I have had 4 different types of attacks on my setlments : gouls, mutants, raiders and synthetics. Almost all my setlments are surrounded by fences. I figured this would stop anyone from coming in.

However, I was surprised when upon arriving on a setlment spot during an attack, there were about 8 synthetics right in the middle of the setlment attacking everyong. I was then wondering how the heck did they even got in with all the fences around. So this made me wonder if this sort of ennemy spawning can happen often inside your setlment, then building fences is useless.

Can this spawning happen for any ennemy or just synthetics ?

Fences are useless. I use turrets- much better.

They use evil magic and teleports in to your settlements.

Turrets is the way to deal with them. Lots of them!

But fences looks nice, tomorrow I'll uploeadsome pictures of my Taffington Boathouse, with pretty fences around it!

Depends on the settlement and how they placed Spawn Locations.

For example worst offender is Sanctuary but lets be real here, that settlement is so huge that if they placed the spawns outside of it we would run into issues with the UGrids to Load not being big enough to fire off the attack on arrival.

Fences are useless, as are defenses if you're not physically there during an attack. I have turned my random defend missions off because it's a broken system.

How did you turn off the random missions?!?! I've been looking for a mod or console commands to do that I'm so sick of not getting an alert and then having to repair everything.

To the OP fences only help with the random spawn while you are there, a non settlement attack spawn like a random two headed deer wanders in.

I'll give you the link, this mod actually works - http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/4180/? (this only turns off the random defend missions, not the Preston-instigated quests).

I've been putting in enough turrets to put my defence above 150 at each settlement that I've made and haven't been attacked for ages.

im on xb1 and ive never had attackers spawn in any of my settlements. one time a single radscorpion burrowed inside but he was a random enemy one of my turrets spotted not an attacking one. so idk to me fences arent useless.

Thanks! adding right now.

Yeah, it depends on the settlement in question due to where the spawn points are.

I primarily surround my settlements with concrete walls (concrete foundations above the ground) even though spawn points could be within the settlement itself. I do it for aesthetic reasons. But for settlements where the spawn points are outside the settlement itself the walls are pretty effective so far from the small number of raids I have had at Abernathy Farm, Tenpines , and Graygarden where enemies always seems to spawn outside of the settlement area.

The walls forces enemeis to go through the heavily turreted front gate. Or at least that is what the idea is supposed to be. It seems to be working fine at Abernathy which is a relatively big. Doesn't work quite as well for Tenpines and Graygarden because they are very small settlements where the settlers run outside the perimeter walls to engage the enemies.

Thank you!!! I was just on nexus last night and must have missed this. I like Preston quests since they let you build affinity with some of the followers. I just hate looking in my pipboy and seeing the settlement I just spent 2 hours building up now has 0 food, 0 power, 0 defense, 0 water, half the settlers... It's such a let down, I don't know what Beth was thinking with that. It's not immersive or fun.

That certainly has not worked in my case. I have settlements in the 500-600 defense range, fences all around and well armed settlers that have gotten totally wiped. My settlers never seem to die, the pip shows they did but when I go to the settlement they are all there, just everything else is broken.

Yeah the random defend missions really break the game, along with all the bugging out that happens with resources and happiness.

Need a patch!

Yep, then there's the "defense quest won't complete bug" which I figured a workaround for that is to simply keep resurrecting and re-killing one of the dead attackers until the quests reaches its dead count and registers as complete. But obviously that isn't all that immersive nor rewarding enough to offset side-tracking you to have to fast travel in. I feel sorry for PS and XB players, these must be real game breakers for them.

I hope modders bring in all the decent game tweaks to them first (or we all get an official patch that fixes these things, wouldn't that be great).

I find walls/fences far from useless. For one, not all enemies spawn within the town. Some will end up outside the wall, thus serving it's purpose as a wall. Second, they help with organizing settlements when creating structure. And third, they can still be used to set up choke points and corridors within the settlement.

Plus, it just plain looks nice.

Fences = XP _and_ they look neat.

So I don't care how useless they are, I shall continue to enclose my settlements in nice little palisades!

I agree the spawn points are an annoying mystery. But I don't think they are necessarily always at the same spot.

Oberland Station for example, the settlement I love to hate, my new home base for no other reason than location (I'm convinced that Todd or someone TOLD the level makers to make that place less than ideal to build at! since it is such a strategic spot). I've been at that spot for at least four attacks. Three of them the spawns were most definitely outside my walls. I tend to keep my walled areas pretty small, but still . . . that is a small buildable area. Actually the one time it seemed to be a spawn inside the walls, it was raiders, so you could even chock it up to "they duped the settlement into thinking they were traders."

Walls are cheap, XP is scarce, they do force anyone to go through bottlenecks and that is better for defense than a free-for-all, and since you will almost never be on the offensive in such a place, that equates with "overall good for combat." I say build walls all you want even if it is undermined by a less than ideal spawning dynamic.

Most definitely. I think functionally they are useless in most cases for defense. But I like them for both aesthetics and structure, and continue to use them prodigiously in my settlements. There are a couple settlements I found where the spawn is just outside camp. They seem to spawn in the same place each time so I found putting a large multi-level battery of turrets right there makes short work of them (that is when I actually get the alert and can respond!).

I've done it for the look of it, I also tend to have built rooms in to the corners which I put turrets on and have them facing in to the base and out so they can easily finish off most enemies. I'm glad I've got walls as I've been fast traveling to drop stuff off and had 2 deathclaws spawn outside the walls lol.