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10 Best Payday 2 Mods You Can’t Play Without

This article is over 6 years old and may contain outdated information

Payday 2 is the perfect game to play with some friends as you take on the role of common thieves together. The fun doesn’t stop just at the base game if you’re on PC, though. No, here are the best Payday 2 mods you need to download. These must have mods are awesome for enhancing an already great game. Thanks to the amazing modding community for continuing to create content for fans of this game!

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Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

Better Bots

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It’s plenty of fun to rob banks and take hostages in the vanilla version of the game, but the right Payday 2 mods will make the experience even better. Before we continue, we recommend downloading BLT 2.0. This tool makes installing many mods a simple drag-and-drop process.

Every game has its own AI problems, and this great game is no exception. Thankfully, there’s a mod out there which provides a simple fix Better. Betters Bots makes numerous changes to the way your bot teammates interact with the world, from having bots automatically mark turrets to being able to shoot through other bots and hostages so they don’t cause any more accidental deaths. The mod also lets players customize a number of bot features, including health and movement speed. 

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

WolfHUD

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Partly a collection of other heads-up-display (HUD) mods, WolfHUD makes improvements on them as well as adding other features into the mix. For a full list of the mods WolfHUD includes, check out the download page

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Mods)

Enemy Health and Info

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A fairly simple and self-descriptive mod, Enemy Health and Info shows a health bar above the head of enemies you are aiming at. The name of the enemy will also appear there, and each unit’s name can actually be changed in the mod’s files. Changing the security guards’ names to “Paul Blart” is a vast improvement to the game.

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

Keepers

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Another mod to improve your AI companions, Keepers improves things like pathfinding, taking cover, holding position, and increases general responsiveness. The mod also lets players order their companions to interact with objects that don’t require equipment. If you’re playing with bots on your team, Keepers will help keep you and your team alive long enough to get the job done and escape from the police.

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

Hostage Escort Tweaks

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This mod improves hostages and makes them easier to handle so everyone can make it out of your heists alive. This increases the maximum distance you can be from a hostage before they lie down from 20 meters to 200 meters. It will be difficult to get 200 meters away from your hostages, however, as the mod multiplies their speed by 1.5.

Hostage Escort Tweaks also allows for three hostages to be following you at a time. Finally, you can stop killing innocents because they’re too difficult to deal with, and instead focus on getting the money and getting out.

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

Smokin’ Barrels

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Okay, so this mod doesn’t change up any of the gameplay or make your bot companions more bearable in the game, but Smokin’ Barrels does increase the amount of smoke coming out of the barrels of guns, and what’s more important than that? It’s often the attention to detail that draws people into game worlds, and the smoke effects aren’t just cool, they’re realistic.

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

Re-Texture Project – Performance & Quality

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This texture mod doesn’t try to keep as close to the original as possible while making slight improvements. Instead, it overhauls many locations in Payday 2.

Badly-textured carpets are replaced with shiny wood in some places, and in others, bland walls have been replaced with a nice brick and mortar look. It really modernizes the game, but as with HUDs, textures are often a personal preference kind of thing, so be sure to check out this comparison video before downloading the mod.

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

FEDNET Inventory Icons

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Tired of those bland black-and-white inventory icons for your weapons and equipment? Well you’re not alone, and someone has done something about it.

FEDNET Inventory Icons replaces the monochrome icons from the vanilla Payday 2 with icons from the game’s FBI Files Database, ensuring you know exactly what you’re looking at in your inventory.

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

Restoration Mod

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This mod overhauls many aspects of the game and also adds new units. Not only does it rework enemy statistics and improve police AI, it also changes player weapon statistics, player character statistics, and makes changes to progression.

On top of the changes it makes, Restoration Mod adds new enemies like the Grenadier, who uses teargas to try and smoke you and your thief friends out of hiding. There are too many changes and additions in this mod to list them all here, so be sure to check out the download page to see every modification it makes.

Best Payday 2 Mods (Must Have Payday 2 Mods)

Press-2-Hold Standalone

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Last but not least, though perhaps the simplest mod on this list, Press-2-Hold gets rid of the need to hold down buttons while interacting with objects.

No more holding down the interact key for seemingly forever while you pick a lock, now you just need to tap the key once and the game will do its thing while you sip on your drink or clean crumbs out of your keyboard. Want to stop in the middle of picking that lock? Just press G to cancel the interaction. Like I said, simple.


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George Ash
George is a graduate of the University of Missouri, where he got a degree in journalism. He has worked for a number of outlets in a bunch of positions, but his passion is video games.