I have been playing Fallout 4 since shortly after the release and I had a lot of fun with it. I really like the idea of building settlements but I accumulated a couple of issues that make settlements imho lacking.

First the obvious issues:

- No real explanation how everything works

- No ui to manage settlers

- Babysitting settlers is a must do

- Too many settlement quests

- No way of having my own stuff

- General lack of buildable stuff

- Bugs/ Clunky interface

- Preexisting buildings, rubble, etc can almost never be influenced

Next are the not so obvious things:

- Why is it important to capture spot x when I can do everything in almost all settlement?

- No new technology/ reward

- Only personal perks really matter

- Lack of meaningfull production. Only a few plants are grown, water is collected and junk is gathered.

- No controll over Minuteman and areas around settlements.

- Storage areas and automatic breakdown into components. Everything magicly fits into the workbench.

- Everyone can have every job and there are no criminals

- Electricity is only transmitted via power nodes. Houses can not be completly electrified.

- Human only settlements (except greygarden but the bots are limited)

I don't understand. What about switches? All my houses are completely electrified with working radios and tv's

Those're called Raiders, even though they're more like bandits. They'll sometimes sneak by your settlements for armed robbery or abduction.

I agree with a lot of your points, and I am sure eventually settlements will be expanded by mods/expansions. I could definitely got for the settlers scavenging more than just junk, maybe be able to outfit settlers and send them out into the wasteland to explore and collect useful stuff for me like ammo and meds.

Kinda disagree on this one unless they move some things out of junk. Prewar money for example is worth way more as it is than when scrapped and gold watches as well. And a few items are needed for manufacture, abraxo off the top of my head can be used to make things. Auto scrapping of those would be bad. The same thing can be said for all storage containers though. Make a footlocker, shove in 20 suits of power armor. I like it that way, ease of storage is more important to me than realism in that particular case.

The one thing I agree upon is the absence of any settlement UI. It's a pain to figure out which settler is doing what, once you've assigned them to a task. The highlighting part only works if settler and resource share a line of sight. Otherwise you're still in the dark. Reassigning supply lines is basically catch the provisioner and hand him another task. Unless there's some hidden secret I'm not aware of.

Otherwise, the only other thing bothering me is the object placement limit. Large places, such as Sanctuary or Spectacle Island are still virtually empty, once you hit that ceiling.

The limit makes sense on consoles, which have a very definite limit on available resources, but yeah, on a PC that can upgrade specs to easily handle the game then an artificial limit seems silly. There are already mods out there though to disable it, and settler limits.

Randomly recruited (through beacon) settlers can be ghoul, but they're rare. Still, you can get as many ghouls as you want if you sift through enough random settlers. You can also use your companions as settlers to some extent and there is a recruitable robot settler (Buddy) out there if you don't turn him in for a certain quest. If you decline to finish Curie's questline (but definitely do her quest anyway, because she's awesome), that'd give you 3 robots between her, Buddy, and Codsworth...4 if you count Nick maybe. Strong is your resident supermutant. I do wish we could find/build more robots. Robot hacking skill should let us claim robots we find around the world for our settlements. Protecterons, Assaultrons, Handies, Gutsies, and Sentries! Maybe even some Gen 1/2 synths. I'm sure mods will deliver.

Settlers are fine once assigned. Sometimes settlements need defense or radiant quests to be completed though... is that what you're talking about? Jack up your defense to 2x the food+water count and you'll rarely get attacked. Don't turn in the radiant quests after completing them (ie, hold the last 'turn in to preston' stage) and it will drastically slow down radiant quest generation.

Wish we had that...yeah. The best you can do now is dress your settlers by job so you can see at a glance what each is doing. Under resources->misc there is bell you can ring to summon all the town's settlers (except provisioners that are away). It doesn't always summon all the settlers though for some reason... but it helps for finding unassigned settlers usually. I wish we had a better way.

Mods have already solved that for me. I think it makes sense for Bethesda to focus on DLC at this point and let mods handle the mountains of extras.

Massive stockpiles of valuable purified water that you can sell and rows of shops are a pretty good reward for settlement building. The big reward though is looking at the massive towns you built and thinking, "I made that happen!". Not to mention, settlements fuel the reinforcement calls for Minutemen help if you bother to use that (I never bothered) and an artillery network provides some very extraordinary destruction when you want it (I love the fireworks!).

I was overwhelmed with the huge number of settlements the game throws at you so fast, but I've warmed up to the concept now. It gives you options. Some you'll love, some you'll hate. Options are good and you aren't obligated to develop them all. For those of us that enjoy building, it gives us more variety in the late game, which I've come to appreciate. I can do fun stuff like have a beach resort town, a scrapper town, a trade hub, a water purifying town, ect. The big reason we get so many settlements though I think is the very conservative object limits. You can't build a massive city normally, and such a thing would drive some systems to crashing and serious framerate drops. Those of us with decent machines learn to bypass the limit...but it makes sense to provide a lot of settlements so that people stuck with the default object counts can continue building.... just not all in one area.

I'm not sure what you mean... I've built my own base at Red Rocket. For a long while, I had no settlers so everything there was mine. Now I have a few settler guards and a few settlers in red rocket mechanic jump suits that go around pretending to work on my rows of power armor. I have a private penthouse that overlooks the area. That is mine. It's mine because I say it is, and who's going to argue with that? I've got the Minutemen and enough firepower to obliterate anyone that tries to take it... of course, that isn't likely to happen, and if the settlement gets attacked, the enemies will be wiped out by rocket turrets while I watch from my high tower.

Do you want to micromanage junk? I don't.

I think the construction interface is pretty good overall. If you compare it to similarly ambitious systems in other games, Fallout 4 actually comes off as polished and use friendly...albit overly simple at times. It is difficult to great freedom of construction AND be simple and polished. If you want the full power of a level editor, you end up with an interface like a level editor, and not many players have the patience to learn what amounts to a glorified CAD program. I wish they'd allow clipping, since a lot of the placement restrictions don't seem to make sense and you might as well let the player decide if something belongs there or not. We definitely could use some more settler management UI. There are some nastier bugs, like sparks that you can't get rid of if you accidentally leave a hanging wire and save the game (I have one eternal spark like that...). Hopefully some of that will get patched. Mods will help in other areas. If you learn console commands (GG Console players) you can precisely move objects where you want them.

Break the limit! The simple way is to drop a bunch of guns, go into build mode, store the guns in the workshop using build mode. It will decrease your object count and you can retrieve the guns and repeat it as often as you need. On PC, you just use some console commands... or better yet, a console script (see object limit breaking mod on the nexus).

Yeah, but I'm cautious about many of these mods, since they use external apps loaded with adware - as the modder himself admits.

The dropping weapons trick, if still working after the patch, seems to be the best and easiest solution to do it.

That's the old version that used cheat engine to modify game values in memory. Someone figured out the console commands to reset the limit though, so the old cheat engine thing is obsolete. It takes 4 commands total though so it's better done as a batch file. If you look at the newer object limit breaking mods, they are just .txt files you drop into your Fallout4 folder. The txt file acts as a batch file for running console commands. To use the mod, you'd just open console, target the workshop in question, and run the batch file (for me, 'bat settlement'). Very simple and effective once you do it once.

That's the problem though. The tilde key doesn't open my console as it did with every other Beth game. And I haven't figured out yet what's wrong. So, as of yet, I can't open the console.

I've never heard of the console not opening unless you add a config file option to disable it. In any case, since Fo4Edit allows precise modding without resorting to the tesvsnip insanity, a flood of mods has released addressing most annoyances like build limits. There are a few mods that raise the build limits for settlements already along that vein. You could add one of those. It would affect workshops, so there may be compatibility issues with any other workshop affecting mod you might use. The weapon store trick is still working I believe. If that got patched, you'd have console players up in arms. I imagine they'll leave the exploit at least until proper mod support reaches consoles, as it works as a pretty intentional way of bypassing a limit at your own risk. It would be unlikely for a player to just drop and store a ton of weapons on a whim, considering the actual inventory interface for the workshop would be much quicker and easier....so chances are you know exactly what you're doing and the risks you take. Why patch that?

Switches or power nodes as I have incorrectly called them only work around a certain radius which means larger structures need to be powered from multiple spots or from the inside. So our choices are either to put ugly wiring around a structure or leave holes in the wall.

I am quite aware of them. I more talking about the inside of a settlement. No settler tries to extort another settler or something like that. Would imho be more fun if we had quests about that instead of just defend x.

I think it is fine if someone wants to fill his beds with pre-war money. Kind of a waste but oh well. That's why I want a system. Maybe have a list where I can forbid items from being scrapped and/ or have certain items being transfered. It would imho not really hurt if we had to build storage container for our settlement depeneding on the weight of stored item. It could drasticly increase the immersion if done correctly.

I actually counted the ghouls as humans.

But you still have to be there personally or else the defence is going to fail. Radiant quests should be delegatable. No reason for the general to do everything. There are workarounds but workarounds are usally not pretty. I still haven't talked to the settlers I cleared Corvega out for but the quest is still there. We should also be able to act before something happens and make the land more peacefull so we don't have to rescue everyone all the time.

That's what I am doing as well.

They should imho put at least a good base fore something in place for people who don't want to use (some) mods. There are a lot of clear oversights like no indoor doors and no windows. You also can't remove rubble to properly place new stuff.
I for example don't use all those mods because they add stuff regardless of plausibility.


Not enough. I want to be able to build better stuff the more I invest in settlements. For example build a resarch depardment, assign scientist, give them research materials and then research a new light or build an ammo producing workstation and choose an ammo type they should build or build my own casino and create a gambing town. The options are limitless.

The choices aren't the problem and I fully agree with the object limit. I would have done the same. My problem is that I have no real reason capture a new settlement. I kind of understand helping existing settlements though. There is however no need provided to go and get a new settlement. Founding new settlements should be born out of need instead of just "X is a good place to settle".


Settlers don't respect your property. They claim the bed in your house when one is needed. They take your power armor if you leave a core in it. They are in your hoouse and do something when you come home. There are workarounds but they neither perfect nor the best way to handle that problem.



Not micro. I want have to build some storage containers the more I want to put into a workbench. I also want certain item not to end up as building material and have them stored in a special container.

It is imho only ok because it no option for "experts" to for example clip an object through another or I can't make the ground even or tilt it for crops. Using mods and cheats is not really part of the interface. There are quite few settlement bugs that annoy the [censored] out of me. For example there is this bug that makes the game forget what you have in a settlement when you fast travel form there. Which is really annoying when you rely on that town to supply water and food to a scrapper town.

The console key is depending on the localisation (I think!). For me it is the "?" key. Try hitting the cheat sites from your country if you are from a different country.

Not sure if anyone brought this up ... but a big positive is placing artillery at all the settlements you discover. You can summon artillery strikes across most of the wasteland. Muttfruit and purified water make you rich.

Artillery is nice and the money too but that is not enough (for me). Building settlements just because it is a quest is boring. All those quest should be created out of a need.

Here is an exapmle quest:

"Oh there is a group of raiders that want to change their way but no settlement will take them in. Help them or they will contine to plague the land."

You can either ask for a good settlement spot or give them an empty settlement. There should of course be a few followup quests and that settlemnt should be special until the followup quests are (re-)solved.

And you could always ask for new spots but never be given a quest you have no reason to do.

I will try the ? key, since I'm using a German keyboard setting. But up to FO4, the tilde key worked just fine with every Beth game.