Best Mods for Cyberpunk 2077 in 2026

Welcome to the ultimate Cyberpunk 2077 modding guide, updated for January 2025. Night City has never looked better or played smoother thanks to the incredible modding community that continues to enhance CD Projekt RED’s cyberpunk masterpiece. This comprehensive guide covers the most essential mods across multiple categories, from character customization and interface improvements to visual enhancements and graphics overhauls.

Each mod has been tested and verified to work with the latest game version, ensuring a stable and enhanced experience as you explore the neon-soaked streets of Night City. From subtle improvements to dramatic overhauls, these modifications represent the best the community has to offer. This guide assumes Vortex has been installed.

Best Graphics Mods

Boost Night City’s visual quality with mods that replace low-resolution textures with crisp, detailed alternatives and add intricate environmental details throughout the world.

These modifications upgrade everything from character faces and clothing to building surfaces and street elements, dramatically improving texture resolution and adding fine details that weren’t present in the original game. Perfect for players with powerful hardware who want to experience Night City at its most visually stunning.

Nova LUT 3.0 (AgX – HDR Support)

Transform Night City’s color palette with this advanced Look-Up Table that utilizes AgX colorspace technology to deliver crisp visuals and lifelike colors with enhanced contrast. Created by CyanideX, this comprehensive color grading solution includes both SDR and HDR variants, featuring 72 HDR options with customizable exposure multipliers and color temperatures.

The mod brings natural, realistic tones to replace Cyberpunk’s often oversaturated default palette while maintaining the game’s distinctive cyberpunk aesthetic. Compatible with LUT Switcher for easy variant switching, it also includes optional environmental changes that modify weather conditions, lighting, and fog effects for a complete visual overhaul that works seamlessly across all game versions.

Preem Water 2.0 ( Canon – Pure – Tropical – Paradise )

This water enhancement mod replaces Night City’s default water with more natural-looking alternatives across four distinct styles. Canon stays closest to vanilla while reducing shiny reflections and adding larger, slower waves for a grittier urban feel. Pure offers crystal-clear surfaces with enhanced texture detail and natural world scaling.

Tropical transforms water into a vibrant paradise-style with realistic light scattering, tropical colors, and reduced refraction that reveals the ocean floor. Each variant adjusts wave patterns, animation speeds, and lighting properties to improve water realism throughout the game world dramatically.

You can choose which water style suits the intended aesthetic of your Cyberpunk 2077 world. Personally, I’d go for Paradise, as this is the most visually pleasing variation of water to me.

High-Res Graphics Pack – MAXIMUM

This comprehensive collection bundles 22 carefully curated high-resolution texture mods that transform Night City into a truly next-generation visual experience. Created by renowned modder MonstrrMagic, who has released over 250 texture optimization mods, this collection addresses Cyberpunk 2077’s reliance on low-resolution vanilla textures by replacing them with meticulously AI-upscaled 4K alternatives.

The collection encompasses everything from character clothing and cyberware to environmental containers, world map textures, and named NPCs, ensuring every visual element receives the high-definition treatment it deserves.

What sets this collection apart is its technical sophistication and ease of use. While Cyberpunk 2077’s engine upscales vanilla textures anywhere from 2x to 32x depending on your graphics settings, these AI-trained upscale models deliver far superior quality than the game’s on-the-fly processing. Since the vanilla textures are already being upscaled, VRAM usage remains similar to running high texture settings, but with dramatically improved definition and clarity. Perfect for players with powerful hardware who want the absolute best visual fidelity, this collection essentially functions as a complete next-generation graphics DLC that works seamlessly with version 2.3 and Phantom Liberty.

Nova Rain (and Improved Ripples)

Experience realistic and subtle rain effects that prioritize authenticity over visual spectacle. Created by CyanideX, this mod replaces the overly prominent rain particles of the vanilla version with rain that behaves more realistically. It is barely visible in the darkness of night, yet remains audible and atmospheric.

The rain respects lighting conditions correctly, no longer shining inappropriately in shadows, and it responds dynamically to wind patterns. Designed to work seamlessly with Nova City’s stormy weather systems, this mod also includes optional improved ripple effects for enhanced interactions with puddles and surfaces, creating a more immersive precipitation experience.

Best Appearance Mods

Transform your V and Night City’s inhabitants with high-resolution textures, hundreds of new hairstyles, and exclusive NPC customization options. These mods enhance character creation and improve body visibility, letting you create a truly unique protagonist while making every character look more detailed and realistic.

4k New Female complexions and better NPCs

This mod provides new 4K complexions for female characters and improved textures for NPCs. It offers two versions: V1 is rougher with more imperfections, and V2 is cleaner and younger looking. Both change the 5 available skin types with options that include eyeshadows and eyebrows. The mod also includes microdetails that affect all skin in the game and detailed skins for female NPCs.

4k New Female Complexions and better NPCs can be applied to either the player (V) or NPCs via specific files found in the manual files section; running both at the same time does work.

WINGDEER HAIR COLLECTION

This massive hair mod contains 210 hair styles for female V, created by the popular modder wingdeer. The collection represents most of the hair mods the author made over the past year.

This mod doesn’t have an all-in-one file, but allows players to download only the hairstyles that interest them. They can select from options such as ‘mid-length collection’ as shown above, or specific hairstyles, like ‘Chun-Li’s Hairstyle’, among many others.

Advanced V Customisation

Adding NPC customization to V one piece at a time. This mod allows both male and female V to use hairstyles, cyberware, tattoos, and special clothing that were initially exclusive to NPCs. The mod was inspired by the creator seeing an NPC hairstyle they wanted for their character, which opened the door to many more customization options. It requires Cyber Engine Tweaks and includes custom presets, tattoos, and skin textures for both genders.

Shown above is the F – Tyger INKED. This is one of 23 presets that alter the character’s appearance during character creation.

Immersive First Person

This mod improves body presence and adds a free look camera feature. Clothes and body are now more visible when looking down, and the camera is unobtrusive, only applying when safe from clipping.

The FreeLook feature allows you to rotate the camera without moving the body by holding an assigned shortcut key. The camera works nicely with zooming, scanning, and interactions. The mod requires Cyber Engine Tweaks and offers various customization options.

Best HUD Mods

Fix common interface issues and enhance your Night City navigation experience. These mods address UI bugs like disappearing health bars, improve loot visibility, and overhaul the map system for better functionality. Essential for a polished, bug-free experience with improved usability and authentic 2018 demo aesthetics.

Project E3 – UI

Project E3: UI replaces all in-game UI elements as much as possible according to the 2018 Gameplay Demo. The mod revamps all UI elements, shapes, colors, animations, and positions based on Cyberpunk 2077’s 2018 Gameplay Demo. This mod requires RedMod and may be incompatible with some other UI mods due to its comprehensive nature. It’s perfect for players who prefer the aesthetic shown in the original gameplay reveal.

This mod requires RedMod, which can be downloaded via Steam. The picture shown is taken from the mod’s CurseForge page

HUD Fixes – fix disappearing HUD element and quest dialogs

This essential mod fixes disappearing HUD elements and quest dialogs that became problematic in game version 1.5+. The mod provides a constant health bar display (similar to previous versions) and includes a forced HUD state reset feature that attempts to restore missing elements, such as the minimap. You can set up hotkeys to manually trigger the HUD reset when needed. Requires Cyber Engine Tweaks.

Better Loot Markers

This popular mod adds additional loot markers on containers that show which types of loot are inside. Instead of a generic loot box icon, you’ll see specific icons for each category (armor, weapons, eddies) with different colored icons representing the highest quality loot in each category. The mod is customizable with options for vertical mode, icon scaling, and showing default markers alongside the new ones. Requires Cyber Engine Tweaks.

Realistic Map

This mod replaces the default stylized map with a detailed high-resolution 2D render of the actual map. Available in 4K, 8K, 16K, and 32K resolutions to fit different hardware specs. The mod addresses the navigation issues with the original map by providing a Google Earth-style satellite view that makes understanding Night City’s layout much easier, with a clear indication of buildings, roads, and elevation changes. Higher resolutions may increase loading times when opening the map.

All links are unaffiliated and are available through Curseforge, a reputable mod community where individuals/teams can upload mods for specific games, in this instance, Cyberpunk 2077. I have personally reviewed the site and identified the most useful mods that add value to at least one of the categories listed, and compiled this list to save others time and achieve the same effect efficiently.

The rankings have barely changed since publishing this in January, and so I consider it up to date as of January 2025.