In just a week since launch, modders have delivered loads of simple quality-of-life upgrades to Hogwarts Legacy that really should’ve been there from the start. I’m talking about the little things: the ability to unequip your wand or fly over Hogsmeade without that annoying barrier, skip those lockpicking minigames, or finally shut up the annoying floo powder lady. The weirdly blurry minimap? Fixed. Obtuse broom controls? Improved.

Here are 12 quality-of-life Hogwarts Legacy mods (opens in new tab) (including one cool spellcasting mod to potentially make combat more interesting) that you should consider installing.

FreeFly Mod (opens in new tab) by R457

The first mod that I immediately had to have. As a Hogwarts Legacy player who doesn’t like to fast travel, flying around the needlessly huge magical marrier surrounding Hogsmeade was really getting on my nerves. This mod gets rid of that restriction entirely, though apparently it doesn’t always work if you have your minimap on.

Vivarium Upgrado (opens in new tab) by BorisJohnsonLies

Another must-have if you’re enjoying Hogwarts Legacy’s Room of Requirement (opens in new tab). Unshackles your vivarium from the 12 beast and four species limits, allowing you to truly make your home a zoo. This mod is actually a combination of several mods that also let you conjure anything in vivariums (not just outdoorsy stuff) and even capture/breed non-fantastical beasts. Though, the whole breeding thing can apparently get buggy if you’re incorporating non-beasts, so maybe steer clear of that pitfall. The mod author has also conveniently split the mod into chunks if you, for instance, only want the loosened vivarium limits.

I happen to like the Hogwarts Legacy lockpicking minigame, but if you’re looking for a lore-accurate Alohomora experience in which the spell simply unlocks any lock for you, then give this one a download. The auto-unlocking works on all doors, chests, and quest-related locks too.

Adds a potion to J. Pippin’s potion shop that allows you to reallocate all of your talent points. Interestingly, datamined info suggests such a potion was planned to be in the vanilla game (opens in new tab). I can see why Avalanche ultimately decided there was little need for the potion (you earn enough talent points to unlock almost everything anyways), but I can see this being useful early on if you want to experiment with the skill tree.

Hogwarts Legacy takes the lightswitch approach to UI, meaning you can turn individual elements on/off and that’s it. I much prefer the Red Dead Redemption approach to UI where elements disappear when they’re not needed. This mod is as close as you can get to that in Hogwarts Legacy, adding the ability to toggle any and all obtrusive elements (like the map and spells) with hotkeys instead of lengthy trips to the settings screen.

You could consider this more of a bugfix, but nonetheless it’s worth fixing the strangely lo-res default minimap. Down with the jagged edges!

Unequip Wand (opens in new tab) by nathdev

Geralt can sheathe his swords. Arthur can holster his revolver. So why can’t I pocket my wand? I spent most of Hogwarts Legacy flaunting my wand in-hand like a buffoon, always hoping that the game would finally decide to holster it. It’s time to take control. This mod lets you set a hotkey that’ll equip/unequip your wand at will. As a bonus, there’s also a toggle for taking on/off your cloak’s hood.

It’s fair to say that Hogwarts Legacy’s default broom controls are a little weird. On controller, I never quite got used to controlling my direction with the left stick and my elevation with the right, so this mod brings both of those controls to the left stick. It works and is a better overall control scheme than the default, but there are a few downsides: the mod does not currently remap the up/down on right stick to camera control, so there’s still no way to simply look in those directions while flying. The control change also disables the slowest flight mode on the left stick (the one where you’re not leaning forward), so keep that in mind. If you’re playing with mouse and keyboard, modder R457 also offers an alternative with Mouse Controls for Broom.

Game Pauser (opens in new tab) by YouYouTheBoxx

This mod undoes a cardinal videogame sin by allowing you to pause during conversations and cutscenes. This got on my nerves a lot over my 50-hour playthrough, so jump on this immediately.

There will surely come a time in your Hogwarts Legacy playthrough when the stone Floo powder lady embedded in every fast travel point repeats the same line of dialogue one too many times and goes from charming to totally irritating. When that time comes, this mod will make it all stop.

Your mileage may vary, but this mod purports to reduce the stuttering that has plagued Hogwarts Legacy since launch and improve erratic framerates. This one has a more involved installation process than most other HL mods, including its own custom installer, so pay close attention to the instructions. Don’t expect a silver bullet.

This is more of an experimental change than an essential one, but you may find it adds a welcome layer of immersion to Hogwarts Legacy’s simplistic default spellcasting. The mod essentially creates shortcuts for casting spells executed with mouse gestures, so wiggling the mouse left and right while aiming your wand could, for instance, cast Lumos (or whatever spell you want). There is some fiddling involved in getting every spell assigned the way you want, but the mod page is equipped to help you figure it out.

In a “special report for the community (opens in new tab),” developer 3Division said the fan, formerly a “respected member of our community,” believes the idea for a “realistic mode (opens in new tab)” added in December 2022 was his, and is angry that he isn’t credited accordingly. The studio said it would have added him to the credits, along with other contributors, after the game was complete, but before that could happen the fan began making legal threats and issuing copyright strikes on YouTube against a popular Workers and Resources influencer.

“As he chose to use extortion and abuse, we became angry about this, and decided to never mention the name of the challenge he allegedly ‘invented’ again, and ignore him,” 3Division wrote.

An understandable reaction—but instead of blowing over, the situation got worse, and the fan now claims that he actually owns the rights to Workers and Resources’ realistic mode. 

“This guy reported our website, and the website was taken down,” 3Division wrote. “He also reported our video about the last content update where realistic mode was introduced, and the video was taken down.” The studio said the takedowns were successful because they’re handled through an automated process, and it expects to get the content returned once it’s able to deal with actual people.

The message includes a link to the fan’s original play guide, called Cosmonaut Mode (opens in new tab), and compares it to the realistic mode in Workers and Resources to demonstrate that “there is nothing in his work in terms of game design that would relate directly to game’s code, and he does not offer any technical solutions for the development team to use.”

“He literally just created a guide with some possible way to play the game and called it Cosmonaut mode, but it is not helping the development process,” 3Division wrote. “[The] one thing he was helpful in, is that the popularity of his guide showed us how much people wanted to play the game in a realistic and more challenging way.”

3Division told Kotaku (opens in new tab) that the fan in question is actually a lawyer, and that he’s betting the studio won’t engage him in a costly legal battle. But “we will probably fight to the end,” the studio said, noting that the angry fan is also risking his reputation and potentially hefty financial penalties if he loses.

The studio also said that it is “very sad” that DMCA mechanics enable people to do things like this in the first place. “[It] seems like anybody can claim anything,” 3Division said. “The service provider is just forced to remove the content and in general not ask or [consider] if the claims are real.”

Claiming ownership of a specific game mode based on writing a guide for a particular style of play is an interesting idea, and also potentially very disruptive if it’s allowed to get traction. It reminds me of Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, who blocks fans who send him unsolicited ideas (opens in new tab) because of potential legal entanglements—a habit he was also notorious for back in the days of Usenet (opens in new tab). He took occasional heat for being a hardass about it at the time, but this situation demonstrates that his concerns were not unfounded.

A 3Division representative said in an email sent to PC Gamer that the studio is “working with our legal representatives on the issue,” but has not yet heard from Valve.

The feature is live now in the latest Steam Deck beta and the latest beta client on desktop.

This feature was first spotted in the Steam OS code back in October, so it’s nice to see it come to fruition. “A common use case would be a home setup with multiple PCs or Steam Decks on the same local network,” Valve writes in a new FAQ. Once a game is installed on one PC, all other PCs or the Steam Deck can install or update that game by transferring files directly from that one PC. A modern PC can easily transfer game content with 100MB/sec, and during the transfer the Steam client sending content will generate disk and CPU load (ie, you probably wouldn’t want to be doing any intensive tasks on this PC during the transfer).”

If you have an unlimited gigabit internet connection, this update likely won’t benefit you much. But for everyone else—especially PC gamers stuck with restrictive bandwidth caps—it should be a real blessing, considering the mighty storage hogs of 100GB+ PC games these days.

It sounds like the feature isn’t an all-or-nothing thing, and can switch between a local transfer and an internet download if your PC gets turned off, for example. The FAQ explains: “If a potential PC is found, your client will ask the Steam backend server to contact that other PC’s Steam client and start a game file transfer if local network transfers are enabled and possible. If the game file transfer is accepted, your PC will try to download as much content as possible from the other PC. If the connection is lost or no more content is available, Steam will fall back to use public Steam content servers to download the remainder.”

By default the feature only allows transfers between systems logged into the same Steam account. However, you can set it to also support people on your Steam friends list or any users. If a friend comes over with their Steam Deck and wants to download Apex Legends to play together, for example, you could potentially get things going a lot more quickly by transferring them your 60 gigs of game files—although that’s going to depend a lot on the hardware on both ends.

In my quick testing, it was actually faster for me to download Elden Ring to my Steam Deck than to transfer it from my PC. The local transfer from my wired desktop’s PCIe Gen 4 SSD to the Steam Deck’s internal storage (via wi-fi) was only moving at about 25 MB/s, while the speed jumped to more than 35 MB/s once I started downloading from Steam’s servers.

There are a few limits to the feature Valve notes. These are the ones that stand out to me:

• Game content can only be transferred out if the transferring Steam client is idle, e.g. no downloads or games running
• The game needs to released to the public and playable by both Steam users (no preloads)
• The game needs to be up-to-date on the PC sending the game files
• Only a PC running in Steam desktop mode can send files. So Steam Decks, PCs in Big Picture mode, and custom launchers can currently not transfer files out over the local network.

On desktop you can find the feature under the Downloads tab in settings. Both systems will show a blue banner on the downloads page indicating that a transfer is in progress. When I clicked the “Stop transfer” button, Steam just seamlessly switched over to downloading over the internet. Once you cancel a local transfer, there doesn’t seem to be a way to re-initialize it—even deleting the half-complete install and starting over had me pulling the game from Valve’s servers.

Returnal’s PC edition launched on February 15, and a small first patch is out. There’s six items fixed, ranging from corrected Windows resolution detection to a minor tweak in Epic Particle settings. See the full patch notes below.

According to Returnal’s Steam page, the next patch will have performance improvements and a fix for 3840×1600 resolution.