One day after launch, the top 30 "adult" Stellar Blade mods have over 350,000 downloads on Nexus Mods, which isn't far off what Nier Automata has after 8 years

Stellar Blade has come to PC, and at a time when the bar for PC ports is embedded in the basement of Hell, it's come out swinging with a glorious port that looks, runs, and plays great. It's flying on Steam, instantly becoming PlayStation's biggest single-player PC launch, and that means it's also flying on Nexus Mods, where early mod creators and users are already filling out the Gooner Library of Alexandria with a frankly staggering pile of NSFW mods.

Everyone expected Stellar Blade, which has gone to great lengths in-game and in trailers to show off female protagonist Eve, to get a lot of NSFW mods. Even when the PC port was just a Steam demo, it had plenty of nude mods and the like. But even I'm surprised by just how many adult mods there are and how much traction they've gotten.

I'm going to focus on Nexus Mods here, because while it isn't the only place to get mods, it is the biggest mod site there is, so it's a pretty good data source. I'll also focus on total downloads as an indication of traffic, partly because they're more commonly used for mod rankings, and partly because unique downloads can vary dramatically based on a range of factors.

At the time of writing, Stellar Blade has 203 mods on Nexus Mods. Of those, 80 are marked as "Adult" mods, with many of them being loud-and-proud pornographic or nudity mods, and with others mostly adding outfits that would still definitely get you kicked out of an Olive Garden. I'm not going to link or embed any of these for obvious reasons. If you want to see them, make a free Nexus Mods account so they show up in the listings, and knock yourself out.

The top five most-downloaded Stellar Blade mods are all adult mods, and the title of the current champion, at 58,000 downloads, is so blindingly on-the-nose that I simply have to share it: "Eve with no Clothes on." I mean, you can't say they aren't giving the people what they want. (Fun fact: this was at 57,800 downloads when I started writing this article about 40 minutes ago.)

I pulled out the total download figures for the current top 30 adult Stellar Blade mods, and one day after the PC port's release on June 11, fans have already downloaded just these 30 mods over 351,000 times. Granted, some of these mods were released upwards of a week ago, but most of them were updated recently, and the mod scene only really took off with the full release.

We can't use a banana for scale here, so to compare these figures, let's look at Nier Automata, a game that directly inspired Stellar Blade and which developer Shift Up has been buddy-buddy with at any opportunity. Even Nier Automata boss Yoko Taro joked that maybe he shouldn't have done that collab, seeing as how many cosplayers are now dressing as Shift Up characters instead of Nier's.

Nier: Automata was released on PC in 2017, and its most-downloaded mods go back to 2018. None of its top 10 mods are marked as adult; instead, they're a bunch of texture, performance, and helper mods.

This helps demonstrate why this is a useful but very imperfect comparison. Nier Automata was busted as a can of biscuits when it launched on PC, so players turned to mods to help put it back together. Stellar Blade doesn't have that problem at all, so players have been freer to run wild elsewhere. There's also the question of how difficult it is to mod these games. (Nier Replicant, a much better PC port, has a much smaller Nexus Mods community with just five adult mods, so it's not a good comparison either.)

That being said, if we look at the top 30 adult Nier Automata mods on Nexus Mods, we'll find just over 505,000 downloads. The oldest among these mods go back to early 2020, which shrinks the 8-year gap a little bit, but may also demonstrate the different audience appetites here. Nier Automata may have a "destroy skirt" button, but it wasn't as sexualized as Stellar Blade.

Additionally, there are only 68 adult Nier Automata mods listed. Granted, eight years is plenty of time for mods to get removed for whatever reason, and Nier Automata has undoubtedly seen many more adult mods across the entire internet.

Even so, this is pretty convincing evidence that Stellar Blade's PC audience is, as many suspected, quite above-average on the horny scale. The game has more adult mods than most games – 80 out of 203 total mods, compared to 68 out of 581 for Nier Automata – and they are high-ranking.

After one day, the total downloads on Stellar Blade's top 30 NSFW Nexus Mods creations are just 30% behind Nier Automata's top 30 adult mods despite the latter being years older. I would only expect this trend to grow from here as players get more comfortable modding the game.

As Stellar Blade PC gets booted off the Steam Next Fest charts, a sci-fi FPS that's everything I actually wanted from Starfield is rising up to take its place.