MW5 Essential Mod List

A compilation of mods that work together to make MW5 look, run & play slightly better, without any significant gameplay changes.

Use this guide as a starting point for your own personal collection of mods, or use it as it is for a near vanilla experience.

This list is obviously subjective and because of PGI, all mods are prone to breaking with any patch so if something isnt working (or gets fixed) leave a comment.

Core Workshop Mods

These are all available on the Steam Workshop.

Technical

Remove JumpShip Animation
This mod does what it says on the tin, it removes the lengthy scene that plays of your Leopard attaching to a Jumpship so you only see the default loading scene where your Leopard flys through space, which can speed up the game if you have a fast PC, but its not updated so you will still see this scene during DLC events like the FedCom Wargame Campaign journey.

XenoPax Art Optimizer 1.99a
XenoPax Optimize 2.99a
Two mods that tidy up the code of the game to theoretically have it run a little better.

Audio

Kh0rnes Sound Mod
The definitive mod for improving audio across the entire game without taking things too far. There are other versions of this mod, this one is my personal preference.

MW2 Betty Ultimate
Any excuse to remove the default voice lines in MW5 is a good thing, and what better way to do that than reintroducing something from a classic.

Gameplay

Star Map Mouse Over
This mod lets you see a tooltip when hovering over a system that shows what missions are there and who the involved factions are, the difficulty of the mission and the drop weight.

QOL Upgrades 2 - Thermals and Headlights
This is a very useful mod that primarily adds working thermal vision and external lights to your mechs, and has some useful options through Mod Options such as customising the salvage chances, but is a rip from YAML so dont use the two together as it says in its description.

Visual

NiagaraMG
Replaces the MG bullet effect with a particular effect technique that is meant to be more light weight, and produces a distinct visual as it turns MG tracers into actual light effects.

Core Nexus Mods

For these mods you will need to download them from Nexus Mods and then you can either just manually install them or you can use their mod manager Vortex.

A quick guide to using Vortex: After installing Vortex, you download the mods you want from Nexus Mods, then inside Vortex after setting up MW5 as a game it manages and that you have selected, in the "Mods" section you have a button to install mods from a file, you do that for each mod you download, then you click "Deploy Mods" and if there are no permissions issues it should show that its doing something and return back to normal, now if you done it correctly when you load up MW5 you will see those mods and you will always have the convenience of Vortex to keep the mods up to date and quickly find their pages on Nexus Mods if you need to.

If you cant get the mods to show up in MW5 using Vortex, use the manual installation method, unzip the mods and drop the contained folder into "\MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries\MW5Mercs\Mods".

Technical

MW5 Mod Compatibility Pack[www.nexusmods.com]
"Community driven package that enables increased compatibility between mods".
Some mods benefit from this to play nice together, not the ones currently recommended here though.

In The Pit[www.nexusmods.com]
This mod fixes some camera positioning issues as well as some bugs in the game, along with some support for some displays, check the Nexus page for details if thats you.

Mod Options[www.nexusmods.com]
"A mod that allows configuring options for my other mods, because MW5 modding."

Multiplayer

Co-op Rewards[www.nexusmods.com]
"Gives rewards to clients in co-op."

Gameplay

Enhanced Cooldown Pips[www.nexusmods.com]
This mod allows you to customise the cooldown pips for weapons around your reticle if you have them enabled. It works on a scale like the heat bar, so my advice is to set your optimal and minimum ranges to neutral colours like white and/or black, so that theres a clear distinction between being in range and not, but otherwise very useful and a feature of older MW games.

TTRulez_AIMod2[www.nexusmods.com]
This improves the AI, even though it might not address your personal gripes with specific aspects of the AI in MW5, and if you get the version that comes with Lancemates_Orderz, that doesnt seem to work all the time, so IMO this mod is a little hit and miss but theres no currently working alternative.

Visual

Improved Laser Beams[www.nexusmods.com]
This makes lasers brighter and more solid, which is useful in snow maps and otherwise is a visual preference.

Improved Mech Shader[www.nexusmods.com]
"Tweaks the material of all the mech paint to less uniform more dirty and the metal darker like in MWO. Also does small changes to the weapons material. (You will need Ultra Visual and Weather and Source HD Textures to get the best effect)"
I personally recommend the "Dull" file pack.

Source HD Textures[www.nexusmods.com]
This is a collection of HD Texture packs for different aspects of the game. The files we are interested in are:

• Cockpit HD
  
• MechNormal_HD (or) MechWear_HD (but not both, I prefer Wear)
  
• MechNormal_HD_DLC (or) MechWear_HD_DLC (but not both, I prefer Wear)

Ultra Visual and Weather[www.nexusmods.com]
"Improvements to the lighting and various visual elements (Volumetric fog, AO, shadow, and post processing, skybox...)"

Other Mods

These mods dont currently work.

Visual

Precision Sights[www.nexusmods.com]
This replaces the sight/reticle with one that obscures your target less, if you find the default one is too obtrusive. This mod is broken, it crashes your game if you change to an AI mech.

Remove Green Pickup Zone Ring
Doesnt hurt your game but doesnt currently do anything.

Gameplay

Better Spawns 2 Classic[www.nexusmods.com]
Better Spawns updated implementation[www.nexusmods.com]
Better Spawns 3[www.nexusmods.com]
Fixes enemies and vehicles spawning out of thin air, but unfortunately none of them work well currently. If these did actually work, you would only use one of them, they all aim to do the same thing but seem effectively abandoned unfortunately.

DIY Mods

Sometimes theres no decent mod that does what you need, maybe specifically because its so easy to do that everyone else does it themselves.

No Intro Quick Start

Removing the opening videos when starting the game:
1. Navigate to the games install folder.
2. Navigate to "\MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries\MW5Mercs\Content\Movies".
3. Make a new folder and call it something easy to understand and notice like "DISABLED".
4. Move all of the "legalsplash...", and "piranha-logo..." files from \Movies\ to your new folder, 4 files in all currently.

You can also remove any other videos you like, and if you change your mind or move the wrong file you can just return the files to where they originally where, which is why were not deleting them entirely.

Keep in mind that editing these kinds of files like this is something that can be easily undone unintentionally by Steam through regular patching or definitely if you ever verify the game through Steam.

[Zavia]

lol missing actual vital mods that make the game worth installing like YaML, coyotes, von biomes.. ai mods.. i would have refunded if i played vanilla/your mod list only.. usual terrible devs like bethesda that need modders to make their game worth playing.. can't wait to not spend money on clans.. that will be from the seas %100 given the type of game that will be..

[Gnasty]

you forgot infantry

[Canniballistic]

WarFX.

Its buggy though because the smoke lasts so long it will last from one mission to the other and because the heights of the ground in the map change, you end up with fires and smoke floating in the sky.

[KraggleWulf]

what was the mod that kept destroyed units burning and smoking? That was actually really cool.

[DragoNeonSign]

I like to have my own proprietary UNIT NAME as well as UNIT INSIGNIA....else, why the f**k am I playing? I don't need to matter in the Great Houses/Clan Invasion scheme of things, but having a kick ass unit name, with a witty/cool insignia is the honest-to-goodness "play or not play" decision for me.

So, until things are re-ironed out, I don't play. That's that.

[Canniballistic]

I didnt forget infantry.

[Brent]

you forgot infantry

[Akira_R]

I feel like TTRulz AI mod should be part of any must have mod list... My biggest issue in the base game is running out of money because my lance mates keep trashing my mechs.

[Canniballistic]

I'll update the EULA for this guide to properly define the term "gameplay" when I next update this, thanks.

[Iceciro]

I feel like saying "without any gameplay changes" and then picking Salvage Percent Max is a little out of place. That's a gameplay change.