4 Things about settlements & settlers you should know

[CyrusAmell]

A few things Fallout 4 does not tell you about settlements you should know which I wish I had known earlier.

 

1) The vanilla attack system for settlements is currently broken.

 

How the system is supposed to work is simple. Your settlement’s likelihood of being attacked is based on how much higher your defense is over your combined water and food count (and population factors in somehow) so a higher defense means a less likely chance. When the settlement is attacked the player is supposed to receive a notification of such and a misc quest to help out. And if the player ignores the quest then the settlement's turrets, engines, water pumps and crops will be destroyed and this happens no matter how pathetic the actual threat was.

 

But in the game as is you will many times never be warned of an impending attack or given the misc quest and unless you accidentally stumble upon the attack as it happens it will destroy the given settlement as if you had ignored the misc quest. This happened no less than two times to my own Castle (Fort Independence) which I had rigged with a defense of 433.

 

So do yourself a favor and find a mod to disable all such attacks if you want to keep making new settlements.

 

2) In combat, settlers (almost) cannot be killed by the enemy.

 

I have been fired upon by Super Mutant Warlords and watched villagers fall down around me only to watch them get right back up. The only time I have taken settler casualties is when I accidentally killed one myself with a legendary explosive weapon’s splash damage and when the institute synths attack and one is revealed as a body snatcher.

 

Also, big thing: Villagers will not be hurt by explosions caused by missile turrets. I watched a gaggle of settlers and gunners come under fire by these turrets and the villagers emerged unscathed. The gunners were very much dead.

 

So don’t bother armoring standard settlers unless it is for taste (your settler army at The Castle) and never go all out Fiber Armor and Polymer unless it suits your fancy. The only exception to this are provisioners who you will often find yourself fighting alongside in the wasteland. Speaking off…

 

3) Settlers do not use ammo at all (except perhaps with Fat Mans and Missile Launchers).

 

If you give a settler or provisioner a gun and 1 ammo they will never run out of ammo. I wish I had known this before giving all of my provisioners super sledges because melee weapons do not pan out in the endgame in the hands of a standard settler. This is true for Assault Rifles, Laser Rifles, Plasma Guns and even Miniguns.

 

Also, when it comes to provisioners i would highly advise against miniguns as they don't seem to help much with tougher enemies like gunners or super mutants. It is fun to watch them with it though.

 

I've also noted that settlers like to run up to the enemy and hit them with their gun so perhaps slap on a bayonet when possible.

 

4) Stores make settlers happy and make you a lot of money.

 

I find it prudent to try and place at least a food vendor in a settlement so npcs can gather around it and on any chairs near it at the end of the day, otherwise they just stand still like a bunch of stupefied idiots in the field. After that, if so inclined, a Trader vendor and perhaps a doctor’s First Aid Station and if you really feel like you have room a Clothing vendor. I find that this does help stabilize your happiness rating and based on population the settlement will eventually bank caps you can take from your share of the store's income. I have found no evidence that bigger stores make that much more money than little stores so don’t bother with Emporiums, Surgeries or Restaurants outside your capital or whimsical wishes.

 

Money will begin to lose meaning once you have piles of caps gathering dust in 20+ settlements.

 

Feel free to object or correct me, I need to know as much as possible to manage all of my settlements.

Edited January 7, 2016 by CyrusAmell

[oldspice2625]

This was superb, thank you! I make my settlements into mutfruit slave plantations, and just build things in God Mode anyway, because it's a tedious system that you are forced into if you want to make any kind of money and have serious cash reserves in game for more expensive playtypes, like energy and power armor builds.

 

Also, speaking on that, do not bother with water farming if you are playing legit. Go gather mutfruit around Greygarden and Diamond City, and begin to plant trees of mutfruit in your bases. The cost to weight ratio is the best for crops, and they respawn the fastest, making it a ridiculously cheap way to make money, and, if you go all out, you can quickly harvest them in rows and have spares and leftovers in your workshop. toting around 1200 mutfruits is like having 9,000 caps... so if you want the most bang for your buck as a legit player that doesn't abuse God Mode, mutfruit is the way to go by far, and can be done with EVERY settlement, while water farming can only be done at very specific settlements, limiting your effectiveness.

 

Clinics and Bars raise your settlement happiness the most, so build those first.

[CyrusAmell]

When it comes to crops I focus on mutfruit, corn and tato so that I can quickly mass produce adhesives by way of vegetable starch. I don't think it is actually a factor for happiness but I like to think that my settlers appreciate the food variety. I never bothered with selling my purified water because I need it for adhesives and from a roleplaying perspective would rather have an abundance of clean water over bottlecaps. I was always surprised at how quickly our character adjusted to the new "currency" system...

 

Once you get your hands on your preferred weapon set I find that money is really only useful for stockpiling ammo and gathering resources for your settlements.

 

The way I play, you are doing something wrong if you have more than several thousand caps in your inventory. Why bother to hoard soda caps? True wealth is the number of farms you control and the number of bullets in your arsenal.

Edited January 7, 2016 by CyrusAmell

[SergeantGrrock]

Excellent post! I already figured most of this out but it would have been nice to know from the beginning. What I didn't know was that the current system is broken. Big shock though :ohmy:.

 

I haven't modded my game at all yet as I like to try to play vanilla on 1st play through (except fixing game breaking bugs).

 

I can't seem to link to it but do you guys think that "Shaikujin's Better Warning for Settlements Being Attacked" could fix this? The best part of this mod seems to be that you have to acknowledge the notification (click OK) before it disappears. In vanilla it disappears in like 3 seconds and is VERY easy to miss when otherwise occupied.

[Moraelin]

5. I'd add one thing, since I keep seeing so many LP-ers not get it -- or not for quite a while -- and maybe it'll help someone: there's nothing magical about mutfruit. It doesn't produce twice as much food per settler. It just saves space, if you run out of that.

 

Each farmer can produce 6 food, regardless of what plants they use. This can mean 6 mutfruit trees, or 12 tatos, or 12 corn. Or 4 corn and 4 tatos and 2 mutfruit. Or any such combination, as long as it adds up to 6 food.

 

So don't go planting only mutfruit everywhere and think you actually gained anything. Unless you have some artistic concept about decorating with fruit trees, I guess.

 

Throw in some corn and tato too, like CyrusAmell mentioned, because...

 

6. You can make glue. If you have a steady supply of those 3 vegetables and clean water, starch breaks down into a whole 5 glue each. It's used for most weapon and armour mods, so that's valuable.

 

7. And for water, just build a purifier or two somewhere. Then check your workbench now and then. You'll find clean water there.

 

8. Build scrap stations and assign the extra workers to them. If you need to feed 17 settlers, you only need 3 farmers (total number divided by 6, rounded UP.) The rest can collect scrap for you, so you don't have to run back and forth hauling every mop and bucket you find for scrap.

 

It's slow, but it adds up to quite a bit. By the time you have a dozen connected settlements gathering scrap like busy little bees, or sons thereof, things get a lot easier.

 

9. Speaking of connections, they are reflexive and transitive. So you don't need to connect everything to the same point. If Sanctuary is connected to Red Rocket, Red Rocket to Abernathy, Abernathy to the Co-op, and the Co-op to Graygarden, then Sanctuary will see all the materials in Graygarden and viceversa.

 

10. While surgery centres and bars raise happiness the most, weapons shops sell fusion cores. 'Nuff said. Build enough of those around, and you have ammo to buy and pretty much all the fusion cores you'd need to stomp around in full power armour, full time.

 

And they buy back old cores for a decent bit of cash, if you sell them before they reach zero charge.

 

11. Speaking of shops, watch out for the special level 4 merchants. If assigned to a level 3 shop, well, basically it works like a level 4 shop.

 

So for example if you assign *ahem* a certain travelling brewer to a bar, it won't do all that much good, but assign him to a restaurant and now we're talking.

 

Be warned though that they ARE a bit wonky in the head, and sometimes never reach the destination settlement when you hire them. And at least one can then disappear from there.

 

12. Building a bar or restaurant is great for village management. If you come during work hours, preferably around noon or so, most unassigned villagers will hang out at the bar. So it's easy to find one that gets to supply the new settlement over there, or man the scrap station.

 

Be warned that settlers love to assign themselves as too many farmers, though. So if you have 15 settlers and find nobody at a bar, well, don't be surprised if you have 12 tending the fields :tongue:

[Raycheetah]

Just as an aside, rather than selling depleted Fusion Cores, you might also given them to any followers you want to use power armor, first, since, IIRC, they don't use them up. =^[.]^=

[Moraelin]

Pretty sure that followers don't actually need a power core, though.

[oldspice2625]

Great stuff, most of it I knew already, but many others will be confused and benefit from bad crap floating around the internet.

 

I specialize my settlements into two categories:

 

Early settlements are pure farms with the last six settlers being shop keepers. This is for the first five settlements, where I plant around 40 mutfruit trees or so, I have two scavenging stations, and six stores, one of each variety just because, no special reason really.

 

The rest of my settlements, if they are small like hangman's, our Oberland, I specialize them in corn and tatos... that way I have a HUGE excess of corn and tatos, I have the Castle, Sanctuary, and Nordhagen Beach producing water out the butthole (nordhagen has something like 800 water production without exploiting the space down with the workshop exploit).

 

The rest of the settlements have 18 mutfruit trees, so three settlers, and the rest is scavenging and stores. I only put down missile turrets, and, when I get around to it, will put nothing down or the bare minimum once I disable attacks via mods altogether since it's annoying and immersion breaking anyways.

 

I do one round trip and end up with around 2k mutfruits and a crap ton of water. If i need to, I make around 200 adhesive, and then take the rest into town and sell it. I don't make use of my own shops selling stuff, since I have wayyyyy over 10 CHR with Agatha's Dress, minuteman general hat, fashionable glasses, and grape mentats (very easy to get if you harvest hubflowers wherever you see them).

 

I would imagine that your own stores have better prices, no?

 

At this same time, using the Castle as my main base, and the only one that I actually give a damn about, I will drain the workshops of all the scrap and things to sell like water and crops as well as caps, and fast travel with the Strong Back perk to each one, and dump all of the scavenge into the Castle's workbench, so that I have all of the resources that I need in one location.

 

I usually do this, since I only need to do one run to get fully stocked up on anything that I'd actually need, when one of my ammo pools starts to get low, which is not often since I have well over 2.5k fusion cells, 2k plasma carts, 1.2k cryo cells, and have used this method, while finding my initial 30 fusion cores in the world and banking them, to have well over 250 fusion cores alone.

 

Also, yes, save your old fusion cores, you can sell them for the same price that you'd be able to sell a full charged one.

 

I would NOT imagine having to do anything nearly as immense in scale for melee and guns based characters though, or non PA based characters, as I cannot imagine them taking nearly the same amount of dough, especially sneak characters that use melee or sniping, who wouldn't need much ammo anyways.

 

also, a tip for making money: pick up EVERY WEAPON YOU SEE!!!! Every round of ammo is at least 1 cap if not more, and it is weightless. If you pick up a weapon, you get a magazine's worth of ammo, for nearly every weapon that I have picked up. That's why I had a huge store of Flamer ammo when fighting the forged, and the Gunners are an energy weapons player's wet dream come true. When you run out of carry space, just dump the weapons onto a follower, and then when they fill up, just store the weapons in a corpse so they will be deleted when the place despawns, but you still have a huge amount of ammo to sell.

 

As an energy weapons character, I sell all ballistic ammo, and it's good enough to be able to buy all of the energy based and heavy weapons/missiles/mininukes from Diamond city alone.

 

Also, don't reload the Gatling laser, or you will be left with tons of half spent cores :P.

[Benedictium]

In regards the issue of the vanilla attack system for settlements: I too was driven to distraction by the 'phantom settlement attacks' in which there seemed to be no warning message. I would just drop in on a settlement (or notice in the Pipboy's 'data-->workshops' listing that a settlement's numbers were wonky), and discover it heavily damaged in a distinct way (widespread damage to objects, but no enemy or settler bodies or other indications of a true battle).

 

So, I grabbed at the "Shaikujin Better Warning" mod. I've been using it for about sixty hours gameplay time.

 

The good news: the mod definitely helps. I get warning messages that dominate the screen and pause the game -- perfect! I have even had such warnings when I was deep underground. I endorsed this mod and heartily recommend using it.

 

The bad news: some wonky settlement mystery attacks persist. Even with the Shaikujin mod, I just recently noticed on my data list that a settlement (Somerville Place) suddenly had zero food etc, but there had been no 'attack' warning. When I traveled to it, it had the classic 'mystery attack' damage: all turrets damaged; crops damaged; generators damaged; water pumps damaged -- all, despite a 220+ defense, including both chokepoint defences and comprehensive internal-settlement turrets that left no coverage blind spots. And there were no bodies of enemies or even dead settlers. If there was any doubt that this was not a real battled-out attack, it was put to rest by the fact that two of the generators were sealed inside tight steel structures with only tiny gaps for the wire runs, yet both of these generators were damaged.

 

Notably, Cyrusarnell is correct that there are definitely some attacks that don't trigger the 'settlement under attack' warning, but which truly are legitimate attacks. I am 200 hours into the game (groan) and I've had numerous instances where, say, I just happen to notice off on the horizon some laser fire from the sky and realize that it could only be my very distant settlement's ladder-elevated defenses at work. I'd rush there from my far-off position and find that the settlement was indeed under attack by, say, raiders. If I had been turned the other direction, I'd have never noticed the distant attack. But in these instances, there are bodies and there is coherent battle damage patterns (e.g. weapons lying on the ground; some damage to chokepoint turrets, but the interior of the settlement unharmed). I also noted a peculiarity to these attacks: the attacking forces are typically just of the wandering variety, and my impression is that they just blundered within turret range of my settlement and sparked the battle. As evidence of this: when I am at my home settlement (Starlight) working on armor etc, raiders strolling past on the road consistently blunder into my turrets, leading to a battle; yet, when I am not present, there are never any 'Starlight is under attack' announcements.

 

So, I think there are three kinds of settlement attacks:

 

a) Formal Attacks: These are the kinds when the game spawns a dedicated attack force (often powerful) to directly assault your settlement. Such Formal Attacks trigger the warning announcements (which, in vanilla games, are very easily overlooked -- particularly if you're working on settlement building someplace else, which generates many announcement messages that you just start ignoring). These attacks are the ones whose frequency is impacted by the famous 'water plus food compared to defense rating' formula. If you don't defend these attacks (because of, say, overlooking the warning message), these might be ones that result in the 'widespread impossible damage... even the best defenses totally ineffectual... no bodies' pattern. (I am uncertain about this, though -- I am basing this on the fact that, in 200 hours of playing, I've never had a settlement flattened / slaughtered even if I was not there to defend it. However, some people on the net seem to indicate they have experienced it.)

 

b) Happenstance Attacks: These are attacks that occur when wandering enemies chance into conflict with your settlement defenses. These leave bodies, and your defenses function normally (and typically effectively). I think that there is some sort of actualization proximity trigger relative to the player's character -- these battles can take place even if the character is nearly to the horizon and looking the other direction. But I'm not 100% convinced they take place when the player character is totally absent. If so, I would regularly be coming home to Starlight and finding a heap of bodies. (Notably, though, I find some scattered guns at the usual conflict points, so I might be wrong here.) I think that the player 'coming upon' these attacks is not truly a fortuitous happenstance: I think the player's presence (even if he's halfway to the horizon) actually provides a trigger for such attacks to occur (the same way that your provisioners never die 'off screen'; they only die if you are in proximity to them on the road and, say, some ghouls wander past).

 

c) The Mystery Attacks: These are the ones that I think are the bugs. These produce the infuriating combination of no 'settlement under attack' warnings (even with the Shaikujin mod) plus the unnatural and impossible damage (all turrets / generators hurt... water pumps damaged... prodigious defenses ignored... no attacker bodies). One alternative hypothesis is that these 'Mystery Attacks' are actually 'Formal Attacks' whose 'settlement under attack' warning alerts were somehow missed despite caution (and a Shaikujun mod) or because the game suppresses all messages (including alerts) in some as-yet poorly understood circumstances (e.g., I don't recall ever getting a settlement attack alert during a very important core story quest). Whatever their nature, these Mystery Attacks are the single most infuriating design flaw in the game, because they threaten to invalidate so much of the settlement design process.

Edited January 7, 2016 by Benedictium

[TheOriginalEvilD]

Before the patch I did get notifications about settlements getting attacked, and I could fast travel to them and help defend them. I haven't seen one of those since the patch.

 

I also haven't had anything in any of my settlements get destroyed, ranging from the most impenetrable fortresses to the ones with only 2 settlers and one turret. All I ever see are ash piles popping up here and there.

 

Settlers do indeed seem to be nearly immortal. I did some base defense testing by spawning various enemies, and I could spawn 5 mythic deathclaws and nobody would die.