Settlement Building Feels Off

[Naturlich68]

Yeah the main problem seems to be that they didn't find a way to allow the ground to mold to the base of the object you are placing (or as said above you can't build on a slope with a fence!), so you start with a building or a fence/wall on flat ground, and after 5 sections you have a ruddy great gap underneath, it's really rather silly and greatly restricts what you can do if you want it to look half ways right

[Vagrant0]

Somewhat agree, the UI is a mess, the object limitations are too low in many cases, turning items is too imprecise, and while there is a snapping, the detection is funky and there's no way to turn it on or off as needed. Even on console they could have made a simple toggle key (sprint for instance) to temporarily turn off snapping or make rotation move between quick fixed 15 degree increments or a slow rotation. It just feels like they spent so much time just making the system function, barely, without really using it much themselves. The limited number of pieces you get access to is another problem. There's no good ways to fill in slopped areas without using floor foundations, no way to solve for changes in elevation without using stairs, no way to remove some of the larger default structures that you probably won't want to use anyway. Gates and walls are a joke. Gates end up being open most the time anyway, so essentially becomes useless as all your NPCs (including traders) just run outside to deal with whatever tripped your sentry guns. I've taken to just setting up sentry guns around the perimeter of the settlements and placing them on the bridge pieces so they're raised up and less vulnerable to suicide supermutants.

 

Then there's the problem of having all your settlers named "Settler". Hard to know who is assigned where unless you start color coding or specially equipping them, but still makes sorting out bed assignments a royal pain in the ass. They already had a list of names created for chargen... Why couldn't they just use that and make a script randomly apply a name to some settler as they were spawned... Then you could have their name appear over their assigned job or bed. How nobody on the dev team had this thought is unbelievable.

[Deleted3507349User]

I get the shivers when I think of the settlement mods that will come out when the G.E.C.K. is available for this...

[SMB92]

Modders are going to have a ball with this. I hope it doesn't get too out of hand though with one mods that does one thing well then 2 other mods that do them things well but can't use together. Lol. I just think of Skyrim and it's many competing mods.

 

I miss the FCOM/FOOK days :/

[Vagrant0]

Modders are going to have a ball with this. I hope it doesn't get too out of hand though with one mods that does one thing well then 2 other mods that do them things well but can't use together. Lol. I just think of Skyrim and it's many competing mods.

 

I miss the FCOM/FOOK days :/

From what I've gathered poking about in console, buildables are defined by keyword lists and recipe lists. As long as people are using scripts to inject forms into these lists instead of editing them directly, there shouldn't be much in the way of conflicts. Conceivably, it wouldn't be hard to assign a large majority of clutter and building pieces that already exists to these lists.

 

The actual scripting behind the building system however will likely be the real problem.

[Deleted3507349User]

I just want to build things that don't look as bad as what I cleared away. Seriously, what with all the dead trees to harvest, clapboards aren't all that hard to make.

 

btw - I did discover that you can scrap things from outside your build zone (if you can drag it inside your build zone).

[NDDragor]

I wanted to make a junkwall around one of the settlements but I gave it up after 2 hours. It should be possible to place a wall next to another wall or some building, so that there wont be any gap between them or to place objectst on bumpy surfaces so that they adjust to the surface. But still its rly nice to have the option to build all these settlements.

[Markmid]

Badly needs more objects that can be put inside rocks, floor etc, so you can level off fences, or sit things on the ground. There is a wood block floor type that can clip through terrain, so I know its possible.

It also needs a type that holds smaller objects fixed in place, so that people running into things constantly doesn't break the little details you setup, like cups, or decorations, etc.

I am enjoying it for the most part, I always run out of materials and I've bugged one of my settlements to not gain any more people, after 10, but so far I am having fun still. I think modders will do so much with this, you'll see amazing work if its left open and modable.

Edited November 14, 2015 by Markmid

[Wolfmod]

I am loving this game in spite of the dog's breakfast that Bethseda have made of it. Without spoilers, I now have Covenant as one of my settlements (I was forced to use "setownership" on several of the objects - I'll come back to this) and it struck me that something was amiss with this 200 year old culture. The rubbish lying around has suffered 200 years of natural aging, acid rain and toxic radiation so we expect a sheet of iron to have rust holes in it. We expect a matress to be stained and look like rats have made a home of it. However, the basic premise of the building system is that we melt down coffee pots, wrenches and scrap metal to make brand new sheets of steel to make housing. We chop wood for brand new timber. We find cotton and yarn, we boil it, bleach it and then dye it to make brand new fibre so that everything we create may or may not have that professional look but we certainly would not be making stained matresses.

 

In the end, all of this must fit with the story of a survivor who on so many levels is rebuilding civilization. And, of all of the settlement/building games on the market (some of them being small budget Indie games) Fallout 4 has managed to come out with the worst I have ever seen. It is so bad, it is broken. Covenant has managed to procure a lovely clean double bed (before the nuclear war the world appeared to sleep in singles) as well as brand new bunkbeds. So where did they get them? Their community is surrounded by a cement wall but that isn't in my building options even though mud and brick are ancient technologies mastered by primitives - So why am I collecting bags of cement? Where are the large doors/gates for my wall (Covenant has them). The fallout world of previous games was full of sandbag walls and at Sanctury I was asked to build defences and sandbag walls were given as an example and yet a simple sandbag isn't on my build list. I want stone walls, cinderblock walls, mounted heavy weapon emplacements, towers. What I don't want is a wall made of scrap that looks like it was put together by someone on acid. How about an electrical system that assumes that the wire going through a wall or ceiling (or any obstruction) is actually going through holes I drilled. How about floodlighting? How about giving us a device or machine that gives a small extention of the build area so that we can run piping (something else that doesn't exist) down to the river for a water purification machine?

 

While I could write a lengthy essay on what we don't have or on what we should have, what we do have is abysmal. You can't patch houses that are still standing. You can't effectively use existing features or objects in your design. Where is the snap-to-grid on and off toggle? Where is the scaling of built objects using the mouse wheel? Where is the broom to sweep out the crap? Where is the shovel to level the land? Why not assume that in placing the flooring we actually used a shovel to level the land? Why not assume that the wall we built didn't come out of a factory in pre-made sheets and can reach the ground regardless of slope or level? How about a 90 degree angle snap-to (this possibly the most frustrating point here). As it stands, I believe modders will have to overwrite everything that Bethseda has done in building before they can so much as add a brick.

[Boombro]

You know, if they turn of the restrictions of building items to allow building them any way we want, the system will be 50% better. But we have what we have sadly. At least until a patch comes out. And it better be 5 gba of fixes and stuff.

 

For the modding, when the new geck comes out next year, cleaning locations from bricks and trash should be easy for anyone that can boot it up and knows how to use the render window.

 

I don't think adding new walls and stuff would be that hard, expect there should be someone who will be breaking them down into walls, floors, windows and whatnot if they were not in the game and fix the broken one. But until that happens, one maybe can add whole new houses or shacks for the sake of connivance. I saw some sweet houses in the city I would love to live in. Yet again, I think making a house mod is easier.