After 5-6 playthroughs - all aborted after some period, usually 40+ hours into each, sometimes for fresh start reasons due to lessons learned, sometimes due to big changes in mods used so wanted clean install, i am now on new PT hopefully will be my first 'story game complete' run.

I love settlements, and enjoy the crafting and building, but didn't want it to become the obsessive time sink that precludes me spending less time on actual missions vs. settlement management.

So I've now setup what I call Settlement Lite for the Serious Settlement Player.

1- Choose 3 and only 3 locations to build core settlements. In my case, I like and decided Sanctuary, Spectacle Isle, and Starlight Drive were going to be my only real settlements.

2- Choose 1 Penal Colony - the place you send all the uglies, undesirables, and miscreants that have otherwise offended you or by godlike reasons can't be stuffed into a super mutant meat bag with their corpse eroding away (e.g .Preston the useless)

3- Do whatever missions, discoveries, etc for other settlements, but either never claim the workbench, or for those that you need to build beacon to finish quest step, build it, finish quest, then tear it down and never move settler there. Any existing settlers like at Abernathy, let em rot, get kidnapped, be unhappy and complain about beds, water, food, kidnappings, etc. Don't hear em because don't go there.

That's pretty much it. I mega build at my 3 locations, max out the population, and any undesirable settlers that don't look attractive wearing my modded cutoff jeans, booty shorts, and gingham tops - I send to the Penal Colony. When the Penal Colony gets full, I take Dogmeat who won't judge me and is just happy to be there to watch as I snipa a few of the convicts dead. Now there is room to send the new undesirables.

I've found this eliminated 80-90% of my excess settlement time sink, let me do a lot more actual missions and combat, but still enjoy the full range of settlement building, modifications, and crafting at my 3 core settlements.

What is "PT?"

Here's how I deal with it.

When I acquire a new settlement :

- Scrap stuff, mostly trees cause I need wood

- Plant whatever vegetable I need for adhesive until the settlement has 24 (potential) food (right now I've got a few hundred adhesives so I just plant whatever I feel like)

- Place 6 water pumps for 21 water

- Place 21 sleeping bags in a prefab shack

- Place 1 big and 1 small generators, power up 3 missile turrets and 1 recruitment beacon

- Place 16 scavenging stations

- Come back once when the settlement has 21 settlers to assign stuff and never come back again

Cba spending all my life making my settlements pretty, now they're just big scavenging factories with crammed up beds and overseer missile turrets