Configure Vermintide 2: For Beginners and Advanced Players

This guide will take you through most of the options available in the game. Optimizing gameplay and graphics (obviously this is in-part subjective and hardware-related). I also briefly mention how to set up mods that I deem important for the quality of life.

Introduction

Take these recommendations with a grain of salt. Some of these options are subjective and can affect the immersion. My recommendations will try to balance performance with visual quality. This can be different depending on your system. The settings I have chosen to set to high might have to be decreased if you have a slower GPU and the settings I have chosen to set on low might be increased if you have a stronger CPU.

Some settings I will skip due to them not affecting performance too much and being up to personal preference or having good enough default descriptions.

I will update this if someone notices any mistakes I've made or invalid things I've written. Might also add suggestions/configurations from people who are running other setups lag-free for more diversity.

This is the layout I'll be using:

- Tab Name -

Such as "Gameplay", which refers to the leftmost tab in the settings menu.

Cluster Name

• Note: In lack of a better name, I use this term to describe sections such as "input" (the first group of related settings in the Gameplay tab).
  
  
• With the name of the setting written in bold: Followed by a suggested value (if any)
  And descriptions/comments being regular text.

Gameplay Settings

- Gameplay -

This section also contains some keybindings and network options since those are somewhat related and very brief.

Input

• Double Tap Dodge: off
  Dodging is a very crucial core gameplay mechanic and this way of executing it is inconvenient, requires you to stop walking in the direction you try to dodge and is unable to perform backwards diagonal dodges. It might also cause unintentional dodges.
  
  
• Input Buffer: 1
  This settings refer to amount of actions you can queue in the game. What that means is: if you begin a strike and then press the attack button again during it, the game will add a second strike to the queue that will be executed right after the animation of the first one has finished. This is overruled by new inputs made during the time of the animation, such as a charge attack being initiated. I recommend setting this to 1 because that makes attacks easier and more convenient to chain.
  
  
• Priority Input Buffer: 1+
  Similar to the above setting, this instead manages "priority" actions such as blocking or swapping weapons. These are actions what are capable of cancelling the animation of regular actions (eg, blocking in the middle of an attack interrupts the attack and blocks immediately). I recommend setting this to 1 or above for the same reason as the first one - avoiding the game missing inputs you made too early.

Visual Effects

• Player Outlines: Always On
  This will help you easily spot your teammates at all times.
  
  
• Screen Blood Effects: Off
  Personally I can find it difficult to see through.
  
  
• Note: From the small amount of testing I did the other settings in this cluster don't seem to have much of a performance impact. However, I'd recommend turning the camera movement off based on my own preference, especially if you are prone to experience motion sickness.

Interface

• Play Intro Cinematic: Off
  They are available on YouTube, and the novelty wears off quite quickly when you have to skip them manually every time you launch the game.
  
  
• Equipment & Talents Privacy: Public
  This is a feature that allows other players to see your build from the Party (TAB) menu. I enjoy being able to see what other people are running, being able to better understand their decision making in-game and playstyle, as well as receiving inspiration for by own builds. It only affects your own privacy outwards, so having it turned off will still allow you to see the builds of others who has the setting turned on. You always see your own loadout.

HUD Settings

• Friendly Fire Crosshair: On
  Alerts you when you shoot your teammates in the back, if the voicelines weren't enough. It also has a very pretty color uwu.
  
  
• Friendly Fire Hit Marker: On
  This is an option to disable the visual feedback when being hit by a teammate. Personally, i just find that confusing. One of the mods have a better solution.

- Keybindings -

Movement

• Jump/Dodge: [UNASSIGNED]
  Don't use this, assign them to space and shift respectively (or whatever keys you prefer). Otherwise it's very likely that you'll dodge into objects when you try to jump over them or jump when you try to dodge and attack. Neither is a very pleasant experience.

Hero Actions

• Weapon Special
  Only a few weapons have this functionality. Some examples are Saltzpyre's rapier which fires a pistol, his billhook which can tug on enemies to stagger them, Kerillian's Waystalker career who can do an enhanced zoom while charging/aiming weapons and Kruber's Huntsman career which has the same effect as Waystalker when he's under the effect of his career skill.
  
  
• Tag/Social Wheel:
  I prefer to have tag on my mouse wheel because I can spam it into hordes or far away to tag specials or occasionally items outside my draw distance. The social wheel, however, requires a held input, so I keep that on a regular key.
  
  
• Wield Melee/Ranged Weapon
  I use my mouse thumb buttons for this, which took a little while to get used to but that I greatly enjoy now. The reason for this is that I like to be absolutely certain of what I swap to in sticky situations, as well as being able to swap without removing a finger from the movement button. Alternatively I'd recommend using weapon quick swap
  
  
• Wield Item
  I strongly suggest using the quick access buttons for the items for the same reason as above. Personally I think the default [3,4,5] works fine, but once again, it's up to preference.

- Network -

Matchmaking

• Suggest Other Heroes
  With this on, you will be able to join any lobby through quickplay and if your hero is unavailable, you'll get a prompt to change it.
  With this off, you will only join lobbies that has a spot available for that particular hero.
  If you like to play a particular hero, turn this off, but if you like at least one career for each character and prefer to find groups you can join, keep this on.
  
  
• Always Show Hero Change Prompt
  This will give you the option to change hero every time you join a lobby.

Other

• Max Upload Speed: 2Mbit/s
  This setting controls the amount of data you can share with other players per second. A higher setting will make it less likely that you run into network-related issues, assuming you have a stable network to start with.
  
  
• Quick Play Search Range: Far
  I'm not entirely sure how far "Far" is, but my ping during quickplay is usually around 60, very rarely does it approach or surpass 100. I live in Europe, and as far as I can tell "Far" isn't really outside of Europe. There is a third option "World", but that's only available in the lobby browser.
  
  
• Show Numerical Latency: On
  Displays the latency for every player in the Party (TAB) Menu. This is pretty useful to determine if someone in your friend group is more or less suitable to be the host, or if someone might be less reliable when playing with randoms.

Performance Settings

This is very dependent on what your hardware can handle and your preferences of performance-to-visual-preference. The difficulty also has quite a big impact on the framerate, so a good performance on lower difficulties doesn't mean that it'll be lag-free during hordes on legend or cata.

One concept that's important to know of is processor intensity. If a game is "CPU-bound", that means that the CPU can't finish its role in calculating a frame as quickly as the GPU, resulting in the GPU having idle time, and vice versa for "GPU-bound". This also means that the settings will be optimized for putting an equal relative load on the CPU and GPU, based on my system.

Some of these settings will be brought up out-of-order at the end of the section because they have to be edited in the game's configuration files.

For reference I use an RTX 2070 and an i5-9770k with a 2k (1440p) 144hz monitor and easily achieve an fps of 60+ in hordes on cata, or idle of 100-140. I cap it to 90 for consistency.

- Video -

Display

• Field of View
  My preference is to max this out in order to get a better view around you and spot enemies (especially specials) more easily. Keep in mind that this will mess with the depth perception. I also know many good players who plays with the default and perform as well or better than I do, so it's by no means a necessary setting if it makes you uncomfortable.

For the next two settings I reference this video (which I also recommend watching if you haven't configured NVIDIA control panel), in particular the segment about VSYNC and especially if you have a GSYNC monitor:
• VSYNC
  Makes your GPU wait to draw the next frame until the entire previous frame is drawn. This will counteract screen tearing. Turn on if your fps exceeds your monitor's refresh rate. If you have a GSYNC (or compatible FREESYNC) monitor and experience screen tearing, enable it in the NVIDIA Control Panel instead.
  
  
• Max Stacking Frames: 2-3
  Allows for a smoother frame rate in certain scenarios. Usually, set this to 2. If you enabled VSYNC (see above), it might work better changing it to 3 or even 4. If you have a GSYNC monitor and use VSYNC, set it to 1.

Textures

Not much to say here. Set both texture settings to high if you have a decent amount of VRAM. I have not noticed much of a performance difference when messing around with it, but the visual impact is very noticeable.

Particles

• Particle Quality: High/Extreme
  Most modern GPU's should be able to run this without any huge performance impact, but turn it down if you notice frame drops when there's a lot of fire/ratling gunners etc. This setting makes a big difference on effects such as Sienna's Fire Sword and Coruscation Staff, where the lower settings makes the effects appear splotchy and uneven.
  
  
• Transparency Resolution: Low
  This setting affects the resolution of any effect that you can see through. Imagine the transparent effect being an animated GIF. The difference is that the low setting usually makes effects look somewhat smudged in comparison to high.
  
  As a test I spawned in about 20 gas rats in the keep using mods. With Particle Quality: Extreme and Transparency Resolution: Low I had a consistent fps of 65-75, while Transparency Resolution: High made my fps drop to 25-40.
  
  Here are two pictures of the fire sword and of a sienna headgear, all have Particle Quality: Extreme. The leftmost images have Resolution Quality = High and the rightmost Resolution Quality = Low.

The images are somewhat brightened. Something finicky going on with the windows image editor.

Causes hair and edges of enemies to occasionally become jagged at low (right picture).

• Scatter Density: Off
  This setting controls the amount of decorative geometry. It should only mildly affect the CPU but since it also makes your view cluttered by objects that has no impact on the gameplay, I've chosen to keep it at the lowest setting.

Lighting

• Local Light Shadow Quality: Off
  This gives the game a flatter look, but will decrease the CPU load.
  
  
• Sun Shadows: Off
  Same reason as above. Environmental shadows will still be visible in the visual form of low-resolution textures.
  
  
• Max Shadow Casting Lights: 2
  I would advice against going lower than two since the transition between light sources can become disorienting. This doesn't affect light sources that are part of the map as far as I can tell. Only ones that are being carried.
  
  
• Volumetric Fog Quality
  It is a little bit annoying that there is no "off" setting. The high settings gives a more atmospheric, dark look to the game (and covers objects in the distance with a curtain of fog). The lowest setting lights the environment up in a somewhat unnatural way but has less intrusive fog. This setting essentially controls 5 parameters that we'll take a closer look on in the advanced part.
  
  
• Ambient Light Quality: High
  High makes the game more atmospheric, low makes everything look a little washed out and causes certain dark areas to appear brighter (such as the citadel in Righteous Stand). The area has to be reloaded before the setting takes effect (essentially when you see the spinning logo).
  Credit: Bitte!
  
  
• Auto Exposure Speed: 2
  The higher the value, the faster your "eye", or the camera, adapts to light changes, which makes them less noticeable in my opinion, contradictory to the in-game description (might depend on Ambient Light Q). If you set it to a low value, the screen will be white for a while when going from a dark to a bright area and black for a while when going from a light to a dark area.

Post-Processing

• Anti-Aliasing: TAA
  This is a must if you want any resemblance to smooth edges.
  
  
• SSAO: Extreme
  This adds shadows with low CPU impact.
  
  
• Depth of Field: Off
  A slightly more realistic look, but at the cost of higher GPU load and lower vision at far distances.
  
  
• Motion Blur: Off
  It blurs the image and affects your performance negatively. I feel like this is the first thing many people look for and turn off when they launch a game, but I thought I'd mention it here anyways.
  
  
• Bloom
  Personally I like this on because I feel like it's more atmospheric. I took two screenshots to describe what it does. Pay attention to the candles.
  
  Left: On ; Right: Off

Pay extra attention to the flames of the candles

• Note: Everything else is pretty much up to taste and can be shaved off if you want to ease the load on your GPU.

Other

• Physics Debris: Off
  Similar to Scatter Density, I don't see any reason in rendering extra objects if it can save me some CPU load.
  
  
• Animation LoD Distance: 0
  How often do you look at finger and face animations while wading through a river of rat corpses? No? Well, then you won't miss anything. Also lessens the CPU load a little.

Note: If you are not going to dabble with the Advanced section, know that you can swap between DX11 and DX12 in the launcher. Look for the SETTINGS button beneath START. You can also change the max amount of threads there.

Advanced

Close the game, we're going to do some changes outside of it for now.

For this step it is preferable if you have Notepad++ which is a text editor you can download here[notepad-plus-plus.org]. Follow the link and download the latest version, then open the installer and choose all the default settings.

Press WIN+R (the key between CTRL and ALT) and type %appdata%. You should see a File Explorer window open. Open the folder named Fatshark > Vermintide 2. Inside that there is a file called user_settings. Right click it and choose "Edit with Notepad++" or go to "Open With" and choose Notepad++ from the drop-down menu.

Press CTRL+F to search for settings to alter.

Volumetric Fog

After writing this guide I noticed that I still had fog in my game and that my previous instructions for removing it were incorrect. This is what I've come up with after some testing for the best visual result in my opinion. It is a mix of mood and making the fog less noticeable. It's still not gone by any means.

If you want performance, set all to "false".


volumetric_extrapolation_high_quality = true
volumetric_extrapolation_volumetric_shadows = true
volumetric_lighting_local_lights = false
volumetric_lighting_local_shadows = false
volumetric_reprojection_amount = -1
volumetric_volumes_enabled = false

volumetric_extrapolation_volumetric_shadows = true
This gives the game a more atmospheric look.

volumetric_volumes_enabled = false
This is basically the main part of the fog from what I can tell.

System Resources

• process_priority = "high"
  This sets the priority of the program in windows, so that the CPU will finish calculating the game before anything else. The default if "normal", followed by "above normal", "high", and "realtime". I recommend saving "realtime" for recording or streaming software.
  
  
• render_api = "dx12"
  This might lower performance on some systems due to compatibility, with higher risk on old systems. This setting can also be changed in the launcher settings.
  
  
• max_worker_threads
  I am running at the amount of cores of my processor without any issues, but if you notice weird behavior from background applications such as spotify or discord it might be worth lowering it by one.
  You can check the core amount in Device Manager (search for it in the windows search bar) under "Processors".

NOTE: SAVE (CTRL + S)

Mods

Check this video, or follow the instructions below
Note: It's a little bit outdated, so some mods featured may no longer be relevant, but apart from that it should be accurate.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2420273924

Follow these instructions

• Go to the collection above
  
• Press "Subscribe to all"
  
• Wait for the download to complete
  
• Open the Vermintide 2 launcher (press play on steam)
  
• In the bottom-left corner, beneath the play button, there's a button MODS. Press it to open the mod menu
  
• You will see a pop-up window with a list of all installed mods
  
• Tick the box All/None on top of the list
  
• Also tick Auto-disable Unsanctioned Mods In Official Realm in the bottom left corner
  
• The top 3 mods should be, in order:
  
  • Vermintide Mod Framework
    
  • Penlight Lua Libraries
    
  • Simple UI
• These mods are the foundation that many other mods build upon and has to be loaded before the rest
  
• Press Accept in the bottom right corner

A few ways to disable mods if there are ones you don't like

• Open the in-game mod menu (F4) and search for the mod at the bottom. Select the square beside the name. Orange means active and grey inactive.
  
• Go to the mod menu in the launcher and clear the box beside the mod.
  
• Unsubscribe to the mod in the steam workshop.

Note: Sometimes mods break with game updates. If this happens, check the crash report and see if you can find any information in the error message that might hint to a certain mod being the culprit. If you find the mod, disable it in the launcher and wait for it to be fixed. Often you can check in the Vermintide 2 official discord or Reddit if other people are experiencing issues.

Very useful settings in the UI Tweaks mod

• Open the "Mod Options" menu (F4 or ESC). Search for "ui" in the search bar at the bottom. Open the UI Tweaks drop-down menu. Close all the drop-down menus under the mod for a better overview.
  
• Check the boxes for Unobtrusive Objection Marker and Unobtrusive Mission Marker. The first one is especially useful for monsters in the Chaos wastes where they often have objective markers on top of them, obscuring a large portion of the enemy.
  
• Open the drop-down menu for Player UI Tweaks and select Hide Player Portrait.
  
• Open the drop-down menu for Teammate UI Tweaks and scroll to the bottom of it. Set Portrait Transparency to 150.
  
• Just underneath it, enable all items under Important Icons. Those give you an UI indication of what teammates have different necklaces and talents that are affecting healing and might influence the distribution of supplies across the team.

For more details on the UI Tweaks and related mods

[Space]

When you talk about "System Resources" where do I access that?

[brandwegg]

NuTTi, I could probably have been more descriptive about that, but I did hit the character limit for guides, heh. I've moved on to using DLAA since it's implementation tho. Personally I prefer the smoother appearance of TAA because I get really annoyed at jagged edges, but I understand if the ghosting/blur might be more offputting for some people. Might be a good idea to add reasoning to that setting though.

[NuTTi]

"Anti-Aliasing: TAA"
Whole guide lost all credibility right then and there.

[AgarthanTerrorist]

Thanks, but I figured it out. Most tide games are pretty shit with resolution, I had to run the game using the /borderless configuration, put it windowed, and then it let me adjust resolution. You can't do it while fullscreen/borderless window.

[brandwegg]

@TheCrusaderGuy the in-game resolution? If youre using a NVIDIA card you might be able to use GeForce Experience by going to the game and pressing the small wrench icon located between the settings and the image, to the far right. There you can change resolution. It is going to mess up your other settings though.

[AgarthanTerrorist]

How can I change my resolution? It's blurred out for me/grayed out and I can't change it. It's set to 1920x1080 but my monitor is 3440 by 1880

[brandwegg]

@AsmoDaeus
1. Try unsubscribing from all mods if you have any. One of my friends returning to the game had a back-end issue solved last week by unsubscribing from the mods instead of disabling them. Might want to make a collection of them before so that you can resubscribe easily if that isn't the issue.
2. Make a repair installation of Easy Anti-cheat.
3. Verify integrity of game files.
This post contains more detailed info on the last two points (if I can post links here): https://support.fatshark.se/hc/en-us/articles/360033298334--PC-Observing-a-BACKEND-REJECTED-THE-CHALLENGE-RESPONSE-Error-OR-Unable-to-Connect-to-Others-Craft-or-Open-Spoils-of-War-before

That's about all I can think of at the moment, but feel free to return if you are still having issues afterwards.

[AsmoDaeus]

So can someone help me understand why I cant even log in, I get a back end error every time. Would love to try this out, but ya no luck.

[brandwegg]

Hey Bitte!
I didn't know about reloading the map, or that that's the setting that makes the game bright. After the Darktide beta I'll check on it and update the guide. Thanks for the feedback!

[Bitte!]

nice guide. but i totally disagree with Ambient Light . it has a big impact on visuals. it makes the game much brighter. i am running it on high, but if i play on the "Hunger In The Dark" map i will turn it to low so i can see in the dark part of the mine.

ps : you have to reload the area to see the effect. just changing the setting in the keep doesnt change the visuals.