The preset

285 of NVR's 688 settings differ from stock here. Every one of them is listed with its original value in Docs/UngodlyNVR/CHANGES-ULTRA.md inside the archive. This page covers the parts worth knowing before you start turning things.

Three complete files

Ultra, Balanced, Purist

These are not partial overlays. Each is a complete configuration — copy one over nvse/Plugins/NewVegasReloaded.dll.toml, keeping that exact filename, and it becomes the live preset.

Docs/UngodlyNVR/Presets/Ungodly-Balanced.toml
        →  nvse/Plugins/NewVegasReloaded.dll.toml

Start here

The five settings worth knowing

Each is a one-line edit in the TOML or a couple of taps in the O menu.

1. [_Shaders.PBR.Status] Enabled true

   The single biggest change to how surfaces read. It adds a physically based specular term to object shaders. First thing to switch off if a texture pack starts looking oddly shiny or oddly flat.

2. [_Shaders.Cinema.Status] Enabled true

   Chromatic aberration, film grain and vignette. AspectRatio is set to 1.0, so there are no black bars. If you dislike lens effects, set this false or switch to Purist.

3. [_Main.Main.Misc] ForceMSAA true

   Fixes the black squares around trees and tumbleweeds. Set it false if you run ReShade depth buffer effects or ENB — both need MSAA off to read depth.

4. [_Shaders.DepthOfField.FirstPersonView] Enabled false

   Gameplay stays sharp. The values underneath it are already tuned for a subtle look with distance blur to hide LOD, so flip it true whenever you want it.

5. [_Shaders.VolumetricFog] and [_Shaders.GodRays] raised

   The only two effects that can wash the sky toward white if pushed. Both were raised conservatively. If your weather mod is unusually bright and the sky blows out, drop VolumetricFog.Main.Amount and GodRays.Main.RayIntensity first.

What changed in 1.1.0

Night visibility

Version 1.0.0 crushed outdoor nights to near-black. Three things were stacking, and the first is a genuine trap in the plugin itself.

The auto-exposure was switched off at night

Exposure.fx.hlsl ends on a blend between the original colour and the corrected one, weighted by MaxBrightness:

return delinearize(float4(lerp(color.rgb, color.rgb / lumaDiff, maxBrightness), 1));

So MaxBrightness is the blend weight of the correction, not the "brightness threshold above which the screen will be darkened" that the wiki describes. MinBrightness is the target average luma the correction aims for. Stock ships [_Shaders.Exposure.Night] MaxBrightness = 0.0, which multiplies the whole correction by zero — at night, stock NVR does no exposure compensation at all, and whatever the tonemapper hands over is what you see.

With MinBrightness = 0.16 and MaxBrightness = 0.6, the correction scales with how dark the scene actually is:

The lift is strongest where it is darkest and cancels itself once the scene reaches the target, so already-lit areas and neon are left alone.

The grading stages were crushing shadows

ImageAdjust applies contrast as (c - 0.5) * Contrast + 0.5. At night nearly every pixel sits below 0.5, so the 1.05 used in 1.0.0 dragged the entire frame down. It is 0.99 now, with Brightness at 1.18 and the dark-tone multipliers raised. Those are taken to the power 2.2 in the shader, so DarkColorB = 1.30 is roughly a 1.75× gain on shadows, with blue kept highest to hold the moonlit cast. Tonemapping.Main.WeatherContrast is back at 0.0 — the author's own comment warns it causes black crush, and it does.

Everything that subtracts light was pushed at once

Night ambient scale is up in both PBR.Night and Terrain.Night (AmbientScale 1.05 → 1.45), shadow darkness and the AO floor are backed off, the vignette is lighter and starts further out, and the night dirt lens is down from 0.3 to 0.1 — that last one was what threw soft blobs across the lower half of the frame.

One repair

WetWorld ships dead in stock NVR

The puddle and rain-ripple system has Amount, Increase and Decrease all at 0.0 by default, so puddles never form and never dry. Turning those on is only half of it. In Effects/WetWorld.fx.hlsl the puddle specular is evaluated as:

modifiedBRDF(lerp(TESR_DebugVar.x * 0.00015, TESR_DebugVar.y * 0.0001, puddlemask), ...)

Those are DebugVar1 and DebugVar2 from [_Main.Develop.Main], both 0.0 by default. A GGX distribution with alpha = 0 has a numerator of alpha², so the entire specular term evaluates to zero — puddles render as darkened ground with no highlight at all.

The line directly below it in the source is the author's own commented reference: // float roughness = lerp(0.00015, 0.00007, puddlemask);. Setting DebugVar1 = 1.0 and DebugVar2 = 0.7 reproduces that curve exactly. That is what this preset does, and it is why rain leaves real reflective water on the ground here.

Reference

Every shader, stock against this preset

Eight are switched on that stock leaves off. Nothing that stock enables has been turned off.

• AmbientOcclusion on
• Blood off
• BloodLens off
• Bloom on
• BloomLegacy off
• Cinema on · changed
• Coloring off
• Debug off
• DepthOfField on
• Exposure on
• Flashlight off
• GodRays on
• Grass off
• ImageAdjust on
• Lens on · changed
• LowHF off
• MotionBlur off
• PBR on · changed
• POM on
• Precipitations on
• SMAA on · changed
• ShadowsExteriors on
• ShadowsInteriors on
• Sharpening on · changed
• Skin off
• Sky on
• Snow on · changed
• SnowAccumulation on · changed
• Specular on · changed
• Terrain off
• Tonemapping on
• Underwater on
• VolumetricFog on
• Water on
• WaterLens on
• WetWorld on

Ultra → Balanced

All 26 differences

Same grade, same atmosphere, same colour. Every saving comes out of shadow resolution, shadow range, and the number of things allowed to cast one.

Ultra → Purist

All 25 differences

Identical lighting and shadows. What comes off is the camera simulation — the grain, the aberration, the vignette, the dirt lens, the depth of field — and the split-toned grade.

For the meaning of any setting not covered here, the wiki's main settings reference↗ and the per-shader pages↗ document the whole schema.