Cyberpunk 2077 Mod Adds Smart NPCs You Can Talk To, Travel With and Give Orders

A mod called NightCityNet is in development for Cyberpunk 2077. It hooks language models up to ordinary Night City residents and turns them into more independent characters. NPCs can hold a free-form conversation, react to what’s happening around them, follow the player, get into a car and carry out various commands.

In early October, a demo of NightCityNet appeared on Nexus Mods. It isn’t a full release of the mod on the platform yet, but a video of an early working build. The developer distributes the archive itself through Discord.

The main difference between NightCityNet and standard Cyberpunk 2077 NPCs is that dialogue isn’t limited to pre-recorded branches. A neural network generates responses based on context and the previous conversation, syncs them with lip movement and can voice them with voices based on characters from the game.

NPCs can become companions and even swap numbers

NightCityNet already supports noticeably more interactions than ordinary conversation. You can ask a character to follow V, get into a car or perform a specific action.

In the current version, NPCs can sit down, dance, drink, draw a weapon, sell items, hand over or ask for money. There’s also a semblance of social relationships: characters can exchange phone numbers with the player, send messages, call and send photos.

The mod also uses basic computer vision. In the demo on Nexus Mods, for example, NPCs can take the protagonist’s clothing into account and react to other elements of the current situation.

That said, development is at a very early stage. Testers report problems with animations and cases where individual actions are poorly connected to one another. So for now NightCityNet is more a demonstration of what AI NPCs can do than a transformation of Cyberpunk 2077 into an entirely new life simulation.

A third-party launcher adds Russian

A separate developer, ARCHIDEXTER, has created AD.Engram — a launcher that automates the installation of NightCityNet and the required dependencies, and also adds Russian localization and voice communication.

According to the AD.Engram page, users can choose a cloud neural network or run a compatible local model through Ollama. Additional components handle speech recognition and synthesis, and the launcher itself has been tested on Cyberpunk 2077 version 2.31.

There’s an important distinction here: NightCityNet and AD.Engram are not the same project. The mod itself is distributed free of charge by its author, while the third-party launcher AD.Engram is in early access and offered through a paid Boosty subscription. Using cloud AI models may also require separate API payment.

NightCityNet shows one of the most interesting directions in game modding: the neural network doesn’t just generate new lines, it ties conversation to actions directly inside the game world. How stably such a system can work over a long playthrough will only become clear as development continues.