I'm using this method to bypass settlement size on PC.
Press ~ to open console
Click on the workbench in your settlement
Type the following two commands:
getav 348
getav 34A
This populates the triangles used and then the total draw for the settlement. You can increase as you see fit using
setav 349 [number you want to set]
setav 34B [number you want to set]
What I want to track is how much we increase settlement sizes before the game crashes, relative to our hardware.
I know we won't be able to get a set number exactly, but I'd like to help narrow it down. The most I've heard is that 3-4 full bars on The Castle played on PS4 did cause a total game crash and couldn't load at all. Obviously we all want to avoid that.
So for reference, I'm running on an Intel i5 4690k 3.50ghz and a GTX 970 (16GB of RAM, and Windows 10, if anyone cares). At The Castle I think my first full bar came in at around 720,000-730,000 for triangles and 1,500-1,600 for draw. I now have it set to about double that (1,496,640 for triangles, 3,482 for draw). No problems so far but I haven't really built much since increasing it from 850223 and 1990, which is where I maxed out the bar after increasing it a little from the original max (about a 25 percent increase).
How about those of you using mods? Keeping track of it failing? Crashing? Lagging? Weird stuff happening? How about multiple settlements being huge? I feel pretty confident in my machine, but I imagine if I went past maxed out at The Castle and Sanctuary and a couple other places it would be trouble.
---->>tl;dr
I want to know when your system crashes if you went past max settlement size, please post specs (or PS4/Xbox One) and when you noticed problems or it crashed.