Perhaps this has been covered before, but does anyone else have difficulty crafting a metal house ? I'm not looking for SIMS ease....well, I guess am. The large prefab serves well enough I suppose. On a related note in a future patch I'd like to see some way to claim it as YOUR house. I have a settler who randomly uses my bed. I've taken to calling him Karl. I hate Karl with the fury of a thousand suns.

So assign Karl to a different bed in workshop mode.

I wish there was a door, just 1 door that you could craft that when built adds a key to your items, this door would be able to be locked. Then you could build your house wherever you wanted within the settlement system, be able to put your goodies inside and lock the door. This would stop those no good, lazy, thieving settlers from pilfering all my bundles of joy.

If you wish to move your player home then you would have to scrap the door, once done the door would be able to be crafted once more at the new location.

1 lockable door, it's not allot to ask for, is it?

Prefabs complicate the building. It is much easier faster and flexible to use walls floors and roofs. You can easily create rooms inside a house by removing the floor, placing a wall element and putting the floor back. So that you dont have to deal with support beams everywhere.

There are a couple of workarounds for this.

The most basic is to put a Wall in front of the doorway so that you can only access the building by moving it through the Build menu.

A bit more complex is to make a very simple Jumping Puzzle (one or two simple Jumps will do fine) leading to your House because your Settlers cannot Jump, thus cannot enter.

The most complicated (and coolest) is to build a structure that your settlers cannot get to at all, just completely sealed off from the outside settlement. Then you put the Wellcome Mat (which controls where you Spawn when fast traveling into your Settlement) inside this inaccessible area. Now only you can get in, and then only when Fast Traveling.

And that's why the Red Rocket station is all mine! I build a nice 2 story home for myself. The robot workshop is in the garage, my other crafting benches are on the first floor and my bedroom, kitchen and living room are upstairs. The place has ONE bed and it's ALL MINE! No Karl or Marcy will bother my things, sleep in my bed, sit at my table (and walk into it, tossing all my decorations to the floor...)

@ JOrifice: Those are some great tips!

I definitely agree. Its a royal pain in the rear and aggravates me to no end when I find a settler sitting down in one of my chairs in my private space. Then to find one of my magazines laying on the floor because a settler knocked it from the stand, sends me into an instant rage. That's why I live by myself now.

Thanks for the tips Guys and/or Gals. Oh, and ByePolar , Karl has the EXTREMLY annoying habit of knocking my comfy pillow off my bed. Oh Karl , how I hate thee.

I've tried metal homes but I've about given up. It seems like there are missing parts in the corners and such to really design anything interesting. Always end up with gaps in the walls and such where things just don't line up correctly.

As far as wandering settlers it is easy enough to assign them a bed, but I do wish we could lock our doors or something. I finally resorted to building my home base at Red Rocket and not allowing any settlers there. But even then the dog guy appeared on the second level of my tower wanting to sell me a dog. I need a No Trespassing sign, or No Soliciting, something.

He came looking for you? I can't even find the dude

There has been playthroughs that Gene was nowhere to be found and then there was other playthroughs I ran into him constantly.

Settlers will go the nearest bed, if not assigned one, when they are done with work. If yours happens to be the closest one, wherever "Karl" came from, he will choose yours. So you can work around it when planning layout of your settlement.

Please don't bully Karl he means no harm

I usually assign a provisioner or guard to any beds I want to be empty during the night. I also wish they had "half" walls.... I really dont get why there are none other than bethesda just sloppily threw this build mode together and sht it into the game, sealed it up and said "all done!"

Same here

Well, there are half walls. Just use the wood fences under the building -> wood -> misc section (where you find the wooden bridge).

One might instead want a wall that is regular height but half width?

This is all very well written. Unfortunately, none of it works. All NPC's, including settlers, companions, and brahmins, can respawn in random locations on loading. So build your Fortress of Solitude as high as you want, with no doors, and you can still come home to a two-headed cow on top of your pool table. The way the code is currently written there is no way to avoid this, even with lockable doors. If Karl wants to bed down with you, he cannot be stopped.

Maybe it's a PC vs. Console thing?

I've never had any trouble with them getting into inaccessible locations in my game on the PC and I keep a fair bit of stuff locked up where those no good thieving Settlers can't get their grubby hands on it. Heck, I keep each and every suit of Power Armor in it's own inaccessible private Vault (just a single room metal prefab with a metal wall blocking all access). No one has stolen one yet. Of course, I'm also on an extended Break from the Game until the first couple of DLC's are out (it was starting to get stale, so, time to stop before boredom turns to dislike), so maybe it's gotten worse in the past couple of months?