Why should you care about your settlements? [censored] vegetable starch, man!

Really, that's the biggest drive for me; adhesive is incredibly hard to come by for weapon and armor modification if you don't have adhesive. Vegetable starch will deliver adhesive in spades if you know what you are doing.

What you need are Mutafruit trees, Tato plants, Corn and a source of water, in excess of the amount of villagers that you have, which in turn means that you need to build up defenses and keep them happy.

I did that with the Starlight Drive-In. I did install some mods to increase the capacity of settlements; there's a limit to the amount of objects you can place there and the amount of settlers you can have in one place is limited by your charisma. Both are stupid in my opinion, since settlers are by default happier if there's more of them, so why would you need to be a charismatic leader to convince them to do what already makes them happy? So I got the mods and now I'm making a miniature fort.

In short; settlements are a convenience for weapon and armor modding at first, then become a motivator of their own for you to scavenge for more supplies to keep your settlers safe as they drudge corn fields for you. You'll need the leader perk, though; it's basically impossible to do without it, since the supply lines link all your workshops together.

I enjoy building settlements. Especially when I get home from work. Its a little mindless and calming to me.
Like Bob Ross painting happy little trees.

i like the settlements , when i get a new one i say : " ok i will just put a pre-fab down and slap some beds then i'm out of here , but 2-3 hours pass and a few radstorms and i am still there adjusting a roof on whatever house there is nearby , and putting a turret in a way it can have line of sight of attack paths

my issues with settlements are :

1) u can't see what the settler asignment is

2) it would be helpfull if u could see his weapon ( sometimes i give him a .45 rifle and .44 ammo and he ends up fighting with his fists in an attack )

Someone posted the idea of putting specific headgear on settlers with certain assignments.
I started doing this mainly because I could never recall who had a job or not.
"Hey, no hat! Where this hat and do this, the Gun Bringer commands it!"

Yes - not knowing which settlers have already jobs is a problem. If you select a settler in build mode, the place he is assigned to should highlight. But this is nearly useless because the place often is not visible.

I hope Bethesda sees this too and thinks of a solution. Maybe it can be modded too, but it would be a shame if the original developer does not fix this. That settlers have no specific names is clear for game reasons, since NPCs with specific names always have a function in a quest. But why not name the NPC 'Settler (Task)' where 'Task' can be defense, farming, and so on. This would help, because 'Settler' without postfix would be unassigned.

I did this for quite some time. I mainly wanted to "get ahead" before the incessant Minutemen timed-distress quests hit. I think I had Sanctuary Hills at about 20 and two or three other settlements at anywhere from 3 to 6 residents before I even "discovered" Concord. The settlements will give you quests to help them even before you are a Minuteman, and then in some cases, you'll get additional quests from Preston to help them even though you had allied to them BEFORE you ever met him. So it actually seems to be a win-win to put off joining the Minutemen for at least a while.

You are missing the point of the question though.

He is asking the same thing I've been wondering.....as in, what "benefits" do you get in-game from building settlements.

From this thread, it seems some of the benefits are:

1 - producing more caps via growing crops and shops

2- increased offensive abilitiy for your character - such as artillery support

Not sure what other benefits there are, but hopefully a future DLC will make more use of settlements (or maybe even a future patch if we are lucky)

I didn't miss any point of anything.

There isn't much benefit, and many could say it's useless. I just enjoy it anyways.

First time I have ever played a game that included building and have become quite addicted to it! Lots of fun. I have replicated the popular back bay buildings and they came out pretty good! Genuinely surprised at how fun it is. Haven't really done much other than the minute men and exploration so far.

i find settlements to be decent distraction from the mainstream shoot and kill routine of the game, which can be quite boring due to the lack of comprehensive skill system unlike original games.

I found that after couple of hours of shoot and kill action of the game (which seems kind of primitive) it gets quite boring and i need a distraction to keep myself interested and that's where settlements come in.

Its a nice but unpolished twist that's added in this instalment even though the game does a poor job of explaining its mechanics, it still manages to keep me busy.

I care ALLOT about the settlements. Not only can you generate food to sell, which at the very first of the game is REALLY helpful. But you can do the water purifiers which crank out tons of water for even more caps. So who cares? Glad you asked anybody that wants General Tso at the Drive in Dinner for one. How else do you think your suppose to afford 1400 caps below level 10. You also get free caps from the vendors that you install in town. Again you wouldn't know this unless your on Survival where it can take hundreds of rounds to put down a legendary. And you run out of ammo constantly. So yeah, i understand you don't get it you must not be on Survival. Do yourself a favor, kick it up to the top notch and then see if the settlements do you no good. Also is the artillery which is INCREDIBLY helpful when on Survival.

Rants not done sorry, also their is the power armor station and crafting stations. Without these you are literally dead against Death claws, glowing ones, etc. You might as well take them out of the game as on Survival you would have no chance at killing these things. Lastly the junk, without again no crafting, then we die horribly. So at normal and down you have a point. Above normal you sir are being insane. Best wishes .

It's called personal bias. Different people enjoy different things. It does not make them useless. I love the settlements, and enjoy playing "minecraft" in a Fallout universe.

To a lot of players, Bethesda games are not just games, they are places that you live in for a while. Some players in Oblivion and Skyrim spent a lot of time with the houses you could purchase, and other players ignored them completely. Settlements are not for everyone, but are amazing for those players who love to carve out their own slice of the wasteland

I built up a few settlements...they never get attack...never...

I made the castle into my hub, my strong hold, the place of places to call my own....it will never-ever-ever be assaulted.

I get the concept of settlements, but when no one tries to roll it....it gets tedious.

My Castle has 25 settlers, with a dozen assigned as guards and to artillery, a full slate of merchants, the rest scavvers and farmers. Defense is over 150, about double my food and water production. I'm currently level 36, barely touched main quest, done a few smaller ones, mostly to grab companions.

Yesterday I zone into the Castle to find it under attack from a dozen or so Synths Seekers, all well armed. They used cover to avoid most of the turrets, we ended up having to winkle them out of the halls one by one. Hell of a fight, lasers slashing through the night, the staccato blast of machine guns, searchlights piercing the darkness, and the screams of the dying. Lost 3 good men, and had a lot of stuff to repair.

Quick trip to the Recruiting Center at Starlight for replacements, then a serious overhaul of the defenses and gear, and we're back in business. Just in time for an incoming Provisioner to drag a gang of jacked up Super Mutants right into our newly stationed defenses.

They were down before I could take a shot.

I care.

In my second playthrough I have been trying to avoid building any settlements but my own refuge. Unfortunately after joining the railroad they stuffed one of those settlement quests down my throat. I wanted to be an agent working for this faction and liberate Synths. Instead I got put on settlement building duty. Is there any way to avoid these kinds of quests?

Settlement are a nice time killer, imho.

Benefits of settlements:

- Increased area where artillery strikes are available

-Increased area where Minutemen reinforcements are available

- Materials from scavengers

- Areas to rest, store items, and craft

- Income from shops

- materials from scrap

Seems good to me.

I look at it this way: eventually you will level up to the point where you've been everywhere and you feel like there's nothing left to do. That's when I will start to concentrate on developing my settlements. So far I've done the minimum to keep a few of them going. I do plan on spending some perk points in that area and giving it my full attention when my character basically owns the Commonwealth.

Back when I started making mods with Fallout 3, there was a mod that allowed settlement building called Realtime Settler, now I imagine like others it really didn't appeal to me and I never bothered to install it or read much about its premise beyond the initial description. Now that there is something like it in the game and officially supported well I went ahead and tried it out.

I'm enjoying the feature, it makes since in the game and its world to not only be able to do this but to also strive to establish some settlements as safe harbors for not only my adventures but also the downtrodden citizens of the CommonWealth. I don't tend to fast travel often or speed through the game world either, so having a few locations that are safe havens to use as a base of operations is quite a nice feature.

It seems to be a feature more aimed for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJFteouQXrE where the goal is simply to do things for no apparent reason other than being able to.

It's really a shame that Bethesda doesn't invest more into narrative design and mechanics. This whole "wasteland settler" thing could have provided a ton of interesting gameplay and considerations if, rather than merely being this disjointed arcade object placing feature, it was tied to the narrative in a way where it would've made an actual difference whether or not you (help) get something done.

For those who don't care for the settlements, where do you store all of your stuff? Power armors? All the stuff you find? Maybe it's just me but I have to pick almost everything up. What about upgrading armor or weapons?

Being a completely optional feature, I do not think they will tie to much into settlements to make them really matter or have a larger affect on the game state. Out side of examples already given there isn't much they offer in terms of depth or world progression.

Uh, you can buy a house and use the crafting stations in the town your house is in. It might take longer to get a house but you don't have to bother with settlements.

Artillery strikes are worse than frag grenades. Even with complete map coverage and you could call them indoors, artillery would still be worse than frags. The real joke here is that frag grenades are useless.

The time spent on exploring is far more effective than settlers.

You don't need to build anything to get this. You can just be at red rocket and it has everything.

Caps are next to worthless.

Listing this twice won't make it twice as good.