Oberland Station drives me crazy. I'm tempted to either disperse everyone to other settlments or shoot them all in the head . . .

It is in a central location, so I figured I'd try to make it my home base. Bad idea for several reasons.

1. First of all there is the landscape with that god dang tower right in the middle. I have managed to build a number of configurations, including i. a small compound just on the southeast side of the tower. ii, A larger compound with a huge "floating" two-story building, and most recently iii. a large compound that nearly encircles the whole thing. The humps and bumps combined with the railroad tracks and the tower make doing all of this exceedingly complicated and fiddly.

2. I managed to get a configuration I really liked: 1ii above, problem was, most of the trader booths didn't function properly when placed in the elevated room. Only the medic and bar worked. I've posted screen caps of this base and I really liked it. Settlers liked it, they could find their beds, it looked cool, I was up above the annoying brush and grass and the humpy-bumpy ground was irrelevant. But the whole point was to have a trade hub, and even though all the traders would stand behind their booths, the only ones for whom the dialogue with barter would ever activate were the Medic and Bar. I've sent a bug report to Bethesda about this with a couple save files. No idea why it wasn't working.

I had the whole teleporter thing built on the roof . . . it was grand. But without a function set of traders it was pointless really, except for aesthetics, which I really enjoyed.

I scrapped it and went on to "Oberland Station v.1.iii

3. Still problems with many of the booths it seems, though it is muddled by another bug (and the subject of the title for this thread). A Yao Guai attacked during the course of me scrapping and rebuilding . . . it was like three days ago in game. But most of my settlers (not all) continue to offer no dialogue option other than "Thanks for your help. I don't know what we would've done if you hadn't shown up . . ." followed by the four dialogue options to respond to this.

So I cannot really test what the limitations on the booths are (do they have to be on the ground? Can they be on a wooden floor that is only slightly elevated instead of 3 stories up?) nor can I equip my guards or anyone else with all the gear I've been hoarding.

Just wanted to get it off my chest and see if anyone else has had any similar issues.

I'm tempted to just scrap everything, send everyone to Starlight except a couple of them, and make Starlight my base as I have seen what enormous grandiose bases some of you guys have built there. But then . . . all that manual scrapping I did at Oberland to get larger possible build size, down the toilet.

I wouldn't scrap anything. Just leave it be for now and maybe go build something at Starlight (or somewhere else) and then you can decide at that point if you want to try making more revisions to Oberland or if you just want to move to one of the other places. Even if what you have at Oberland doesn't work for your original intent, it doesn't mean that it still wouldn't be suitable for the settlers that live there after you move if you move.

Well, I still have the save file from Oberland Station v.1.ii so I can go back to that if the "traders not working" bug gets resolved. The fun of building really is the building, and having to work around the constraints of the landscape is fine to a degree. What is annoying:

1. Things that really should be scrappable or "removable" (like brush and grass) but are not. I'd go so far as to say ANYTHING inside a build zone should be scrappable, but I can see why they would want to leave some buildings and the like as being unscrappable. I'm not fully decided if this really is the optimum design choice for the vanilla game. It is almost a bit like giving a kid a lego set, but then forcing them to build stuff only on the limited space of the bathroom floor and with the constraints of having to build around the toilet! If the point is to let us build stuff, then LET US BUILD stuff. Why not just make EVERYTHING inside a build area scrappable? Allow players to wipe it clean.

2. The slopes and elevation differences in the terrain. Every other landscape remodeling and building game I know of allows for terrain to be excavated and level. Life is Feudal is a good example of this, and based on what I see from going into "collision off mode" in this game and in FO4, it would seem the same "style" of excavating/mining might apply. Minecraft is obviously a different kettle of fish, as the world is fully rendered from top to bottom and does not comprise a false ground surface with void space under it like in FO4 and Life is Feudal. The way Life is Feudal does it: when you dig into the false ground, it generates an additional set of polygons (five or more depending on the shape of the hole) to represent the inside of the hole. FO4 looks superficially similar so I would guess it could do the same thing, but I acknowledge getting it to work on the FO4 engine might be a huge hassle. Moreover, last I played LiF, the amount of mines and excavations in a game world were a big problem as far as performance.

If it was possible to include a "dig" or "level ground" feature, else just to allow things to clip into the ground at any angle/depth it would be a huge plus for the building part of FO4.

3. The way things "click" (I forget the actual word) together is . . . I would almost go so far as to say "broken" but that is too extreme a critique. It is far less than ideal at this point. The thing that I have progressively realized is: most of the things that I have observed as being impossible (red item and it won't place), for example putting a small piece of wall between two other larger pieces, or place a long piece at a right angle to a previous piece so that they ends come nearly flush and it makes a corner (it always wants to "click" the second piece to align with the first piece and match them end-to-end), ARE possible sometimes. If you are placing things from an elevated position, the options seem more flexible. By using very slight nudges of the movement key and mouse, you can often find that "sweet spot" that will allow you to place things that seem impossible to place most of the time.

In sum, it is far too hard to do things that we are naturally inclined to want to do.

4. The lack of settler labels or console commands to do things like "reset" their dialogues or make them go to bed, make them go to their job site, make them go stand in a specific spot and STAY there. The bell works reasonably well, but an enhanced settler command mode would be awesome.

5. Pipboy inconsistencies and lack of any management screens. I'm thinking here of the screens in say Europa Universalis that are all fairly cookie cutter tables that populate with values for various fields (numbers of provinces, resources produced, numbers of citizens, numbers of soldiers, etc., etc.)