I was excited about this fallouts settlement feature,and it is obvious quite a lot of work has went into it,so it leaves me puzzled why it seems to be...half finished?I mean,lack of time can't be the reason.Anyway with that little thought out of the way,here are some of my issues with the whole settlement thing,and some probs/bugs that i have noticed.

Settlement size limits are an issue(at least on console) You really can't build your own mini city with adequate defenses.Don't know if that can be raised on console or not,but i feel it should be tried.

There are a serious lack of options,i'm not expecting minecraft here but metal options are severely limited as are fences and it would be nice to have fires and more types of lighting.

Further to that,there needs to be more rounded item options(curves,circular etc),an ability to warp objects like fences,perhaps?Also,far more half size options to more of the wall and floor and roof types.

Terrain is a right pain in the butt,so many of my placed fences have big gaps between some of them and the ground,using foundations below fences can solve this but it eats up your size limit and can be aesthetically jarring.The ability to warp/curve objects could solve some of that,but a terrain leveller would be an awesome addition.

An option to turn item snapping off on the fly would be a boon(and honestly i'm puzzled why that was never thought of at beth HQ)

You should also be allowed to remove EVERYTHING on a lot,including houses that were already there.

Now onto problems/bugs.

Defenses don't matter except to lower frequency of attacks.(and they don't stop attacks either,no matter how many you have)I don't have a problem with defenses not stopping attacks completely,but i do have a problem with how they are played out.You get a notification you're attacked at such and such and have to drop everything to go deal with it.All those cool looking defenses you put up don't mean anything.If you don't go to that defense everything gets destroyed.20 laser turrets and 10 heavy machineguns wiped out by a few raiders?Come on beth...

You know how i would have this?Still a chance for an attack ,but if you don't go ,some math wizardy goes on at end of attack time and the outcome of all these formulas decides how much of your base is destroyed,if at all.

I would also make it so there is a seperate chance of an attack if you arrive at one of your settlements,launching a wave/s of attackers at your settlement that start OUTSIDE of the settlement,giving you a little bit of excitement seeing all your carefully constructed defenses go to work.Your defense level would be a factor in how large or how many waves there would be.

Not only that,but several times during attacks on settlements i have went to defend but no enemies spawned.I went on a far out search to try to find any enemies that had caught onto some scenery or whatever(once i did actually find that had happened)but alas,no dice.So i wait in the settlements,skip an hour,nothing.I usually have to just go back to questing and let my defense fail,come back and waste a bunch of resources repairing everything again,cause you know,defenses don't do anything^^

This is a bug that happens to me at sanctuary mostly,sometimes when i'm placing items i can't place them anywhere,because for some reason it'll randomy select one of my placed turrets on the other end of the building area,cancelling,going out of workshop etc does not fix this,i have to then store the turret in workshop(and then it'll go through another 5 or 6 turrets that i have to store before it stops selecting them);only then can i place other items again(size limit not an issue)

There's also the "can't tell what settler is assigned to what" which is a common complaint.

Spotlights stop working after a few fast travels.

The map screen is displaying completely wrong numbers of happiness and settlers in each settlement for me.One is showing as 3 but when i travel and go into workshop mode it is the correct 15.Another says i have 27 settlers =/

Settlers have atrocious pathfinding and can end up stuck.My Preston loves heights it seems,everyweek i have to rescue him from a roof.

Anyhoo,i enjoy the settlement thing,but it could have been so much more and i do hope beth take a good look at it and put some people onto it,i get the feeling there's a large chunk of the playerbase that considers it an important part of their game.

I agree with all of that.

I get the feeling they were half way done with programming the settlements and said, "hey lets let the modders handle all of the rest."

It really amazes me how many assets are already in the game that they couldn't be bothered to add to the settlement building list. The more I explore the game, the more this stands out. Bunkbeds, stone walls, loads of furniture, doors, lights.

Whenever I assign a settler I dress them distinctively for that role. This way it is easy to tell who has jobs and who doesn't. I also assign them to a bed close to their work point so their pathfinding is minimal. Being able to rename them would be nice.

The modding tools can't come soon enough.

I agree it really does seem 1/2 finished its a great concept & really has added something missing from previous FO titles but the game has just released & I am hoping this will be one of the 1st things addressed

I am expecting this to be extended greatly in some DLC. Settlement building is very popular, would make sense to officially flesh it out a ton more.

They should add in tons more assets for a start + more building materials (this part can be the DLC), and then make us a proper management window where we can assign/reassign Settlers and Provisioners, and create named NPCs and have the NPCs with job titles under their names (those last three are really more of a patch).

thing is do we really need all these settlements. I have 14 so far and 2 more waiting for me to go talk to them. It gets rather annoying getting several message saying 3 settlements are being attacked. I would of been satisfied with 5 or so. I am starting to abandon some and sending the settlers to the sanctuary and abernathy farms or red rocket. since they are all close together.

Something needs to be sorted out with this.

I'm holding out hopes a modder will make something that disables or reduces random attacks. I'd prefer being able to choose my quest timings myself.

The fence issue is huge to me. You literally have to be spot on to get fences to connect if your trying to build a perimeter your lucky to even get it to even out.

It's like a bad sim city game where the roads fail to connect.

Also my build options are rather limited

Yeah,thinking about it,ithere is nothing more likely to get some more cash from me than a large settlement expansion.If a dlc is just a few more hours of story,i don't go for them.

Giving your settlers better gear should also add to your defense rating, as should having companions staying there alongside the standard settlers.

I have a small army of well armored settlers with powerful weapons, with Strong and all my other companions there at the ready. When there is an attack at red rocket the enemy force are wiped out before I get to them anyway.

It's a shame, considering this is the part of the game that I had big hopes for. The ability to manage all of my settlers from a single console would be absolutely amazing. Or even just something that can assign presently unassigned settlers to any currently unassigned buildings would be great, too.

I build some bad ass settlements and the defense when properly placed makes it funny. For example, connect a bunch of metal walls together, then a roof, then put a guard tower with ladders connecting the tower stairs to the ground. Place tourettes on the roof, one on each side of the guard towers. Also condense the size of the settlement. Just enough room for food, water pumps and sleeping bags. Don't put any gates on the perimiter. Just encapsulate every settler and equip them with better weapons. The pipe pistol svcks. I also upgrade them with better gear. This helps a lot with defense on the settlements.

If you build a proper settlement with defense then you won't have any problems with any attacks. Sure it takes time and you'll have to spend a few hours looking for materials but just because you found a new settlement, that doesn't mean you have to build another one. I like to ramp up my defense and keep at least 10 settlers in each settlement. 8 on defense, 2 on crops. PS4 lvl 19

There is severe lack of convinience in building settlement. Who in the right mind thought FPP was a good idea for something like this? Instead of going into spectator mode and build it from there or even simplest copy-pasted system from any sim/strategy game would make it much more enjoyable. Instead, you have to walk and considering how easy it is to get overburden in this game, there is no fun at all in it for me.

Might as well make an app that would make it easier and more convinient.

I would love to enjoy it, because it looks like a great idea, but for now it looks just like incomplete afterthought

Game devs see dollar signs with dlc... People were paying $60 for games back 20 years ago... If it was up to them they'd be charging $100 and dlc let's them do just this.

you should be able to morph walls and any other objects into other items instead of getting the error saying you can't place there

Guys,re:attacks,with all due respect,i know how to raise defense rating,lots of my settlements sit in excess of 200.Defending when i travel there is not the problem(as long as the attack launches and doesn't bug out and cause a fail because no enemies actually spawn) the problem is that no matter how you layout your base and equip your settlers,it will fail in defense if you do not personally travel it to it.Every single time,for me anyway.

I also don't like the way attacks happen(getting a pop up which to be fair can be easily missed) and then having to drop everything to travel to it.I'd much rather there be attack chances while you are already in a settlement/just arrived at a settlement,with difficulty concerning enemy numbers and level raised the higher your defense rating...but ofcourse the chance of the actual attack would lower like now;higher your defense rating in proportion to resources.The attacks you have to drop everything for are usually very underwhelming with a tiny little npc force that dies in 2 secs(not always,but usually).

In saying that,if they wouldn't consider changing how attacks happen ,they at the very least need to make it so a big settlement with a large defense rating can have a large success rate in defense without the player being present at it,instead of always failing which makes no sense.

Dont you get more items the more of them mags you find around the world, so maybe what you have now is only the base amount of items and maybe some of the things your after will be added by the mags.

On that note does anyone know how many diff copies of the picket fence mags can be found in the wasteland!

If you want to make the settlement bigger than your allowed, just do this:

1. Store heavy weapons in the workbench
2. Put them back in your inventory
3. Drop them
4. Go into build mode and store the weapons (o on ps4).

Now you'll notice the size bar has gone down and you can build.more

It works 100% but have noticed diminishing returns the more you cram in. Haven't crashed my game yet but it's probably possible.

Sometimes, I'll attempt to move an item such as Mutfruit or Razorgrain and it will allow me to move the item. However, after that movement, the image of the item will be where I placed it, but the game will still set its activation point in the original place where I planted it. I ended up having to find this invisible spot again and store it in the workshop to get rid of the bug. Several Mutfruit trees are still stuck, untargetable because I can't locate where they were originally planted.

The size limit does svck, every now and then my size limit will reduce itself for some odd reason allowing me to build me.

I would like to see the ability to turn on and off clipping for settlement objects. I don't care about immersion because there are plenty of times I come across something that is half buried in the ground and I think that there is no way they it could of gotten there like that naturally.

If I want my walls built into the ground, that's how I want them. If immersion comes into a factor, the ground was dug up and I put them there. It would allow for people to place fences into the ground and not have to build jagged barriers around their settlements which really don't actually help the settlement because of the attackers spawning into the middle of a settlement now really on the outside coming in.