Okay, so you’ve been playingFallout 4since launch and you’ve wandered the wastes, scoured the ruins of Boston, and swam in the glowing sea. You’ve had a lot of adventures. Now you’re thinking about settling down and checking out all that settlement crap you haven’t touched since Preston begged you to show him and his buddies how to plant carrots.
That’s fantastic because I’ve been wasting my time playing around with the settlement stuff since the day the game came out and I have a full country harvest of tips and tricks that will save you time and get the most out of your settlements.
Best perks for building settlements inFallout 4
Before you lay down the foundations of your personal empire, you need to get yourself right first. If you want to be serious about your settlements, you’ll need a few perks to make it work, including a hefty investment in charisma. This could be tricky if you’ve already been playing for 50 hours with an anti-social radioactive super soldier and just now want to start rebuilding the Commonwealth, but not un-doable (remember, you may get a charisma-boosting bobblehead at the Parsons State Insane Asylum and invest perk points into S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats if you really need to get that number up, among other less savory methods that I’ll discuss later). You can also just roll up a new character specifically made to dive into the building and crafting aspect of the game.
You’ll need six Charisma to get two levels of the Local Leader perk and at least level two of the Cap Collector perk. These will let you make supply lines (ESSENTIAL) and awesome stores in your settlements. You’ll probably also want to go deep on Intelligence — the Gun Nut and Science! perks are practically necessary if you want to build the best versions of generators and defense turrets and Scrapper is a little too good to ignore (it will let you turn all those junky laser pistols and pipe rifles you normally throw in the dumpster into useful copper, gears, and circuitry).
I know, it sucks that the way crafting inFallout 4works basically pigeonholes you into a certain build. There is still plenty of room for creativity even after those stat demands though and the joy of raising a civilization out of the ashes of history does take the sting out a bit.
Fallout 4settlement building basics
If you want your settlement to grow, you’ll need a few things: water, food, beds, and a radio beacon. Each settler you bring in needs one unit of food and water per day and they get whiny if they don’t have a nice downy pillow to rest their head on at night, so you’ll want to get those things sorted first.
Plant a few crops (easily done by raiding other farms for their crops and it quickly becomes self-perpetuating when you’re able to just harvest your own fields for planting supplies), install two or three water pumps, and flop down a few beds. No need to go crazy, it takes a settlement time to grow and you can always add more as needed (and later crafting options can make old ones obsolete so no need to waste scrap on something you won’t need).
A radio beacon draws a steady flow of new settlers to your homestead. You’ll need a power source to run it so build a generator (which will come in handy for other things, anyway). Remember, you may turn a radio beacon off when you think you have enough settlers in one place. In some of the smaller areas like the Red Rocket station near the beginning of the game, you may want to put a cap on the number of people you take in.
You’ll probably want to defend your patch once you have it all set up. Turrets are the go-to option for this (and why you need Science! and Gun Nut so badly so you have access to the upgraded versions). Each turret, trap, or manned guard tower adds a few points to the defense rating of a settlement. Try to keep that number the same or slightly higher than the sum of both the food and water points to discourage attacks.
When an attack does occur, you will be notified on your Pip-Boy and can help your settlers defend their home. Raids on your property can be unpredictable. In my time responding to would-be home invaders, I’ve seen everything from realistic flanking attacks from Super Mutants pouring over the hills, to packs of feral Ghouls somehow spawning deep inside the walls of a fortified base. Your best bet is to spread out your defenses to cover likely avenues of attack while also covering populated areas where your settlers are likely to take a stand.
How to build a settlement inFallout 4
You could just work with what each settlement already has, but what is the fun in that? Leave your personal mark on the wasteland with a proud series of ramshackle apartments, abodes, and disturbingly militaristic forts.
The tools for building things inFallout 4are honestly pretty terrible. Objects float about in weird ways, mechanics are never explained unless you go digging through the help topics in the menu (and even then it’s hit or miss), and the way walls and attachments snap (or fail to snap) together will give you no end of grief.
But don’t let that stop you! With a little patience and a few pointers, you’re able to make some reasonably cool-looking digs for your wastelanders. If someone could makethis monstrosityof wires and pressure pads work, you can probably get a few fences to stand up straight.
First thing first, lay down a foundation and a floor. Uneven terrain tends to mess with the building tools so you’ll want to keep things as level as possible to make things easier on yourself.
Try to build up! Many of the settlement areas have limited usable ground space. Small areas strewn with debris and hills do not make for nice buildings, but you can avoid that problem by building vertically. Don’t be afraid to slap down ladders and staircases and build on top of what is already there. Not only is it space efficient, but a rad tower fort on top of the local Red Rocket station looks much cooler than a bunch of square boxes crammed together on the parking lot.
Set up supply lines from a central hub to make life easier. Trying to cart around tin cans and microscopes between settlements and keeping track of which place has what is a sucker’s game. With the Local Leader perk you can assign a settler to run supplies between locations and everyone can share from the same pool of salvage (but not hard items like guns or armor).
Make a supply chain by assigning one runner from settlement A to take goods to settlement B, and one from B to take goods to C, and so on. That way you can just toss all your junk in any workbench in the line and use all of it anywhere. Provisioners seem to be immortal like Companions, so don’t worry about them dying on the road the first time they run afoul of some Mole Rats.
Fences can really help with invasions by funneling attackers into kill zones as well as giving your settlement a homey, lived-in look (murder and comfort together at last!). Sadly, when you start putting rings around all your settlements they also become material hogs, gobbling up steel and wood like nobody’s business. I recommend you pick up an issue of Picket Fences from Beantown Brewery so you can make, well, picket fences. They don’t consume steel when crafting them and they look more charming than rusty chain links (granted, they look slightly less so when splattered with Super Mutant blood).
How to power your settlement inFallout 4
How you provide power to your settlements is poorly explained in-game but essential for making a great homestead, so be prepared to mess with it. Basically, you have two kinds of powered devices at your disposal. Active devices like laser turrets and water purifiers require units of power to run (meaning your generator has to be able to match their power draw to keep everything working), and passive devices like lights and traps can run off the ambient grid. Active devices need a line running directly into them, while passive devices need either a nearby connected pylon or wall socket to work.
Power pylons can be used to run lines from a generator to far-away devices or a conduit. The maximum length of a wire is fixed but can be cut short by obstacles, hanging on the ground, and so on. I recommend you build your generators in elevated positions to get the most out of your copper. Pylons give off a radius of electrical power that can be used to run lights, traps, and other things. Plugging a conduit into the wall of a buildingsupposedlyprovides power to the entire shack, but my experience with them has been mixed. Mostly, they seem to work just like pylons (but are slightly cheaper to make and more compact to string up between nearby buildings).
Making complex grids for my settlements has been hands down the single most frustrating and rewarding part of building things inFallout 4. It’s a very fussy system (I can’t tell you how many times I broke everything trying toslightlyadjust one little wall tile or light bulb) but once you get used to it, you can really make your settlements pop.
Adding shops to yourFallout 4settlement
Shops are wonderful. While having to invest in two ranks of Local Leader and Cap Collector to make the biggest shops (which really is the only way to go) is a drag, what you get out of having a few shops spread among your networked settlements can be well worth it.
There are six kinds of shops you can make for your settlements with four tiers of value. Each type of shop will boost your settlement’s happiness and pull in caps, but a few stand out as handier to have in your personal base of operations than others. Weapon shops can be a reliable source of ammo without having to make a trip to Diamond City, trade goods shops can help cut down on the time it takes to scavenge for parts, clinics can help you cheaply cure addiction and radiation poisoning at your convenience, and bars are great for ingredients for cheap healing items. Armor and clothing shops are fun too and you’ll probably want one of each in your network at some point just for variety, but they’re not as overtly useful.
you’re able to build the first two tiers of shop with just the second level of the Local Leader perk. They’re fine and will do the trick if you want to be a skinflint about it. But if you invest all the way to the third tier of the shop by getting two levels of Cap Collector, your market stalls will start to carry surprisingly great gear. What’s better is once you have tier-three stores, you’ll occasionally run into special vendors in the wasteland that you can invite to work at your locations that will turn them into unique fourth-tier stores that carry special gear.
Shops will generate an income you may draw from on their own — just check your workbench from time to time and you’ll notice you have a handful of caps you can pull out. But don’t get the wrong idea: shops accrue money slowly, so you won’t be diving into a vault of caps like Scrooge McDuck anytime soon. The value of having a nice network of shops is the convenience of being able to talk to a merchant on demand rather than wander around looking for a traveling trader or making a special trip. It lets you make more money off of explorations (you can trade found gear for caps more easily) and enables you to restock and refuel faster to get you back out in the wasteland.
AdvancedFallout 4settlement tips
There are plenty of mechanics involved in the settlement system that the game doesn’t go out of its way to tell you. I’ll try and shed some light on them here.
How to useFallout 4settlement cheats
I’ve really enjoyed building up my settlements, tinkering with the crafting tools, and spending entirely too much time equipping all of my little serfs with laser pistols and shotguns, but I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t also been a chore. It just takes too long to collect all the knick-knacks and scrap you need to make things. I don’t want tohaveto root around in some raider-infested warehouse looking for power coils and broken light bulbs for hours just to wire up some patio lights in my fifth fully-loaded farmhouse.
Or maybe, like I mentioned earlier, you built your character to tame the wastes with hands made of concrete and a bulletproof hide. You didn’t give any thought towards a useless dump stat like Charisma when you started the game. Now you’re stuck looking at the unappealing idea of tossing multiple perk points into your stats just to start building decent settlements.
So might I recommend cheating?
If you’re on PC, this is easy. Open up the console command line using the tilde (`) key and go to town. If you are like me and playing on the PS4 (or Xbox One for that matter), you’ll have to resort to installingmods that do the dirty work for you.
There arenumerous console commandsin the game that can take the headache out of settlement building inFallout 4.The most notable and easiest-to-remember console command is:
God mode transforms settlement building into a pseudo-creative mode by providing an infinite amount of resources. It also removes perk requirements for most items besides the settlement vendors.
Cheating is going to be something players will have to come to or avoid on their own. Personally, I don’t recommend cheating like this right off the bat as it can ruin the experience. But if you’re 30 or 40 hours deep into the game and pulling your hair out because you built your character wrong at the start or just can’t find enough oil to keep your turrets up and running, it’s nice to have a safety net like this available.
