The best Alien: Isolation mods

I love Alien: Isolation, and recently felt the urge to replay it—primarily to revisit that amazing retro-futuristic setting. But then I remembered the stress of my first experience and decided not to bother, until I had a thought: what if there’s a way to mod out the alien and just explore the environments? And there is!

This modified file created by Steam user Thark alters the alien’s behaviour so that it doesn’t chase you around, leaving you free to explore Sevastopol at your leisure. It’ll still be there in the world, but will never emerge from the vents it loves to hide in. Androids and humans can still kill you, though, so it’s not completely safe.

And this got me thinking: is there a mod community for Alien: Isolation? I had a look around, and found a handful of files on Mod DB. There’s nothing that majorly changes the way the game plays—or any player-made missions/levels—but enough small tweaks that could add some variety to a second playthrough of the game.

Life Savers

This mod overhauls most of the game’s weapons and tools, making them more effective against the alien. Now the stun baton will stun it briefly, or even scare it away, and smoke bombs do a better job of obscuring your movements.
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Unpredictable Alien

If you thought the alien in the vanilla game wasn’t a challenging enough adversary, this mod mixes up its AI to make it more unpredictable. It removes the ‘leash’ that keeps it near Ripley, giving it more freedom to scare the shit out of you.
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Motion Tracker Remover

Do you find evading the xenomorph too easy? Then try playing without the help of Ripley’s motion tracker. This basic mod simply stops it from working, meaning you’ll never really know how far away, or close, the creature really is.
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Flaming Bolt Gun

A modification for the bolt gun, making it more powerful and adding secondary flame rounds. There’s an acid version too if you’d prefer. Interestingly, these mods also make it so that, when attacked, the alien’s acidic blood damages Ripley.
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Overpowered Pistol

This pistol mod is comically overpowered, but ideal for anyone who wants to make enemy encounters less stressful. It kills humans and androids in one hit, and damages the alien so much that it runs away, similar to the flamethrower.
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Silent Movement

Another mod designed to make the game easier, this time making your footsteps completely silent. This means you can sprint around Sevastopol and never alert the alien or other enemies, so long as you stay out of their line of sight.
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If you want to make the game look prettier, try this mod by AngelGraves, which adds an extra ‘super’ option to a few graphics settings. It improves, among other things, LOD range and reflections, and adds 4K resolution shadow maps. This, combined with supersampling, really improves the look of Alien: Isolation.