This mod that automatically drops all the junk you pick up in Fallout might be the most important ever made

Vault Boy throws dice while winking at the camera in keyart from Fallout: New Vegas.

(Image credit: Obsidian / Bethesda)

Pack it up, modders, we're done. We've scaled the peak, ascended the summit, and hit the outer limit. All previous mods were just a prelude to this, the culmination of the artform: Auto Drop for Fallout: New Vegas from Sweet6Shooter weighs in at about 4 kilobytes, and I think it could save me enough time to write the next great American novel.

We've all spent many, many hours of our lives with Gamebryo, the weird and wobbly engine that's underpinned everything Bethesda has made since The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, so you'll know that it can sometimes be a little imprecise. Specifically, it's incredibly easy to waggle your crosshair over a burned book, a rusty iron sword, or some other piece of ephemeral junk while you're trying to pick up something actually cool and valuable.

It's never a big problem until you realise you've somehow accumulated 20 kilograms of erlenmeyer flasks and cheese wheels, and you have to laboriously pick through your inventory to dump them all in some dungeon so that you can fast travel back home. It's tedious, disruptive, and makes you feel more like a wandering Collyer brother than the hero of a sprawling RPG. But Auto Drop solves that (at least in New Vegas), forcing your character to drop anything you've marked as junk the second they pick it up, as though suddenly struck by a surge of mental clarity.

It's easy to install and configure, though you will need to install the New Vegas Script Extender (NVSE), the JIP LN NVSE Plugin, and JohnnyGuitar before it'll work properly. That sounds like a lot, but all you need to do is dump the relevant files into the correct directories of your New Vegas install (or you can install them using something like Mod Organizer 2 to make things even simpler). Once you've done that, you need to chuck the Auto Drop .esp and accompanying config folder into New Vegas' Data Files directory and you're off to the races.

That config folder holds a single .ini file that will let you pick and choose which items to consider 'junk' or not. It comes preloaded with 78 objects—stuff like burned books, dog bowls, ashtrays and chess boards—that you can modify as you like. Personally, I'd recommend adding Caravan cards to it; I have over 500 hours in New Vegas and I still don't know what the hell is going on in that card game.

Now we just need Auto Drop for every Bethesda game from Oblivion through Skyrim (and, let's be honest, Starfield) and I think we can just shut Nexus Mods down. Our work here is done.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.