Quiet Exploration - Almost No Looped Music

TL;DR Almost all looped general exploration music has been replaced with 2 - 5 minutes of silence. Combat music is still there, thematic music (opening the vault, museum of witchcraft, faction bases) is still there.

So have you ever been sneaking thru the boston commons and you think you hear something, but the damned music is overpowering everything? Do you want to make the wasteland a feel a little more hostile? This is the mod for you. I play a stealthy character and I like being able to clearly hear what is going on around me in game. I also like the songs I used to replace the combat music in fallout 4. Normally you would have to constantly switch the music on and off to get both. Well I got sick of it and made this very simple file replacer. I replaced FO4's longer looped tracks with 4:45 of silence and all the tiny palette tracks with a minute of silence. It was EXTREMELY TEDIOUS, but worth it. The silent wasteland makes takes some of FO4s cartoony-ness away, leaving the world quiet and bleak. Wind whispers constantly, metal creaks, far off battles echo around you, every sound is a potential threat.

Combines well with Radio mods. I personally use the Pipod Personal Radio and Jetfuel radio(<=== very good lore friendly station 07 )

WHAT PLACES STILL HAVE MUSIC:

all cities (diamond city, good neighbor)

museum of witchcraft

music cues and stingers from events, perks, and discoveries

WHAT PLACES DO NOT HAVE MUSIC:

other vaults

buildings with enemies

anything considered "dungeon" like

the entire world map outside of cities.

most of nuka world. stuff will still play from ingame speakers but i choose to treat the whole DLC like a big dungeon.

the basic logic is do i want to sneak here? if so i took the music out.

Install with Vortex, NMM, any mod manager of your choice or manually. as this is just a simple file replacer there is no ESP file to clutter your load order and no need to worry about updates preventing this from working so it will work just fine with the NG update. the file size is extremely small but silence is easy to compress. unpacked this is 187 mb of nothing. if you want to restore any of the music simple delete the .xwm files from that zone. this will make the game pull the original from the BSA instead of loading the silent track. :)

updated 1/15/2026 to include nuka world.