Mods Payday 3 Are Already Insane
One month into Payday 3's life cycle, the game's vitals are hanging on by a thread; a pulse can barely be found amidst a wave of matchmaking errors and update delays. Only one subsection of the community can save us now, my God. We are so back. Okay, in all seriousness, payday 3 is not in a great state right now.
There are dozens of quality-of-life fixes that are desperately required to get the game back on track. People despise the progression system, and it's just incredibly light at the moment. Much like with early Payday 2, it's been easy to get burned out over this first month, but if there's one community we can always count on to keep the lights on at all times and balance out the company's flaws, it's the immensely talented modern community, who have proven themselves to be once again undefeated with a deluge of incredible content already in the game as of October 2023.
It's crazy that 10 years of Payday 2 modding and PayDay 3 have already hit the same peak. All jokes aside. Payday 3 mods are already amazing and have started to tackle many of the quality of life issues we hope to see fixed officially, while also giving us the opportunity to spice up the game for the better with crazy cosmetic and visual mods.
But before we dive in, I want to start this article off by explaining exactly how to install mods within Payday 3. As things stand, modding is even easier to access and more stable, from my experience, than it was in Payday 2. You're going to have to create named tilder mods. Get well acquainted with this location, as it's where you'll be installing all the mods you plan to play.
The final step for both Steam and Epic players is to change how the game loads up by heading into properties and typing -file open log into your launch options. I have yet to experience a single crash from doing this, so that's great news. Moving on to my recommendations. If I were you, yes. I know it's tempting to dive straight into big bottoms, but hear me out.
I'd start by installing a few low-impact quality of life editions to make payday 3 play sessions that bit more palatable. I started off with the mute contractors and no Heist intro sequencers mods; this is in no way a jab at either feature. The voice work is great, and these intros are evocative of the mod from Payday 2, but with how few heists there are in the game right now and how repetitive loading them up gets, after a few days of the game, you'll be begging to shut up Shade and Sh, earn some money, and be fed up with the same three cinematic panels on every heist.
These are a must-install after around 20 hours of game time, in my opinion. Moving on to skills, I've seen a fair few complaints regarding how they're displayed and categorized. I've done my best to assist with this, but I don't think you can do much better than the Sora's colored skills mod, which adds a clear color scheme for every skill in the game.
If they don't interact with the grit Edge Rush system, they remain white, as can be seen with the hacker tree. If they involve Edge, they're colored red, Grit is blue, and Rush is green, with any yellow skills involving two or more of the buffs interacting at once. This should make building a simpler process in the long run, especially as more skills are added, and more generally, it allows you to get the gist of a build just from a glance while we wait to be able to rename them, which is also related to character and weapon customization.
We have the better weapon preview mod. This one is exceptionally simple but effective. It adds two primary features to the weapon cosmetics screen: one that allows you to scroll to zoom right in on the glorious details of your weapon, and another that allows you to reposition the gun to better see certain sections, such as charms or stickers.
This is the perfect install, and forget it wasn't a base game feature source of mod that is well worth grabbing early. Finally, on the quality of life front, I'd say the most requested change to Payday 3 since launch has been to alter the current progression system. It seems Stars is softening their position on that and will start working towards a hybrid approach to XP and leveling in the future, but until we get an update, all we can do is try and handle the pure challenge system with all its janky menus as best we can.
One of my biggest complaints with it is how challenge completion is only conveyed at the end of a heist, leaving me wasting time and guessing in most cases. With the challenge notifications mod, this stops being an issue altogether, enabling you to get an almost live update on your challenge progress throughout a heist, making that grind just a bit more bearable until we see some tangible additions to the system.
Moving on to a category of mods near and dear to my heart, we obviously need to talk about Hood mods. I've been a Hawk Wolf and now Vanilla Hood plus Acolyte for almost 10 years in Payday 2, so naturally I want to see how the community plans to give Payday 3's rather Bare Bones aesthetic the same treatment.
Starting with the kill count mod, this one could just as easily fall into the Q category as a great way to track weapon kills picked up over the course of a heist with challenges in mind. It also tracks the damage you've done, meaning it's perfect for groups of competitive heisers who want to brag about who was the MVP on that latest Overkill job.
Some might find it to be a little obtrusive and add more noise to their screen than is necessary at the moment, but it's still an excellent utility well worth considering. Of course, one common feature of hood mods that I haven't been able to get away from ever since I first experienced it in good old Hawk Hood are the damage numbers.
I basically can't play Payday 2 without the satisfaction these bring to my lizard brain on that game, and whilst I find enemy damage feedback to be much better implemented in Payday 3, you still can't go wrong with a few numbers popping up over the cop's head for an instant dope mean. Spike: this one is fully colorcoded, depending on where you're landing your shots and if an enemy type has armor left.
As well as giving you a much better idea of exactly how much damage any weapon you're using is actually doing, we can see just how much of a beast the Moscone is and why the SMGs feel like death by 1, 000 cuts. While I won't be using this utility in all my future articles, as it's confusing as hell for console players, this will be one I go back to when casually playing in my own time.
Finally, we have the simple armor and health Hood, also created by The Talented to Lesov Brkovich. This is a bit of a game changer, especially if you like to know exactly what's going on behind the scenes as far as enemy health is concerned and enjoy Payday as a numerically focused horse shooter rather than more of an immersive heisting sim.
