’s just one thing you’ll need to know before we begin, and I’ve spent months researching and taking notes on this topic. Cutting to the chase, AMD/Ryzen owners will not have the same exact experience as Nvidia/GeForce owners because of a supported technology that Nvidia cards have known as DLSS.

That’s not to say that Ryzen owners with a top notch PC won’t see a beautifully detailed, well-performing game. If your card exceeds the requirements, you’ll have a great experience. However, when it comes to things like hyper realism and immersion, you simply will not be able to make that visual jump from a game that looks like a high-detailed Grand Theft Auto V install, to one that literally looks like real life video footage. We’ll get to that topic later, though.

I have a XFX Speedster Merc 310 Black Edition Radeon RX 7900 XTX. If I could have done it all over again, I would have gotten a NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super instead for the Ray Reconstruction & AI tech, and I regret not having done so.

If this topic disappoints and/or intrigues you, you’ll want to check out my expanded article about Nvidia GeForce vs. AMD Radeon and Cyberpunk hyperrealism for the details.

A. Improving the “Looks”

As a modder, looks are everything — just like the philosophy of the Cyberpunk universe. This section will tweak the game’s settings and crank out the absolute best looking output possible that your PC can handle. Think of it as the base layer of taking Cyberpunk 2077 away from “stock graphics” and into a whole new realm.

Start off by setting up your monitor to work properly with Cyberpunk: just make sure your monitor is properly configured, first

I: Settings » Video

This is where you can get the game properly acquainted with your monitor. In the game, go to Settings » Video. If you have a VSync or GSync monitor, you’ll be able to get Cyberpunk 2077 to coincide with its settings here.

If you don’t have one of these monitors, it’s really something to put on your wish list because the visual difference is significant — I highly recommend Alienware’s AW3423DW for Nvidia GeForce builds or AW3423DWF for AMD Radeon builds (note that any Nvidia GTX 10/16 and all RTX model cards can use the AW3423DWF/FreeSync technology). Yes, these are pricey monitors but great investments that will easily last you many years, beyond the life of your PC.

VSync or GSync owners can turn the setting on here, granted that they already have it already enabled in their GPU’s native software settings first. Enabling this will sync the frame rate with the monitor’s refresh rate, so it’s a no-brainer. Otherwise, make sure it’s turned off.

Resolution should always be set to the maximum possible amount that your monitor is also set to.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) will give you more realism in regard to light & dark. So, very dark or very light regions of a scene will appear more clearly. Without this feature, colors tend to appear duller. It’s recommended to turn HDR on if it is something your monitor supports and if you’ve activated the feature in your native settings. If you’re not sure that this has been done, simply do a search for “(your monitor make & model) enable HDR” and you’ll undoubtedly find instructions.

Video Settings Recommendations:

• Monitor:1
• VSync/GSync: On (considering your monitor has the feature, and it’s enabled)
• Maximum FPS: Off (let GSync/VSync handle everything)
• Windowed Mode: Fullscreen
• Resolution: (Highest possible setting that coincides with your monitor)
• HDR Mode: On (considering your monitor has the feature, and it’s enabled)
• Nvidia Reflect Low Latency: On (NVIDIA users only, obviously)

II: Settings » Graphics

Here’s the real meat and potatoes of what your game will look like the next time you load a save. Nvidia and GeForce users will see two entirely different menus for much of the top screen’s worth of this menu. Start off by making sure your “Quick Preset” is set to Custom, since we’re going to fine tune almost every option.

Cyberpunk’s Graphics » Quick Preset menu. All DLSS options will be ghosted for AMD users.

Settings » Graphics » “Quick Preset”

• Quick Preset: Custom (this will auto-set to Custom once you start making changes, regardless)
• Resolution Scaling: This will attempt to stabilize the picture during intensive scenes that would normally cause stutters. AMD owners should set this to Xe Super Sampling. NVIDIA owners, just ignore all of these Intel Xe options, as you should always choose DLSS everywhere you’re asked.
• Intel Xe Super Sampling: This is an upscaling technology that improves image fidelity and enhances performance. Go for the “Ultra” setting.
• Intel XeSS Sharpness: Much like in Photoshop, this setting affects how sharp an image will appear, especially if you’re playing in 4k. AMD users: crank it to 1, the highest setting.
• DLSS Frame Generation: NVIDIA users: enable this for an FPS boost (AMD users will see the button is ghosted out for them).
• Texture Quality: Set to High.

The Cyberpunk Graphics » Basic settings control several view-related options.

Settings » Graphics » “Basic”

• Field of View: 100 (widens your view of everything, why would anyone want a narrow horizontal view?)
• Film Grain: Off (unless you like the rustic look of pixel noise: a personal preference.)
• Chromatic Aberration: Off (this handles “color blur” in reflections, also a personal preference.)
• Depth of Field: On/Off (this is also known in the photography world as “bokeh,” or, when close up objects are sharper than the background behind it. It doesn’t matter much in Cyberpunk since this effect can only be seen in cutscenes or camera mode, and not the actual game itself — a personal preference.)
• Lens Flare: On/Off (“on” you like the hexagons of light that appear when you look at the sun)
• Motion Blur: On/Off (this affects how blurry things look when you move the camera around. It’s a personal preference. People who optimize the game for actual gameplay find it annoying during combat, while the realism crowd always leaves it on.)
• Finally, don’t forget to click “Apply.”

Cyberpunk’s Settings » Graphics » Advanced section handles all of the tiny details for fine-tuning goodness.

III: Settings >> Graphics >> Advanced

This section will dramatically change how the game appears in terms of clarity and detail, sharpness, shadow & light appearance and other ambiance-related rendering.

Truthfully, some of these settings, whether set to ‘low’ or ‘high’ don’t seem to make any visual difference at all (i.e., Subsurface Scattering, Color Precision). If you’re really finicky, you can live-test each one at the low and high settings to see if that’s the case.

How you set everything here depends entirely how modern and powerful your PC is. A new PC with a mid/high end GPU and processor should absolutely be able to handle everything on High + Ultra settings where applicable. Anything else — it would be worth playing around with everything on High for a PC that’s a couple years old. Anything older, start off with all settings on Medium.

Here’s a full list of every setting in this menu, and what they do:

• Contact Shadows toggle: In my opinion, I’d keep this on. This feature seems to improve how shadows look for the really little things, like areas underneath wrinkles in clothing. Plus, having it on does not impact performance.
• Improved Facial Lighting Geometry toggle: I also leave this on, although it doesn’t seem to impact anything visually in-game. It also does not impact FPS performance.
• Anisotropy: This controls texture filtering. The visual effect of it in-game is so minimal, although it does somewhat contribute to overall better looking distant objects, mostly noticeable in roads and the grout between bricks. I recommend setting it to ’16’ since it won’t impact FPS in any way.
• Local Shadow Mesh Quality: This will affect the clarity of shadows being cast. It’s hard to explain, but when set to “high,” shadows appear ever so slightly more accurate in terms of when they should and shouldn’t appear blurrier or crisper based on distance.
• Local Shadow Quality: Similarly to “local shadow mesh quality,” this appears to affect the representation of shadows either more loosely or accurately. When “low,” you’ll see small oddities like metal bars of a fence that have a gap missing where the shadow should be fully connected to the rail above it. Recommended to be set to “high.”

Settings » Graphics » Advanced section, continued.

• Cascaded Shadows Range: This represents shadows being cast from a light source in the sky (i.e., the sun). There’s very little visual impact, although you might see issues where street sign shadows cast half a length of a shadow at low/medium, where as high will show the full length shadow of these items. This setting does negatively impact FPS, it’s worth playing around with if you need to scrimp for optimization.
• Distant Shadows Resolution: This mainly appears to effect shadows cast from very thin objects, where “low” will show their shadows as blocky lines, and “high” shows them more accurately as solid lines. It’s best to leave on “high” since it won’t affect your FPS, anyway.
• Volumetric Fog Resolution: I personally do not see this making much of a visual impact, but it seems to affect how fog reacts with light bloom in some scenarios. This one will impact FPS, so play around with it if you’re looking to improve performance.
• Volumetric Cloud Quality: As it states, this affects cloud quality, but does it? I barely see any difference between Medium, High or Ultra. I suppose, the pickiest eye can see some blockiness in the lower settings, but you’d really have to stretch to form that opinion. “Low” will pretty much erase clouds from the sky. High may be a good setting here. Do note that this is another setting that affects FPS in a way.
• Max Dynamic Decals: A “decal” is basically a bullet hole or pavement cracks from your sledgehammer, and this setting affects how detailed they look. Leave it on High, it shouldn’t affect performance at all.
• Screen Space Reflections Quality: This one will really make or break how nicely reflections are represented in Cyberpunk. It’s also one of the few settings with 6 total options, from Off to Psycho. If you have a crazy GPU or are just looking to take the best possible pics in photo mode, set it to Ultra/Psycho. Everyone else should probably set it to Medium or High. This setting dramatically affects FPS.
• Subsurface Scattering Quality: Subsurface scattering is how light penetrates objects (for instance, how a sunset shines through the skin of your ears and makes them glow red in real life). In Cyberpunk, though, I have no idea what it does, as it doesn’t seem to really affect anything. Set this one to whatever you want, it barely seems to affect FPS.
• Ambient Occulsion: This setting controls how “soft shadows” are cast on objects. It’s one of those subtle things that doesn’t look like much, but contributes to the overall scene of the game. This will knock off a few FPS when set to High, although High is recommended.
• Color Precision: Who knows what this does, because it doesn’t seem to have any visual effect at all. It also doesn’t affect FPS, so I personally leave it on High.
• Mirror Quality: Strangely enough, a setting just for when V looks in a mirror. The difference between Low and High can be seen in the sharpness of clothing textures. It seems to correct the shadows cast by hair and beards as well…or perhaps that’s my imagination. It only affects things when you’ve activated a mirror, so set it to High.
• Level of Detail (LOD): This setting affects the detail level in the rendering of objects (i.e., the amount of detail in distant buildings and other objects). Poor LOD results in things like trees that look like piles of poorly colored mush until you get closer and their textures pop in. This setting aims to improve how these things look. Surprisingly, this setting won’t hit performance that much — set it on High.
• Crowd Density: This simply determines how many NPCs you’ll see walking around. More pedestrians will tend to look more realistic, especially when you’re in a city center. This does slightly impact FPS, but not as much as you’d think — it’s worth experimenting with this setting on High, or at least Medium.

Settings >> Graphics >> Nvidia DLSS

Here’s the main event to switch on hyperrealism: Nvidia GPU owners can enable DLSS options. If you’re going for photo realism and not as concerned with performance, max your settings out there. Otherwise, stick to “Auto” or off, for the ones you can do without:

NVIDIA DLSS (these options only appear for NVIDIA GPU owners)

• DLSS Frame Generation: This will activate NVIDIA’s technology that uses AI to actively analyze and create additional high quality frames. Turning it On should give a substantial FPS boost.
• DLSS Super Resolution: This is AI technology that boosts performance by reconstructing images. Try “Auto,” or test out other settings while taking note of performance (if that matters). For example, setting it to “Quality” might give a slight visual boost.
• DLSS Sharpness: This slider appears only if you toggle DLSS Super Resolution to “On.” Something between 0.80 to 1.0 should suffice, I personally would choose “1.”
• DLSS Ray Reconstruction: This is vital if you’re going for the hyperrealistic “video footage” look in Cyberpunk. Switching this to On will trigger a major leap in the game’s visual appeal.
• NVIDIA DLAA: This is NVIDIA’s anti-aliasing technology, it will noticeably increase overall picture quality. Another must-have if you’re going for “looks” — perhaps not as much for performance gamers.

Resolution Scaling (AMD GPU owners, this is your section)

• Dynamic Resolution Scaling: This technology attempts to keep FPS stable in circumstances where some kind of “GPU heavy event” during gameply makes everything slow down. If you have a monster PC, you probably won’t care about this setting, so, “Off” is fine.
• AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution: At the time of this article’s writing, the only option here is for 2.1, which is nothing to brag about. Leave it Off.
• Intel Xe Super Sampling: This is basically the best option available for Radeon users. It will give a better quality picture than FSR 2.1 with a slight performance hit. Set it to “Auto.”

B. Improving Performance

Now that the graphics settings are in place, it’s a good idea to optimize everything and drop that frame rate as much as you can.

There’s not a whole lot to create a guide on for performance optimization, but it does involve a few key factors:

1. Enabling DLSS (for NVIDIA users). The effects of DLSS will be revolutionary for framerate boosting. There is no similar feature for AMD Radeon users until Cyberpunk gets official support for FSR 3.
2. Turn your framerate counter on and test, test, test — it’s a feature in your GPU’s software. Going back to the earlier part of this guide for the “Settings » Graphics » Advanced” section, note all of the options here that affect framerate and test them at a lower setting with your framerate counter on. Simply note FPS drops and adjust your low/medium/high settings accordingly.
3. Uninstall mods you don’t use. If your game is loaded up with 20 mods and a quarter of them are things you don’t use at all or even care about, just remove them. More mods = worse performance, and it also opens the door to compatibility issues that can make life miserable to troubleshoot in the future.

C. Environment & Character Customization

It’s time to get some mods that will compliment the settings you’ve just implemented. These will have dramatic visual effects on your game that you can really see on your next session.

I. Modding the Game Environment Itself

Some players are fine with the way Cyberpunk 2077 looks out-of-box…but not you, though, because you’re a PC game modder.

There are several options available to you that will make your game look better in terms of texture sharpness, color grading, focus and everything in between. All of them are free, of course.

All of these mods are found on NexusMods, which is a huge community-driven site offering thousands of free mods for many popular games. It has its own mod manager called “Vortex,” and I highly recommend it. It’s free, and does all of the dirty work for you. If you don’t like a mod or one of them is giving you trouble, you can simply pause or delete it directly on your main menu.

There’s no downside to Vortex, and it makes your life much easier. You can get Vortex for free here, and read more about every detail of it on the official wiki.

Below, I’m recommending the installation of 1 choice each for 3 categories of mods: 1 LUT, 1 texture pack, and 1 weather mod. When it comes to upgrading your game’s visual aspect — this is all you need — period!

A LUT can change the game’s color palette to something more realistic

1. Install a LUT

LUTs or “Look Up Tables” are basically color correcting mods that modify the overall palette of a game through mathematics. So, with a LUT, you can change a game that looks heavily red/green to one that looks more bleached out, or with light cyan tones.

There are many different LUTs you can download that will give different “looks” to your game. Simply find the one you like most. Personally, I like the bleachy/slight light cyan tone look because it is more realistic to me, but that’s my opinion.

LUTs are basically a “drop in and enjoy” mod that are reliable and don’t impact performance much, if at all.

• Recommendation: NovaLUT Pure

See Night City the way it’s meant to be seen: in 4K

2. Upgrade in-game textures to 4K

Right out of the box, the game is designed to be as speedy as possible for a huge range of PC builds. If you’ve got a monster of a system and have OCD-levels of immersion demands, you’ll probably want 4K textures so that half eaten hot dog in the gutter looks good. Here’s the most popular 4K package — it will get you a crisp looking Night City in no time.

• Recommendation: Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project

Weather mods affect sky, ambiance and weather visual quality: rain, dust and everything in between.

3. Get A Weather Mod

These directly impact your game environment’s visual appeal. Your weather mod will probably affect the game’s skybox — which “completes the look” when your eye sees what the sky looks like vs. what the game world under it looks like.

For instance, if your sky looks overcast while your game environment looks ‘bleached out,’ the overall look will be very lifelike, as opposed to the sky looking orange and the environment looking bleached. You can choose one — and only one — weather mod in your repertoire.

A good weather mod will make raindrops look like actual water rather than strands of goo.

• Recommendation: Enhanced Weather V5
• Also Consider: GonkWeather (+ the free custom .ini file for NVIDIA users, see mod page description)

Lastly, here’s something more advanced if you demand more. A post-processor will give you fine tuning capabilities that you never had in-game. It’s not a mod you’ll find on NexusMods, but a standalone application. Read on:

4. (Optional!) Install the Post Processor “ReShade”

Somewhat similar to a LUT, a post-processor applies filters to your game that also change its appearance, but are more geared toward refinements such as sharpening, lighting & shadows, reflections and depth effects (distant objects blurrier than near objects, etc.). You can run both a LUT and a reshade at the same time.

The application you’ll be using for this is ReShade, and it’s free. It has many different, free “add-ons” that act like plugins, enabling you to do different things to the look and feel of your game.

If you’re a game modding enthusiast, you’ll obsess over tweaking and playing around with ReShade and its add-on features. When installed, a simple hotkey press during your game will bring up ReShade’s overlay menu, and you can make live changes to tons of different visual settings.

It’s important to note that Cyberpunk 2077 has no true “depth of field” feature outside of its cut scenes. So, you won’t see foreground objects become more crisp than background (of if you’re familiar with the photography term, I’ll just say, there’s no “bokeh effect”). ReShade will add this in for you with its “OtisFX” addon.

Just note that you may experience major issues such as ‘hiccups’ that will make your game unplayable — for instance, I ran ReShade with a few addons and it wound up making Cyberpunk unplayable, as it stuttered hard every 5 seconds. I wound up having to completely uninstall all ReShade addons, which undid the issue.

Uninstalling ReShade isn’t as simple as it is with conventional programs — you can find a guide here. ReShade is something you really have to play around with and test often.

(Left: “4K Complexions for Male V” by praxatics; Right: “4k Complexion and Body for Female V” by Avallonkao, both via NexusMods)

B. Modding the Way V Looks

Let’s close out this guide with the fun part — making V look truly unique and just the way you want. New haircut, nails, facial cyberware lines, eyes, body, limbs, tattoos, clothes. Yes please.

Let’s be honest, the devs really dropped the ball with character customization. In a universe where average people have cyberlimbs, your V never will (without mods, of course). Don’t just look at Johnny in envy. Get that chrome arm — you know you want it.

The good news is that there are tons of quality community-made appearance mods for you to weed though.

Some Pain Points to Anticipate

What Are Dependences?

If you’re already up on game modding, you’ll understand that there are mods that require “dependencies” in order to work. So, that one eye color mod might rely on a couple dependencies in order to work. It’s a minor inconvenience, and you’ll be seeing that most mods use the same handful of dependencies.

Most mods that DO require dependencies will typically rely on one or more of the following, which are mostly scripting frameworks and extensions. Each mod tells you what it depends on, if anything. You would simply install these as you would with any other mod, via Vortex:

1. Cyber Engine Tweaks
2. redscript
3. RED4ext
4. ArchiveXL
5. TweakXL
6. Input Loader
7. Codeware
8. cybercmd

There are other types of dependency mods that expand other areas of the game, such as Virtual Atelier which adds clothing slots for modders who create new in-game clothing, Appearance Menu Mod which allows you to edit V’s apartment and appearance, Appearance Change Unlocker which lets you edit V’s appearance through a new option when looking at a mirror, and so on.

Modding Will Not Always Be A “One Click Download & Run” Experience

The bad news is that the world of Cyberpunk modding is not as “one and done” as it is with other games; that is, many of these mods can’t simply be downloaded via Vortex and activated, but, you’ll have to download them to your desktop and manually drag and drop them into the proper folders.

Don’t feel too discouraged — I’d say that maybe 25% or less of the mods I use had to be dropped in or configured manually and could not be done via Vortex.

If you want to modify how V looks, be sure to read the description of every single mod you’re scouting — this is very important, because each mod author has warnings and other important notes you’ll have to keep in mind before you download.

Browse Comments to Look For Complaints Before You Download

It also won’t hurt to take a quick look through the comments section of each mod to see what the average person is complaining about (if anything). Sometimes, numerous people will complain about a mod breaking their game, in which case, you should probably put off downloading that one until things get fixed.

I realize a lot of this won’t make sense right now, so I’ll take you through a real world scenario where a Cyberpunk mod needs manual action:

via “Maine Edgerunners Face Cyberware” by AnruiMurasaki on NexusMods

Case Study: “Maine Edgerunners Face Cyberware” Mod

This mod allows you to customize the colors of V’s facial cyberware lines. The catch: you can’t download or manage it with Vortex.

Reading its instructions shows that you’ll have to start by downloading and installing the required dependency called “Morphtarget and AnimRig Additions.” Once that’s done, you’ll download the main file, “Maine Face Cyberwear” from the Files tab.

The instructions say that this mod can replace the mesh for in-game face slots 01, 02, 03 and 04 (these correspond with the face cyberware menu in character creation, for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th options — which in thise case are known as “meshes”— on that menu). Just choose any one of those.

For the record, I installed this mod myself and noticed that the facial cyberware this mod inserts into the game will actually overlap the previous one I chose, which came with the game. So, V had 2 sets of facial cyberware overlapping each other. In that case, just turn off the facial cyberware in the character customization menu in-game to remove the “stock” one, so that the “mod” one shows by itself. Another case study in Cyberpunk modding weirdness.

Then, in the ZIP file for “Maine Face Cyberwear,” you’ll have 6 individual files from their respective folders that have to be chosen by you. One for Mesh, Base, Color, Normals, Roughness and Metalness. All of these things are visually described on the image chart that the mod creator included on this mod page.

“Color” refers to the chart that the mod creator included on the mod page. You’ll be choosing one of these:

Mod creator AnruiMurasaki included a whole slew of face cyberwear colors. Choose one.

Next, you’ll need to choose “metalness” (shine/luster) and “roughness” (surface reaction to light, or lack of).

Next, choose the texture you want, which will determine how shiny your new facial lines will be.

Find all the files that coincide with each of these individual options in the ZIP file, then drop your choices into your ..\cyberpunk 2077\archive\pc\mod folder.

When done, get into the game and enter the section for V’s facial cyberwear. Navigate to whichever slot you chose to replace (01, 02, 03 or 04) and you’ll see the mod with all of the options you chose.

The point of reviewing this mod was to show you how some mods can and will work. Sometimes, you’ll have to do everything by hand. It’s true that Cyberpunk can be a real pain to mod because of this.

My personal advice: create a text file and jot down notes about all of the mods you’ve manually installed by hand, along with a URL to their NexusMods page, in case you forget in the distant future and need to remove them. Otherwise, you’ll never remember what you’ve done if you have several of these manually installed mods and a year or two goes by!

Damn. Is It Really This Painful to Install Mods in Cyberpunk?

Not always. In fact, there aren’t many mods that have to be curated, downloaded and dropped in by hand after following a list of instructions. However, they do exist, and undoubtedly you’ll come across a few.

One more thing you’ll have to keep in mind is that some of these mods don’t play nicely with other mods. For instance, if you attempt to install two mods that change eye colors, you’ll immediately notice a problem where one overwrites the other, or the end result is that V has black eyeballs in the game. That’s because for certain categories of mods, you can only have one choice. This especially goes for weather mods.

What’s the Worst That Can Happen?

The biggest problem you’ll face in modding, by far, is when CD Projekt Red releases a software update for the game. It is guaranteed to break your game if you’ve modded it, mostly because the dependencies will no longer be compatible with the new update. And, when dependencies break, everything that depends on them immediately breaks, too.

When a dependency breaks, you’ll have to wait for the dependency creator to release an update. These people are usually on the ball with this, and get it done in less than a week. However, you won’t be able to play Cyberpunk at all until it happens, unless you disable all of your mods.

This is why I try hard to keep the number of mods in this game at a minimum (only the stuff I really like and can’t do without) and I make sure to install mods only by mod authors who seem to be very active and on the ball about updating their work. After spending time on NexusMods, you’ll become familiar with certain mod authors who seem to be active and take their work seriously.

The left button will download & install a mod to Vortex in one convenient click.

In other rare cases, you may come across a mod that wasn’t configured properly for the “one click Vortex download & install” button on NexusMods. You’ll want to just install those manually. This is why I always read the comments on every mod before I install it.

What Are Some Other Issues I’ll Encounter With Cyberpunk Modding?

Unlike many other games I’ve modded — let’s say, Skyrim for example — the way 3rd party mods work aren’t always conventional in this game. Instead of adding something new, they’ll replace something that already exists.

Back to the old example, there many mods out there that let you change how V’s eyes look. However, you can only choose one package. And, all of them have the same limitation: they replace the in-game eyes that come with the game, they don’t “add” more selections on top of those. This is due to the way Cyberpunk was designed, and it’s very shoddy and counterproductive for mod creators, in my opinion.

By contrast, my heavily modified Skyrim install has several hundred eye color choices…no need to overwrite the “stock eyes” that came with the game. It’s pretty sad how a game that’s nearly a decade older can do this properly, whereas Cyberpunk can’t.

A new trend of “Atelier store” mods have propped up on NexusMods, which insert new clothing store inventory menus into the game. They allow mod creators to add new clothing into the game without having to replace “stock” clothing.

There are other quirks you’ll find as time goes on. For instance, you can find some mods that replace V’s legs with cyborg looking legs. However, you’ll have to replace both legs, not just the left or the right one — again, because of the way the game was created.

Above: An example of how some mods aren’t so cut-and-dry to install, and you’ll have to follow directions carefully to install them by hand. This might scare off some people. Source: “Modular Jewelry Collection” on NexusMods.

There are many other cases where you might find something like a visor or a gold chain you really want, and when you read the instructions, it tells you that you can find the object by wearing another in-game hat that came with the game.

That’s because the mod maker couldn’t simply add another “slot” into the game, so they had to overwrite an existing hat to make their visor appear in the game (meaning, the hat it replaced will never be an option in your game again). This is very common, and you’ll see that most of the facial mods replace [overwrite] existing face options that come with the game.

Conclusion

There’s not much maintenance from here on — all you’ll have to do is stay on top of Vortex to make sure it’s updated, and monitor your mod collection every time Cyberpunk gets any kind of software update.

You WILL someday encounter an error where Cyberpunk refuses to load because of a broken dependency. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

If something breaks, start the troubleshooting process by visiting the NexusMods page for your dependency mods first and head to the comments section of each one to see if others are complaining about mods breaking.

Remember, the dependencies are usually the culprit after an update happens and your game gets a popup message or the “black screen of death” at startup.

Once set up properly, you can see this, too. Granted, you need a RTX-series NVIDIA GPU.

In time, you’ll be happier with your modded Cyberpunk 2077, all quirks and frustrations aside. You’ll get used to troubleshooting, especially when the game gets an update and everything breaks. It’s not a relaxing game to mod, but something we simply have to put up with and learn how to fix when the time comes.

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