Better Explosive Bullets at Fallout 76 Nexus

Eyes bleeding from watching the same explosive bullet effects for thousands of hours?

Besthesda thoughtfully buried tons of great visual effects in the game files that can make you stop wishing for a nuclear.. nevermind.

Now available:

• Bottlecap Mine Bullets – throws bottlecaps around as if they hadn’t removed the coolest mine from the game (caps are not collectable).
• Fireworks Explosive Bullets – Several varieties of color and pattern, make every battle a celebration or just make your neighbor’s dog hide under the bed. (demo video showcases one color of each type, files named for each color of each type are included)
• Bottlecap Fountain aka “Money Shot” Bullets – Like a fountain of caps wherever you shoot. (caps are not collectable)
• Blue Magic Bullets – Mystify your foes by making them disappear in a blue sparking cloud like some sort of amateur magician.
• Big Smoke Bullets – Can you see your enemies just a little too well? Fixed.
• Daydream Bullets – White sparking dust bursts away from every bullet strike. Like some sort of trippy indie game where everything you shoot sparkles and you’re not sure if that hot dog you just ate was bad or if it’s the game.
• Confetti Bullets – Small and Large confetti burst bullets. Turn those lunchbox effects up to 11 or just go around role playing that you won a game show.
• Fastnacht Bullets – I really wish I could say this throws donuts and sausage around but no, it’s just fastnacht colored confetti so you can be fully immersed during the parade.
• Fire In The Sky Bullets – Miss the ominous fire cloud effects from Nuclear Winter? Now available in portable form. Two variants, because I found two and couldn’t decide which I liked better.
• Fireworks Shower Bullet – I know I already mentioned there were fireworks bullets but this one is just so damn cool.. red sparks burst away from impact and emit bouncing showers of more sparks.

As of right now these are only visual effects replacers using vanilla assets. The original sound effect for the explosive bullet strike remains the same. There are several sound effect replacer mods for explosive bullets and those are compatible with this mod as long as they don’t also change the visual effects.

None of these effects alter the performance/damage of the bullet, none of them offer any advantage in-game. They are a “Just for Fun” mod.

Some of the larger effects may negatively impact FPS and may even severely impact FPS  or crash the game when too many visual effects are occurring at once, depending on your hardware. Generally, the effects with larger BA2 file sizes will have more negative impact on FPS.

If you have seen any other interesting visual effects elsewhere in the game (or in Fallout 4) and want them added just leave a comment and
I’ll see what I can do.

Installation Instructions

Unzip with 7-zip (available free) and extract the entire contents to to your Data folder (found in your Fallout 76 game directory). All BA2 files can be in the DATA directory, only the one you list in the file below will be activated.

Insert the line “sResourceArchive2List =” in the [Archive] section of your
Fallout76Custom.ini file. You can typically find this in your
“This PC/Documents/My Games/Fallout 76/” folder.

If you don’t have a Fallout76Custom.ini file yet you can simply make one using notepad and place the following lines inside:

[Archive]

sResourceArchive2List = (place the filename of the bullet effect you want active here without parentheses).BA2

Separate any other mod .ba2 files by a comma and space. Remember to only list one bullet effect at a time. You cannot combine effects.

If you have problems with the correct effect not working while using a mod manager it’s likely because the mod manager is not loading that effect file last and is allowing another file or mod to overwrite it. I recommend manual install, but if you really need to use a mod manager you can, I just can’t offer support with it beyond what I’ve written here.

Other mods that alter explosive bullet impact visuals effects are not compatible. If you are unsure if another mod would overlap with this one, load this one last in the archive list and it will take precedent.