Playing Cyberpunk 2077 can be a great experience under the right circumstances. For console players, there isn’t much choice — but if you’re playing the game on PC there’s already a hearty community working on great mods to improve the game. They don’t quite ‘fix’ all the drop-ins, drop-outs, T-poses and bugs, but they’re the next best thing to tweak your Cyberpunk experience.
Here’s all the best mods released since December, and which ones you should add to your game.
Arasaka Appearance Updater
For a game all about body modification, Cyberpunk 2077 sure doesn’t give you a whole lot of options. Once you create your character, you won’t be able to change its appearance at all. No haircuts, no dyes, no nothing. While you only really spot your character in the odd cutscene or two, their appearance matters. If you mess up, you should be able to change it.
With the Arasaka Appearance Updater mod, you can adjust your character’s face and hair on the fly. This will translate into all those pesky cutscenes and your inventory menu, meaning you can switch up your V’s appearance whenever you feel like it.
Cyber Engine Tweaks
This mod is designed to smooth out some of the more egregious bugs in Cyberpunk 2077, including performance issues like crashes and the game over-exerting your CPU. It also includes other options for the game like a debug menu, and the ability to skip the start menu.
According to several posters on the Nexus Mods board, the fix actually helped save their game so if you’re experiencing any drop-outs or strange memory usage, this mod may just help your woes.
Better Vehicle Handling
Let’s face it, driving in Cyberpunk 2077 is a total pain. While the game tries to do something different with how vehicles handle, it just doesn’t work here. You’ll face plant and overshoot more often than you’ll make a turn, mostly because the driving just straight up sucks.
Luckily, there’s a mod for that.
Better Vehicle Handling tweaks the way vehicles are controlled, making them far easier to manage. This mod will certainly make all those drag race quests much easier to complete.
Cyberpunk Autonomous Reshade – True HDR
Autonomous Reshade is a visual mod designed to create more vivid colours and imagery in Cyberpunk 2077‘s world. There’s a bunch of different presets, and all of them change the visuals in new ways. ‘Samurai’ increases the depth of blues, ‘Militech’ adds reds and ‘Classic’ sharpens the existing visuals while dampening green tones.
The mod will impact the overall performance of your game but if you’re looking for a more visually appealing landscape, Autonomous Reshade is the ticket.
Optimized Raytracing
If you’re keen for raytracing but your rig just can’t keep up, this mod is a worthy workaround. It’s designed to reduce and modify existing settings for raytracing so more machines are able to handle the graphics capably. Essentially, it’ll optimise raytraced graphics for your PC and make the game world look so much better.
According to user reports, the mod works like an absolute dream.
Cheat Script 2.2
There’s a bunch of abilities to unlock in Cyberpunk 2077, but if you don’t want to earn them all — or you just want to go in all guns blazing, you can adjust your entire arsenal with this mod. With this cheat script you can set your own level, equip handpicked abilities, max your street cred, grab legendary clothing and unlock every crafting recipe you’d normally find along your journey.
Yes, it’s cheating — but it is a whole lot of fun.
TPP MOD WIP third person
Sure, Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t exactly designed to be a third person game — but if you spent a good long while in the character creator, you might be disappointed by how little your V actually appears on screen. This janky little mod fixes that, by letting you see your V in all their third person glory.
Listed among the bugs with the mod is ‘head sometimes disappears’ so you know it’s not exactly perfect, but this mod is still a fun little addition that imagines a world where Cyberpunk is a bit more like The Witcher.
With these mods in hand, you’ll be equipped for a better Cyberpunk 2077 experience on PC than you can currently get in the vanilla game.
Hopefully some of the issues these mods address will be resolved with the incoming game patches, but until then all you can do is try to plug the holes.
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