Can anyone tell me what one would use a powered speaker for? I built one, connected it to a terminal and now I can remotely adjust the frequency of the tone it emits. Oooh, What joy!

Seriously, what purpose do they have?

I wondered the same thing.

I built one and it only played different pitched tones.

In workshop mode, the powered speaker suggests connecting it to a terminal to unlock additional features. Apparently, those additional features are the ability to make the speaker play different tone without actually touching the speaker. Whoot!

Well, there are various switches and counters and stuff like that, so theoretically you could hook up those in logic gate style and maybe use that to control various speakers. Someone with enough skill could make music. A sound that goes off every hour, one that goes off every sunset or sunrise. I haven't looked into it myself but those are just some things it might be able to do.

They are like Minecraft's note blocks. You can combine a bunch of them with terminals and timed switches to play a tune.

Okay. If true, that answers the *what*, though I've never played with minecraft. Now, why would anyone want to do that? It seems to me constructing a tune that way would be extremely time consuming, and the result would be what, something akin to a 1980's style PC speaker tune?

Can you connect them to the same line with a spotlight say for example near the generators, if the spotlights spot an enemy the speakers will alert the "guards" and they will come?

You are right, it would be kind of tedious and the result would not sound very sophisticated. It would also be a creative and technical challenge, which answers the "Why". Some people just enjoy these sort of challenges.

They're for recreating the floor piano scene from Big- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls2Z3ic_PhM

The mario one was great. This is crazy, haha.

What Minecraft's Gold Ingot guy said.

Just like in Minecraft, there's not much point to them. In fact, considering the complexity of resource and "size" requirements, there's even less reason to include them in F4. Although it would be a nice alarm system for conveniently knowing what was triggered and where, the fact that raid spawns are inside settlements keeps it pointless.

I guess that leads to one last question... WTF was Bethesda thinking?

Time sink

yeah it's pretty cool what he managed to do