The top tips wish had known 48 hours ago was a useful thread right after game came out.

Now that it's been out long enough for people to min/max and restart new games with knowledge gained in first or second attempt, I am restarting yet again (my 5th restart) because of this ONE tip I wish I had known before:

IF you like settlements, and settlement building as part of your game play, personal style, reference, etc - then the one tip is:

1- Be frugal with your Wood supply. It starts out being and seeming most plentiful resource, but ends up being very limited towards even early mid game.

My only source for wood after breaking down large initial settlements with good wood scrap, is the trickle from scavenging like mad and scrapping eery item, including weapons, that have wood in them.

That's my PSA - if you like settlements and don't want to console cheat, be frugal with when and where you use up wood - there won't be enough to build towers in every settlement you come across.

I've no problem getting wood.

All I'm going to say is... lol

Right?

Not hard to find a ballpeen hammer or a pipe rifle...

too easy lol

It's also not very expensive to purchase a shipment of wood when it comes down to it

Purchasing wood shipments is viable, but costs caps. It does get you bulk wood - not same bulk as large-mega bulk of some early settlement scrapping, but viable. But this is a workaround to solve having wasted wood on settlements you now know may not be best to have splurged on.

Scavenging and scrapping ballpeen hammers and pipe rifles - yea, we must have different definitions of plentiful. As stated in my OP, this psa applied only to those that like settlements and settlement building as play style. that means mega towers and finely detailed settlement crafting.

Theoretically, with enough pipe rifles, sure - you could supply the 2000+ wood that a single settlement takes, much less 12-15 of the available 30 that are really good plots to build on, but it is impractical.

For the replies suggesting getting wood is easy, or the one liner quip with zero explanation - care to explain how you are acquiring quantities of 1000-2000 without console cheating? Please explain what math you are using where a scrapped item may give 1-3 wood usually, and how many items you would need to scrap to build even one modest settlement that a settlement-playstyle player would build - using 2k to whatever fuels your imagination?

The PSA was simple - knowing what I know now, I would not have built at some of the lesser locations, and been more strategic with use of metal vs wood, for like say wire fencing vs picket, etc.

If you are not a settlement play style player, then the trite one liners with zero explanation how you are magically acquiring bulk quantities where a single settlement consumes 2k+ just to build a single large multistory building with full furnishings is only useful to the audience this thread was not intended for - players who really don't care or just dabble with building. That's where the scrap hammers and pipe rifle wood comes in perfect use - build your small shack and no problem, tons of extra wood right?

I felt really stupid when I learned you can use left right arrows to go through your inventory sub windows when selling or transferring items. The higher level I got, the more junk I accumulated and I spent alot of (wasted) time scrolling down through the master list every time I wanted to get something out of storage, or sell stuff, or w/e.

Now I can just jump to ammo or apparel or whatever I need. Feels good man.

I already made this post twice on here to the screams of " just break down trees" but after the trees are gone wood literary becomes the RAREST and HARDEST to find item in the game

but its the rarest of all shipments

....do you really not realize it's a dike joke....??

In terms of the lore and canon. It is a desert wasteland barren of new life. Begin rant: At first I'm like 200 years later nature would have taken the world back after 50 years. All those buildings would crumble, your wooden house dried up if not eaten by termites or have trees grow roots through them. Like Chernobyl today. It only took a few decades for nature to reclaim. It's not like ancient castles and structures made of stone. Most buildings are wood. Even what we see and think of as castles today are only the interior shells of their former glory. Even the pyramids were coated with white limestone and golden tops all gone now. None of the buildings should be in existence at all except that if all life died there would be no microorganisms or trees of nature to reclaim the land.

Now let me get out there. What's interesting is a world truly dying with no hope of salvation. You can only hang on as long as possible. There is no turning it around, it will all be sand eventually. Trees of course should have been gone long ago, most you see in game are dead. Mutfruit and stuff grows so it's not that bad. Last few years though you will be living off of the metal shelters and such.

On a side note I hate restarting. It'll take me how long to get to where I am and I'll want something else. I do plan on another playthrough, hopefully if I don't get bored.

Besides the boner humor, you find settlements you don't plan to develop, strip them of resources and haul them back to the settlement you need the resources at.

Obviously the joke kind of went over your head.

I wouldn't say I'm a dabbler with building, I've built up quite a settlement for myself at Red Rocket. That being said, I don't use wood as much as I use steel.

Though I will say I have no trouble gathering large quantities of either. A single load of the right junk can easily yield you 200-300 wood if you know what to pick up and what to leave behind. Ballpeen hammers are actually heavy (1.5) and contain little wood (1). Paintbrushes and screwdrivers on the other hand, also easily found and bought for low prices? 0.5 weight. So you can get a bunch of hammers, or a bunch of items that weight a 1/3 and in total will yield you 3x as much wood.

Now is it practical? Ehh, depends on much time you're willing to dedicate to scavanging for items. And it's not just those two I mentioned. Clipboards, wooden blocks, wooden spoons...so much stuff that weighs so little yet contains wood. And yes, scrapping all those pipe weapons gets you a bunch too.

This, but take the local leader perk and just store them locally and you have access to them anywhere...no need to lug it around.

I just fast travel between my 20 odd?now settlements,collecting food/water from workbenches and selling to buy wood,copper,oil shipments and the junk from my trader kiosks,works out well enough.Takes a little while,but faster than going scavenging in some ruins.

(which,when i think about it,is kinda sad that i'm playing a fallout game like this,it really is all about the settlements now for me...gah,it's addictive maybe even a lil fun for me,but i instinctively know it's wrong)

You guys really use 2k+ wood to build cities for all those 5-20 people per settlement? Doesn't it look funny and out of place, if there are huge and empty constructions there? I think I used like 2k to make a home for every person in every village there is at this point. Am I missing something?

Why would you restart? Just scrap some of your constructs.

You don't have to really go that far.

We saw a mushroom cloud at the beginning of the game hitting the city directly, the shock wave went right through vault 111. You can say with full confidence, that there would be nothing there day one, just ashes and maybe bare frames of the toughest constructions. And you know how it is in F4, even your house is untouched. They say that they need to put stuff into game to make it interesting, because desert would be a boring place, but I completely disagree. There were games before with desolated environments, that pulled this off. It just requires courage and imagination. It would be even better to have fewer high quality models and miles of desert, than this modular, low quality texture mash there is there now.

yes we are and your right the game was only design to let you have small crappy settlements so if you only plan to do the bare minimum then your fine just using the 3-4 thousand wood from trees but if you want to have a REALISTIC ( yes I know this is a game pls dont tell me this ) looking settlement you need more then this and its not in the game and most people will hit this limit and wish they knew

you should look at what these bombs really do, yes there will be a small area less then a mile in diameter of complete destruction but most of the damage is from the fallout not the heat and pressure.

Isn't maddening how just beyond the green Build wall, there's an entire forest just waiting to be chopped down? Or that in places like Sanctuary where there are several nearly-derelict buildings just sitting there, waiting to be leveled for urban renewal that can't be demolished and scrapped? (I build bunkhouses in my settlements for 5-10 settlers. They're a LOT nicer than the crappy houses they were using.)

Really, is it so hard to conceive of just taking a saw and hauling back felled trees a few hundred feet?

But what are you comparing it to? It is based on how 50s Americans saw future, right? So, the one dropped on Hiroshima wiped out everything in a mile and it had 16 kilotons. Already during that time Russia had 50 megaton giants, and we are speaking about the hypothetical future 2070s. So yea, pile of dust.

Pretty much correct. An air burst tends to be spherical, with the upper half going off into space where most of the damage is EMP. Downward is a different story. But the physical damage dissipates rapidly once you get past a half-mile from Ground Zero. How far is Sanctuary Hills from downtown Boston? 10 miles? 20? Ground bursts are much more damaging to ground structures as most of the downward pressure gets reversed and rebounds skyward. (Causing the mushroom cloud and taking a huge amount of soil into the atmosphere where it accounts for most of the radioactive fallout.) However, the horizontal pressure is VERY linear. Intervening ridges, hills, and large durable man-made structures deflect the pressure upward. Once the wave clears the obstacles, it really doesn't press back downward again near as much. The wave is also straight linear, and doesn't bend to follow the curvature of the Earth. That means that by the time it reaches the horizon (@26 miles) it's not pressing on the Earth at all.

So, I'm guessing that Sanctuary Hills was about 20 miles out from downtown Boston, and so much I'm guess much of the thermal blast pressure passed above Sanctuary Hills and the ravines that surrounded it. LOTS of radiation for sure, but not nearly as much physical damage as what Boston got.

BTW, OT, the one tip I wish I knew from the beginning is for Starlight Drive-In. That radioactive pool in the center of the lot was a pain, with settlers and livestock constantly wandering in and killing themselves. So I spent a LOT of Wood ringing the pool to keep people and critters out. THEN I finally realized that simply taking some rads to move in and scrap the toxic waste barrels will stop the radiation entirely. Once they're gone, the pool is entirely clean of rads.

Something I wish I had known...

Holding A/X whilst building let's you move the item without your character moving. Holding LB/L1 and A/X let's you move the item up and down without moving your character

And yes, agree with the op, wood becomes a very rare commodity.

It isn't even about having settlers filling every space either, it is just very fun to build a big settlement and aiming for a city type build. At the moment there aren't many settlers bustling around sure but with mods/dlc/updates, this could easily change

You can do whaaaaaaat....so trying this tomoz! lol

What would be really handy is if you could highlight an entire building youve created and just move that around. Ive built a massive multistorey building right infront of the bridge in sanctuary and i wish id just built it about 30-50 feet away from there coz those bloody provisioners and brahmin keep wandering through my house to get over the bridge. Kinda annoying coz now ive had to remove a few walls so they can get through and theyre leaving muddy footprints all over my nice new tatty space rocket rugs lol