Paint and glass might be hard to come by, but most other building materials wouldn't be unreasonable to produce in the Fallout setting. Building a new, modern-style house should be an option. Not that I think we'll get anything other than Megaton-style shantytowns, because logic is for chumps...

I liked the place, I just didn't like the 3 or 4 loading screens you had to go through to get there.

Really, a society able to produce androids should be able to do glass. Unless the institute has thousands of people fabricating electronics and mining metal ore inside the grounds, there should be some frigging expansion of industry into the wasteland. Certainly enough to make paint and bloody glass.

If pre war materials are not available, then definitely looking to take advantage of any of these that might exist in the game when CK comes out.. If not, it's going to be a long haul on the drawing board trying to re-create the textures and structure shown in the PC's pre-war residence. Probably more efficient use of time waiting for the modding community to create or unlock these in a texture pack.

still scheming on how to role play importing a few roulette tables from NV into my Vault City Commonwealth settlement using my Brahmin trade caravans.

When do you suppose the Fallout texture pack for Minecraft will be released? It's inevitable, right?

I was thinking this the other day. They did Skyrim, I'd be surprised if they didn't do Fallout 4.

Agreed, but I was erring on the side of "what a group of average people could reasonably accomplish on their own". I'll eat my hat if there's any more thought put into the logistics of the Institute than "Because we said so.".

I will be very surprised if the Institute is not in pristine condition.

Mods for settlement building will a sight to see, I'm sure.

Oh I can't wait to see the texture packs they add to the game!

After 200 years and a nuclear winter most structures should be long gone.

Wood would be long gone, brick would have crumbled, metals and shingles would be rusted, melted, or blown away by 200 years of sun, hail, ice, wind and snow, even concrete would be suffering.

Course I'm also sure that in 2077 (42 years in our future), they had new super weather resistant exterior paints that helped the local wooden structures survive 200 years of nuclear winter instead of being piles of dry rot ridden boards.

One of the first mods, I'm looking forward to loading up is a green wasteland mod.

It looks like the assets are already there in the prewar scenes so it won't take much.

I want to be a slumlord.

Not necessarily. No one's really sure how long modern concrete lasts for. It was only invented 100 years or so ago, and I know where I live in Sydney, there's gutters and footpaths dating back to the 20s and 30s. They're discoloured, but by no means are they terribly worn. In the absence of being damaged by something external, they could go strong for who knows how long.

I'm just thinking of the numbers of mods for Cities: Skylines lol...

Oh and there is one thing I must stress for my settlements... MY BEDS MUST HAVE SHEETS AND PILLOWS FFS!!!!! Almost every mattress in the wasteland was just that... a mattress. No sheets, no pillows. Did all the sheets rot in the last 200 years... oh... yeah... probably did. But then how about Tenpenny Tower and the Lucky 38 beds?

My fav was Novac Apt.. After that would be modded ((by Princess Stomper)) Tenpenny tower.

I am really turned on by the build in game option but .. Not sure I will do it first time.

I'm just going to put out there that this is "Fallout." The franchise takes its name from the idea of nuclear holocaust and the nuclear fallout that happens as a result. We aren't living in Beverly Hills ladies and gentlemen... This game is about post-apocalyptic survival and scrounging together what pieces of junk you can to be useful to you. Unless you plan on using mods on PC, don't expect settlements to be sparkling pretty. This isn't The Sims...

As a certain youtuber would say:

"Clean the damned house! and the bathroom...ugh, at least try to live as human beings! here, have some abraxo cleaner, i have loads of it!"

I am hoping for a Mad Max type rebuild, they had, Bullet town, Gas town, and Citadel ( food and water), I don't expect that, but if your going to rebuild and setup trade each settlement has to have different strengths.
Industry's are always needed for rebuilds and trade. Someone needs to make food, and clean water.

The type of game system that fallout shelter demonstrates, in some form is likely to be in fallout 4
They say we have power but we need fuel for that, so I hope we just don't keep finding 200 year old fuel to run the generators, rather we get to trade for it, from someone who is producing it, at the very least.

If I had a guess we get to help settlements around the world that start producing stuff, now we can leave it at that and not get hands on with the ins and outs of it, or we can actively effect the results, not just kill the bad guys stopping things from working or find the parts they need for just caps. We can but we can be more involved if we want.
I may miles wide of the mark, but it could be and interesting challenge especially if the npc bandits are trying to throw a spanner in the works.

Really ? I'm expecting Bethesda to save money on tilesets and reuse the same ruins for the institute. The interior will be standard ruined hallway design, with doors with broken glass in them. They will have ruined rooms filled with banks of computers certainly, but the walls will still be collapsed in places and shored up rubble with wooden boards. The beds in the dormitories will be standard ruined mattresses, perhaps even floor based ones.

Also the institute will consist of about ten guys, three of whom have any unique dialogue.

If not almost sterile. Robotics, machines, all that. Clean environments, yo. I imagine a whole sector of Institute populated by those rad-suit wearing dudes from the Intel Pentium Processor Commercials, and anyone NOT wearing those is like a player walking into Vivec in full Ordinator armor.

Indeed! Lol, bonus points for the Morrowind ref!