Fallout 4 – Construction Mode (Xbox One)

One of the newest and most innovative things about Fallout 4, and consequently something I have spent a great deal of time on, is settlement development. The sequence of settlement establishment that I personally embarked upon goes roughly as follows: Meet the Minutemen “leader”, Preston Garvey, save his people from the Raiders assaulting Concord, lead them all to Sanctuary Hills. Once the people from Concord have been relocated to Sanctuary, the option becomes available to start what essentially amounts to level editing. The way this fundamentally works is the player is given a list of things they can build: walls, doors, roofs, floors, turrets, the list goes on and on and will undoubtedly expand with various DLC in the months to come.

What comes next is essentially Minecraft. In Sanctuary for instance, because it was already an established town prior to the Great War, there is a ton of miscellaneous shit littered about the area: trees, old cars, fences, swings, tires, fallen limbs, ruined shacks, lampposts, mailboxes, couches, television sets, cabinets, and so forth. In order to create new objects from the building menu, you can either scrap the old junk laying around all over the place to break it down to its individual components, or if you’re dying to capture the whole Southern-U.S.-trailer-park-after-a-tornado vibe, you can leave all that bullshit where it’s at and go find or buy all the crafting materials you’ll need. I don’t suggest this course of action. For one thing garbage mining is insanely time consuming, and secondly it takes a literal shit ton of junk to build an entire village made entirely of the stuff, so any thoughts of keeping your shitty ruined trailer park look in any of your settlements should be immediately banished from your brain. You will without question have to go out scavenging if you’re planning on making a settlement that anyone actually wants to live in, so there will be time for all that, but in the interest of costs and resource management, use as many materials as you can from locally sourced objects. Which leads us to the act of scrapping.

There’s shit scattered everywhere in and around prospective settlements, so get after it. All it takes is entering creative mode, highlighting the object that you want to dismantle and pushing the appropriate button. Scrap the trees: 10,000 atomic bombs ravaged the planet, anybody who gave a rat’s rear end about deforestation perished in a fiery maelstrom, and they don’t celebrate Arbor Day in the Commonwealth. Go ahead and lumberjack until your heart’s content. Scrap the rusted-ass cars littered all over the street: You can’t drive them, and none of your companions are going to give it up in the backseat of a broken down “green with some brown, uh, rust coloration” colored car. Scrap the street lights, the patio furniture, the piles of tires, and the mailboxes: They broke.

To be more specific, you should scrap literally everything that can’t be used by the people of your settlement. Then use all that shit to build stuff they do need. When you scrap objects while in creative mode they will automatically go to your workbench in that particular settlement allowing you to automatically draw from your junk pile whenever you’re constructing new objects, this is actually pretty convenient as it doesn’t take up space in your inventory, and whenever you want to build something the material requirement will be listed along with what you have in your workbench, thus allowing you to see what you have, what you are low on, and to start formulating a plot as to how you’re going to accumulate 36 more screws to finish the row of turrets you’re planting in the middle of main street. After all, nothing says cosmopolitan quite like a row of stationary miniguns ready to turn your enemies into bloody chunks festooning your town center.

If you’re ever going to finish your horrible little murder village you’re going to need those screws, and things like screws, oil, copper, circuitry, glass, crystal, and so forth, don’t grow on trees and for the most part you aren’t going to find very many of them lying around your settlements waiting to be reassigned. This is where scavenging comes into the picture. For any of you who played Bethesda’s previous titles, you know that worthless shit has pretty much always been scattered throughout the world in an attempt to make the environments seem inhabited. Things like wooden ladles, feathers, and fancy shoes could be found regularly throughout Cyrodiil, Morrowind, and Skyrim, and in Fallout 3 and New Vegas there was comparable trash littered everywhere. In the previous Fallout installments there were a few uses for some of the garbage, namely with regards to weapon crafting, so even though all the miscellaneous items weren’t completely useless, most of us were never going to have an inventory filled with coffee pots, adjustable wrenches, and desktop fans. This simply isn’t the case in Fallout 4. If you’re planning on doing much settlement building, you’re going to find yourself dropping combat shotguns in exchange for hot plates, and casually disposing of high powered hunting rifles in very public places so you can squeeze a few more bags of cement into your always-near-capacity inventory. It absolutely makes exploration more thorough and in many ways the environments more alive. At one point for instance, I exited an elevator into a bar room full of skeletons and bottles of “Poisoned Wine” littered everywhere. I didn’t know what to do so I took all the poisoned wine and got back on the elevator. Maybe I’ll find a use for it later.

Another thing to consider when planning and building your settlements and what to do with your settlers once they start showing up, is what do your settlers actually need?

Food – apparently most people in post-apocalyptia are vegetarians and that’s pretty much what they get from you. Various fruits and vegetables must be planted to keep your settlers happy and to encourage more settlers to come to your settlements. After the crops have been planted, you have to assign a settler to a plant. From there it’s a simple matter of keeping your food number higher than your people number.

Power – Nobody wants to live with rolling blackouts or the inability to make the boob tube turn on, and that includes the poor bastards of the Commonwealth. Power is generated by building, uh, generators of various sizes, which coincidentally generate various amounts of power. Different lights, switches, pylons, plates, etc. can then be hooked up to the generator through the use of wires run in neither a neat nor workmanlike manner. It isn’t pretty, but I’ve yet to see or hear of a settlement burning down from an electrical fire so I guess you just gotta get it how you live. Once the generators are built, no further action is required to keep the power number in the green, but certain defensive objects require power so it’s a good idea to figure out at least how to run a wire. Which leads us to our next need.

Defense – Super Mutants are real dicks, and sometimes they get hungry. Anyone who has spent any kind of time roaming the Commonwealth or the Capital Wasteland has most certainly come across those awful bags of gore filled with a bottle cap or two and sometimes a hat or a hip bone. What you don’t want as the mayor/sheriff of a Commonwealth settlement is for your gentle townsfolk to be violently and horrifically murdered by a group of those big green shitheads. The best way to defend your settlement is to cover the place with turrets. There are varying schools of thought as to whether or not you should build walls completely around the perimeter of your settlements, as the walls don’t actually contribute anything to your defense number, and to completely surround the perimeter of the buildable area of a settlement requires a tremendous amount of wood and steel. This is obviously the player’s prerogative, but there is something to be said for having one entrance to a settlement and having 30 heavy machine gun turrets pointed right at said entrance. Having perimeter walls will essentially bottleneck any would be attackers right into the killing hole, making any attack that may be perpetrated against your settlement have a relatively small chance of doing any real damage. You can also build guard towers and assign a settler with a weapon to guard duty, but to me that’s always seemed like a waste of a settler that could be used picking mutfruit.

Water – You need it. Build water pumps, and purifiers, the larger purifiers need an allocated generator, so you’re still going to have to learn to run wire.

Beds – Yes, they appear dirty and if you could smell them they’d probably smell like shit, but it doesn’t mean your settlers should sleep on the ground like a bunch of dirty shitty animals. They need beds and that’s all there is to it. Find some cloth, find some wood and build some beds. If you really want to go cheap you can throw some sleeping bags in a shack and forget about it. As long as you have more beds than Settlers you’re fine. The beds don’t even have to be inside a structure, but it helps with happiness so I’d recommend it.

Happiness is something we are all trying to find and most of us don’t know we have it until we don’t and all we can do is look back and remember what it was like to not be miserable. However, there are some tangible things you can do to increase your settler’s happiness beyond just making sure their material needs are met. If you have food, water, defense, beds, and power, and those bastards still aren’t grateful, try throwing down some rugs and throwing up some paintings. A TV or two somewhere in your settlement, assigned jobs for everyone, and a well-lit settlement also do a lot for settlers overall sense of wellbeing. I’ve never managed to get my happiness rating above 85 and that includes having a well-stocked nuka cola and cigarette machine and a bathtub where I throw all the alcohol and drugs I find in my travels. All that shit is always still there when I check in, and the settler’s happiness rating is still hovering around 85.

Review by Joshua Ellis