ICE mod or vanilla?

[|Nick]

Returning player here. I have never even touched iceborn,but I heard about the ice mod that seems ti fix a lot of issues the community had with mhw. Should I try it out on my new playthrough or should I play vanilla first?
I havent played in years monster hunter, so you could consider me a noob.
ALso, are there any mods I really should install?

[D. Flame]

Capcom is about to install a shady, virus-ladden, Russia-made trojan DRM update to all of their games to block mods and lower your FPS by 15 or so. So play without modding.

[|Nick]

Yieks.
Thankyou for the hint. Uninstalling a big overhaul mod would probably break the save

[Lochlann]

^^ Probably better to get a first, mostly-vanilla playthrough anyways, and then dabble with ICE if you can still play with it at a later point (if you ever get around to replaying the game at all)

[Mr. September]

I would just recommend you to not use ICE, but use some other mods to fix some of the issues.

ICE changes so many things that you aren't even playing the same game as the majority anymore. The same cannot be said for most generic mods. The key difference is how ICE overhauls Hitzone Values (monster part damage), Motion Values (weapon move damage), and weapon movesets themselves. That's precisely why it's not the same game anymore.

Also, ICE players can only play with other ICE users, and their saves cannot be used if ICE is uninstalled. Couple that with how ICE players can only play with ICE players, and you basically have no concrete reason to use it unless you already played for far too long and want something new. Even then, custom quests offer more variety than ICE can, without twisting the game into something else.

Long story short, just play everything there is, then when you are fully done play custom quests or something. That alone lasts a very long time. I wouldn't have clocked in 1500+ hours myself if it didn't.

[]"]]

ICE has many opinionated changes, it's up to you if you like them. Any mod that makes a big deal about preserving the "spirit" of the game usually means they disagree with the game developers about what that "spirit" is.

My vanilla mod list is purely QoL/visual:

Stracker's Loader
Performance Booster
Tic Rate fix (if playing at <60 FPS)
Skippable Cutscenes
Custom FOV
Visually Friendly Scoutflies (medium brightness)
Dropped items efx
HQ Assets Project

Honestly it's playable without mods (I did it for the first few 100 hours, and obviously millions of console players too).

---

Note there is a lot of misinformation going around about DRM being added to all Capcom games.

- FACT: Resident Evil: Revelations had a problematic update involving Enigma DRM around 2024-01-05 which was rolled back 4 days later on 2024-01-09.
- FACT: Some Capcom games already had some version of Enigma DRM months ago.

Everything else is speculation or misinformation, originating from a few individuals on Twitter then spread through Reddit and gaming news sites/blogs. There are people writing completely made up reviews now claiming that this game's performance was decreased by new DRM even though there has not been any update since 2023-11-15.

[makinaccion]

ICE is awful, it makes an easy MH game even easier, avoid it at all costs unless you need all those buffs, a quick google search can give you their github and then you can simple ctrl+f their changelong to see all the buffs they gave to your weapon.

Buffing HBG, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lmao.