Actualy Nexus site alone has already 5000+ mods on it(realisticly its more like 4000 since the rest are savegames and similar stuff), and yes there is quiet a few mods that expand vanilla settlment building and its aspects.

For me it gives me something else to do. I hate doing the same thing over and over again.

So one day I will go through and complete a bunch of missions. Another day I will go around scavenging. Another day I will build. I will also throw in a day of wandering aimlessly.

It gives me a feeling that I'm helping restore civilization. A place where they are safe and feel that they have a purpose in life.

5000+! Good gravy! Time to whip out that PC that I tricked out for Skyrim and all it's mods last year and buy a new copy of Fallout to use on it! 5000+! Wow!

Not really a Sim City ripoff.

Sanctuary is my home base, in my view. I did what was necessary to make a defensive and working base.

I didn’t become a Minuteman General sorting out settlements. Though I accepted going to sort out a nearby settlement that had trouble with Raiders. That was a big fight and worthwhile, and I only needed to put some defence turrets there later, and no more than that. I’m not responsible for them, but they are now an asset and safe enough.

It’s hardly Sim City, but it is a real Fallout and those Raiders turned out to be a massive fight.

Another location wants help with sorting out Raiders. At the moment the Raiders are far too strong, I’m going back to sort them out. Like you would in any Fallout.

It’s a real Fallout game. You can be a Settlement General as well I suppose, but I guess you will still have to sort out the Raiders as well.

Well it just goes to show, you can't have your Cait and Edith too ...

Best answer I can think of, on reflection, is this:

Fire bases.

For me, settlements are a creative outlet for when I grow tired of stabbing things to death. That and building anything respectable out of the pile-of-dung workshop mode is a good challenge.

I recommend the "No Settlement Attacks" mod on Nexus for those who hate the attacks and such.

At first I was not really into the settlement building aspect of FO4 when I first heard about it. However, I have gotten to like it once I started playing around with it.

In essence, I like settlement building because it allows me to physically change the landscape in the game.

'Cause it's fun. Nuff said.

I have just one settlement, but i just like coming "home" after a 3day loot run. I think if you're willing to really immerse yourself in the game, it just adds that little something..

Well, because rebuilding the Commonwealth IS work, just as much as killing hostile creatures and Raider gangs, etc. You may think the latter is "fun", or at least your character may think so, but others feel that such activity is best left to people suited to it while they go about the much more creative (and difficult) process of rebuilding and unifying the settlements and people of the Commonwealth.

Likewise, many gamers feel that endless combat/killing is tedious and pointless "work", you know? Such players will never understand why you prefer it.

Isn't it nice that BGS offers the choice of different play preferences?

This.

Not sure i agree with that,gaming,when it wasn't obsessed with graphics and standardised gameplay to appeal to as many people as possible was a very creative and diverse industry.Over the past,i dunno,10 years or so,it has felt more of a chore to me to play the big releases.Everything almost has felt the same.Just one example is the final fantasy series,where square has had this obsession with ditching everything that made their games great and unique(at least in the west) to try to appeal to the stereotypical western gamer(the mountain dew guzzling dorito scoffing got no patience for anything other than pew pewing things with a click of a button type gamer)

Not saying it is all like that,there have still been some gems and very different games released,but it hasn't been getting better imo.I have to spend my time playing indie games to get away from all this stagnation and industry wide homogenization.

I get that feeling with fallout 4 a lot of the time too,it is a good game in my eyes,but it is still basically a fps with not much else going on,and quite shallow for it.Without being able to switch the gunplay off and just go nuts with building ideas(which relies on your imagination/creativity a lot more than the core gameplay) i daresay i would have completed it by now and been done with the game.

*Don't want to give out the idea i'm happy with the settlements feature,i'm not.It is clearly a rush job that could have done with another 2-6 months of dev time.

Why wouldn't you like to create a home base to store equipment armor ect? You can build a house just for you. Bethesda allows you to build yourself a shack of a skyscraqer. People like the ability to make a personalized space for thier character and make a mini city or town. The better question is; why don't you like settlement building?

Bear in mind this is just the beggining since moders are quiet limited in what they can achive before GECK is released, but there is certanly already a decent amount of good mods avilable, i for one am rly looking forward to all the possebilites for more complex mods after GECK is released.

You could always just buy Home Plate in Diamond City and not do any settlements. Maintaining all 30 (?) workshops is a daunting task you don't have to do. I myself just kept Tenpines Bluff, Greentop Nursery, Sanctuary, Red Rocket going and set up home base on Spectacle Island while the rest of the Commonwealth settlements went to waste.

That might be the problem with your viewpoint of what I said. I'm not observing only AAA releases over the last few years. Creative games are huge outside of that area. Fallout 4 brought in some of those ideas. It did surprise me that a AAA studio attempted it. But at some point those features will work their way into AAA titles. Its almost always been this way. The little guys innovate and take the risks while the big boys sit on their cash cows and advertising power. I tend to stay away from most major releases because of what you mentioned, but major releases are just a small part of what is being created. Sure AAA titles make a lot of noise (advertising/hype) to make a lot of money, but frack that, I'm mostly looking for new experiences. Most of my gaming money goes to small studios and indie devs these days.

We had been asking for the ability to set up our own Settlements since as far back as F3, so they provided said function

Settlement building is Minecraft with Anti-aliasing. It sells copies thank god you don't have to do it. Yeah for open world games with choices.

Because many people like this sort of thing. Hell, it used to be a Fallout 3 mod. It's just a little something for people to do between the usual ground pounding. And not partaking in doing so will not hinder your gameplay experience in any way.

Personally I like it. I like making each settlement unique. The only thing I wish you could do is rename them. So you could put your personal touch on the name.

In response to the title;

I don't, its completely useless..........

I'm not a huge fan of the settlement system. Mainly because the way it's set up now is something of a chore. I'm also not really able to construct anything that's actually aesthetically pleasing (to me, that is). In my case all I do is make use of pre-built homes and decorate them a bit, and that's more or less sufficient. If they expand the current system and make it more engaging I might be inclined to give it another go. It's not a bad feature, but if I want to be creative in a free-form way I'll go to Minecraft or something - this just isn't why I play games like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls.

same reason people like playing mine craft..

build a castle out of blocks you pick up one by one and then placed one by one..

the ability to make something out of effectively nothing, how you want it, how you define it.

i just finished restoring Santuary. each house is now fully furnished with furnature and lit by power coming from the street in the form of my own power grid, powered by turbines on top of my custom bed and breakfast which is a two story structure with a large diner bar and sitting area and 6 fully enclosed bedrooms upstairs. it has a minuteman outpost, complete with fenced in artillery and place for the operaters. it even has a mayors office located in the tree (thank you clipping trick) which houses a terminal that can control the entire settlements powergrid. not to mention the clinic with waiting room, main desk (store with NPC) and through a double door a concentrated care room. the entire settlement is walled in, and there is a guard house built into the walls near the river. two massive gates, one on the bridge and the other heading to the vault as a escape route (i consider the vault the town escape plan).

im really proud of the job i did making each house look not just good outside but nice enough to live in on the inside even by pre-war standards. seeing the settlers go into the restaurant of the town inn at the end of the day, sit on the various chairs at the tables and in the sitting room or even on the stools at the bar itself, then seeing them in their houses in the morning before they head out to work i feel such a sense of accomplishment. Santuary in my current save easily is bigger than bunker hill or goodneighbur, even close to the size of diamond city.

the hours in collecting caps and junk to make this one restoration project is just the first of many such efforts... i am 7days of gametime into this newest save and its my second save with my previous having a total 3.5days logged across several endings to see them. my character is above level 70 and has nearly unlimited crafting resources for his weapons and can buy anything in the game, restoring santuary has literally made him into a town mogel, rich beyond belief in terms of what he gets from santuary alone, and the amazing thing is that santuary is only at 25 settlers, Sunshine tidings is currently at 29 and while much smaller is totally devoted to scrap.

i have a plan to make a mall like structure in the starlight drive-in, i have already converted taffington boathouse into a roadside bed and breakfast for traders and my provisioners, the paradise island or maybe the citiadel plans for that island, i turned somerville place into a Minuteman outpost with a massive guard tower to watch the glowing sea (and a **** ton of artillery to blast it to smitereens). the inevetable plans for the Fort restoration (stalled a bit ago due to constant side tracking at other settlements) which will probably be finished next. i still have to make my city outpost at hangmans...

honestly if this game was like the previous fallouts and didnt have settlement crafting, i would have burned out of the normal exploration long ago. not to mention combat. but at this point i still have so much i WANT to do that i dont get tired of anything else...

i have not had such a great combination of action and building since minecraft and there is noticeably more "push" here. i dont feel like im wasting time with the constrution of say a pretty looking peir with industrial lights along the railing for a dramatic effect at night.....

of course, the occasional attacks still happen at most of my settlements... usually quickly popping into those locations result in a few seconds of turret fire... but there are still some rare raids that are so insane that i still find myself speechless..

somerville place once came under attack by supermutants after i had renovated it.. the settler population was massive and while water and food produced was low, the defense rating was over 100 and there were lots of explosive heavy turrets... but the number of super mutants was insane! several had Miniguns and rockets and there were more mutants than settlers! i watched as turrets tore into groups untill they got damaged by a rocket, then the settlers slowly fall to the rockets untill i killed the rockets and repaired the turrets. i then watched as the turrets chewed them to shreds...

on the explosive turret note, the two that protect warwick farm are fun to lure the nearby mirelurk nests into range of... i also like to active the emergency defense that trigger with the siren, 1 heavy laser and 1 Missile turret. any attack in that place doesnt last long, and since the laser and the missile turret are not powered unless the siren is triggered it invites the attacks, which usually end the moment either me or one of the farmers trigger that siren..

did you know that the NPCs will trigger the siren if there is one?! its so awesome, you can set up a base with tons of defense that are not powered. that way you make it more likley for there to be a attack and then when you fast travel there, just flip a switch and watch the fireworks!

sea side shack has a mirelurk queen that spawns nearby... i have a single missile turret on a cliff and i will sometimes travel there just to lure the queen to the settlement to watch the fireworks....

anyways... i have rambled enough but i really enjoy the aspect of building in addition to the ability to run in a random cardinal direction and slaughter anything i find, or farming the glowing sea for legendarys until my power armor breaks. This game is practically made for me... tho i do wish they had gone against the voiced protag in favor of the conversation options that have been in previous fallout and elderscrolls games.. my biggest fear atm is that the next TES game they will try for a voiced protag, which considering the various races, genders, etc would be a massively expensive choice and would undoubtedly result in a loss of emotion and option in the conversations overall.

I am not sure if the OP is serious. I mean how does someone old enough to buy/play a game not realize there are different personalities/tastes out there. I hate moba's (like League of Legends) but I understand there are people who love them. Settlements appeal to people who love Minecraft (a very popular game). So you get to have 2 games in one.

but this is an RPG not a city builder........also minecraft and some of the other city building sims offer a massive repertoire of tools for players to demonstrate and enjoy their creativity, Fallout 4 doesn't and it is also not supposed to .......as I already said its meant to be an RPG first and then anything else (although this one is FPS first and then anything else)...........

And if I want to build stuff i'ld rather go play minecraft or some other building simulator......I play Fallout 4 because I want to role play in that shamanistic and karma based post-apocalyptic tribal world that I fell in love with in original Fallout games (1 and 2), not to mention that core element of Fallout universe is almost absent from Fallout 4........its just so sad.......