In this guide, you will find my finalized method and recommendations for retexturing Fallout: New Vegas and Tale of Two Wastelands as completely and consistently as possible, with major emphasis on stability and yes, even performance.

This is designed as a “final” step to your setup – textures will be combined in a sensible overwrite order (automatically), broken files removed (automatically), textures compressed and downscaled to logical levels (automatically) and packed to BSA (automatically) to match “gold master” standards.

I have in most cases gone with options that maintain the vanilla “aesthetic” where possible. However, the nature of available retextures and maintaining consistent quality means some things look different than vanilla. Still, I think even vanilla purists will find something to like here.

Once you’ve installed this, you will have retextured most of the game (excluding weapons, see SALAD for those) in a way that makes overwriting with any custom textures you want just as easy as with the vanilla game – in other words, SALVO will be the new baseline for your game. But it can also be your endgame – since everything will be optimized and packed in the same way as the vanilla game, once you’re done you’re done. No need to tweak more if you don’t want to.

This has been made possible thanks to the incredible work of a huge amount of the community – whether testing, modifying old tools and creating new ones, creating new textures, or even something as simple as changing the folder structure of a mods.

This guide is intended to work alongside my Caffeine NVR preset.

For tinkerers, I have left my original “pick and choose” guide up. Since SALVO is essentially an “all or nothing” setup by nature, I felt it made sense to let those who want a bit more freedom on their visuals to still have access to that catalog. The compression and downscaling techniques in this guide can still be applied if desired, but manually instead of automatically.

Ready to go?