Although much has been made of the Fallout's DLC for PS3, Xbox 360 and the PC, what you may not know is that those of you on the PC can mod Fallout all on your own, and at no expense. We've been tinkering with Fallout 3 on the PC here in the ZATZ Labs (yes, while we should have been doing real work), and we thought it'd be helpful to show you the list of mods we installed for Fallout 3.

Some mods to explore
One think to note is that there are a lot of mods. What we're listing here are only a few that we've had a chance to test out. And, you could break your game, so be careful and make backups.

• Action_Boy_hacking: makes the computers far less sucky to break into.

• ArtilleryStrike: I've have never managed to make this work.

• CheaterTerminal: Drops a terminal right outside the entrance to Megaton, adds some features. I hacked this to give me a house key.

• Greenerworld: Much more pleasant and still feels real. Bit of a challenge to install, but makes the game fun, but still clearly postwar.

• Item Room: Go outside Springdale, near the gas station and there's a manhole cover. Go down the manhole cover and there's a room with all the possible objects in the game. Megacheat. Rarely used (except to get a bonnet hat to stick on the kid I needed to escort 'cause he was such a dork).

• LevelersTruck: Love this. Again, you could over-cheat, but I use the merchant there to sell my loot to because she never runs out of cash and can do my repairs. Very well-designed mod. Located right near Vault 101.

• Marts Mutant Mod: Increased Spawns and Increased Increased Spawns. I think it's called MMM3 on Nexus (see below). The first one adds more spawns and the second adds lots more spawns. Right now, I'm using Increased Increased because the fights are fun.

• Marts Mutant Mod Zone Respawn: Respawns inside as well. Used with Increased Increased might be over the top. To make it into a bunker, I had a wild firefight with 10 mutants just inside the door.

• npc-tracker: supposedly tells you where certain NPCs are. Never tells me the ones I want.

• Nuke Weapons: Insane. Drops a locker outside the Vault 101 door and provides a big-ass nuke gun (hint: you and everything else will die), a nuke mini-gun (holy crap, this is fun to shoot) and a sniper-nuke (actually, rather useful).

• PersonalTerminal: Cool tool. I tweaked it in GECK to add almost infinite VATS because I like VATS. Not exactly sure how I did that. Many other excellent features including a personal helper terminal in your inventory. Found in your house in TenPenny and Megaton.

• Skeleton_key: supposed to help you pick locks. There's some stupid hint system to find it, I gave up. Dorkish. Ignore.

• GECK: The Garden of Eden Construction Kit. You can get this from Bethesda's site and it's a full development environment for Fallout 3 where you can do anything. Very poorly documented and you can do-anything yourself into a lot of trouble, but it's a must-download if you want to hack your game.

You can get most of these at Fallout3Nexus. Oh, and yes, since gamers are often dirty-minded little brats, there are nude mods. Don't.

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.