Yeah my fourth character who was big into settlements just connected them all like one big train. The first settlement (Sanctuary of course) would share resources with all other settlements down the line for building/crafting. But connecting them all like the spokes in a wheel from a central settlement would work just as well.

That almost perfectly describes how I play. Total loner, no companions, my "settlement" is just a small base I built for myself. No actual settlers (beyond Dogmeat) live there. I only have enough CHR for Lone Wanderer. The one thing I've gotten used to with low CHR is failing damn near every speech challenge. All of my perks revolve around stealth, weapon and armor crafting, and heavy damage output.

On a side note, Local Leader 2 makes going without Gun Nut, Armorer and Science a LOT easier. Especially armorer. Since you can move armor mods from the normal armor variants to the sturdy and heavy variants. Edit: A lot of the times you will get the standard version of armor with a high level mod and the sturdy/heavy version with no mods in the tier 2/3 shops. Buy them both and move the mod from the standard to sturdy version. Guess that does not help too much with this thread.

Gun Nut/Science your weapons may lag a bit. But not by that much.

Local Leader is a short jump from Lone Wanderer though. 2 Points in special and the bobblehead gets you there. Though I think the requirements should have been lower, since it really does make your life easier and takes away some of the really boring parts of settlements.

That's me, too! I'm still set up in Sanctuary, but I left the dog at the Red Rocket, because I want no companions at all. Codsworth stays to himself. Most of the time I don't even know where he is, but the moment he starts trailing me around, he gets banished to Red Rocket. I've recruited no settlers, although any settlement that came equipped with settlers was allowed to remain as such. I haven't done anything with them, though. Nothing built, no recruiting, no assigning. On the few occasions when they've been attacked, I've gone to help them, but only because I like getting the easy exp .

With regard to speech checks, though, if I know I'm going into a a situation where I *might* encounter one, I'll dress in my CHR clothes, to bump CHR by 4 points. I haven't gotten the CHR bobblehead yet, but that'll help, too. I found a couple of magazines that give a boost to persuasion, one for dealing with men, the other for dealing with women. But yes, I still fail a lot. Oh well.

On speech checks, Graqe Mentats are your friend. +5 Charisma, plus price saving and shops. Lasts for 8 minutes too. Easy too craft: mentats, whiskey and hub flower. No perks necessary. Throw in some booze and your charisma clothes and you should be hitting 13-14 CH. Enough to pass most speech checks I think

This is my No Chems woman. She's never even taken a stimpak (she's level 32) or a Radaway. Ever. She's totally clean -- well as clean as a Wastelander can be, I suppose.

I think it is only feasible with strong backed deep pocketed fast travel so you can be your own caravan. Without them that means traveling back to Red Rocket manually with your dungeon load, making it pointless to travel back to a settlement with a crafting load from Red Rocket (Or Sanctuary if you truly think Preston is your BFF) since it already has all the workbenches, and without local leader you cannot make new workbenches anyways. Crawling from Castle to Sanctuary just so you can attach a mod is not really fun. The game does not have all settlements with close dungeons sufficient for keeping local workbenches stocked, the game is pretty much designed that workbenches are supplied by caravans.. I think it does not make sense that the perk that enables supply caravans between workbenches is higher level than the crafting perks. Even the settlement defense missions pretty much assumes you are going to fast travel, as it is unlikely you can beeline somewhere on foot since the game intentionally respawn road mobs and side trips to slow you down.

Without CHA I would say only if also doing a no settlements no crafting, pickup only gear better than what you have leave the old and new junk behind. No modding at all. Which means gunslinger is fairly pointless unless luck brings you a nicely modded .44 from a raider boss, unmodded it is just too weak to keep up. I am doing settlement with no crafting perks but am doing local leader in my CHA 7 playthru, but doing it without the Minuteman (except Oberland Station - Preston snuck up on me for that one) and without fast travel. I think no crafting perks is feasible, but no crafting workbenches is infeasible. Using fast travel to RR to make it work without CHA, is that really a different game than fast traveling to the closest local leader workbench? Certainly without fast travel it would make it very hard at RR, worth a try but I am not convinced you can finish the game.

Huh, that's a great tip. For some reason I always ignore mentats and I've never really taken advantage of the benefits of cooking. I'll have to keep this in mind.

Nope spiderweb caravans are not needed. You would think so that this is because each settlement can then find a more direct route to any other settlement rather than having to stop at in-between settlements - but the caravans do not actually carry the loot and their traveling is just for show. The instant you assign a provisioner to any other settlement your workbench has crafting access to all other indirect settlements, even if the provisioner has not actually even left yet. I generally prefer to use StarLite Drive-In as my hub leaving it as is without interfering walls to better handle the glitchy caravan traffic that a hub creates.

My last (first) char was low charisma.

Coming from the vantage of F3 and NV, not having LL didn't bother me at all. But, I'm not really doing anything with settlements. That will be my focus way down the road, after I've done playthroughs for all factions.

scrapping

all "base" resources weigh 0.1 each

so instead of carrying around the junk items themselves to and fro scrap them all and just carry the base resources to and fro

you will be amazed how much more you can carry

i play with high cha (ill do a low one eventually maybe) but theres still the odd settlement i dont link for whatever reason, whenever i want to build stuff there i just grab a bunch of base resource and with 3 str and no weight perks (no strong back, lone wanderer etc) i can take as much as i want

For general building materials true that raw materials are less weight than entire good, though you have to drop items to scrap them at a workbench including weapons/armor since you will not have any craft benches, which means hiking all those items out of a dungeon to the local settlement (always nice if the dungeon has crafting benches at end though!). If you want to carry the mods, those are 0.5 weight each, and you may want all the mods from a good weapon/armor since you do not know what you will find and need. For found gear you cannot get the mods off anyways because lack of local leader means your local settlement likely does not have the crafting bench, and even if you do remove a mod in the field that means attaching a lesser mod and you may not have the junk you need to even do that. Which again means RR (or DC vendor benches) to be able to do mods, while you are stuck carrying all the gear with the mods . So for settlement building field scrapping and carrying maybe feasible, but I still think modding is not feasible without fast travel or local leader. They should have made it so you can field strip gear without mod swapping at mod bench to make field modding more feasible.

@ OP


If you are playing gunslinger/one wanderer why bother with settlements? You want easy XP? Well your build should allow you to get easy XP through fast combat kills. My advice play your gunslinger character as he is meant to be - out on the road racking up kills. Pick up a point or two early on in scrounger/fortune finder - will make your life loads easier.


What I suspect though, is that you really just want to build settlements so re-roll a good settlement builder character.


If I've learned anything at all about character creation in this game it's that you can't have it all.

Yeah generally the easy EXP is that you get just setting up Sanctuary, though I could skip that I suppose. I do need a base with all the benches though and I think I'll just clear that first house near the bridge and build a large metal building there to store all my stuff and benches. Then I can just ignore the settlement as a whole.