There's a lot of talk about strategy for keeping your settlements fully stocked and defended, but haven't seen any explanation of WHY. And not even in that philosophical "what really is the point of playing ANY game?" sense, just "what is the worst that could happen if you leave your bases completely defenseless?".

Do raiders destroy buildings and/or steal items you have stored at your workshop benches? It's not like the FOBs in MGSV, where you could boot up the game one day and find that everything you've been hoarding over the last dozen hours has been jacked, right?

Or is the whole settlement aspect mostly a "for fun" thing?

It is completely optional and so it doesn't really have any impact on... anything.

It's a totally optional distraction if you find it fun, but you don't really gain or lose anything regardless of how much you engage with it.

Also, I've found it pretty easy to just build up enough defenses that my settlements never even get raided.

I had assumed that you could lose a settlement if it was attacked badly enough and you would have to clear it out of raiders or monsters to reclaim it.

That's pretty surprising if there are no consequences to failing to repel attacks.

I'm not surprised at all. It's a weird gameplay element with no precedent in the series that many people probably wouldn't want to engage with. Attaching dire consequences to ignoring it would piss a lot of people off.

Huh, so the ONLY thing you really have to gain/lose from defending/failing to defend your base is the pride of being able to say that you defended it? No stuff you need to spend more time and resources to rebuild? Gosh, having (relatively) recently finished MGSV, that's... Refreshing.

The only real consequence seems to be happiness. Too many attacks lower settler happiness and make it harder to recruit more settlers I guess.

It feels like they recognized that a segment of the community really likes playing house in Bethesda RPGs, so Bethesda added the feature in themselves instead of leaving it to the mod community (and Skyrim had that DLC where you could build a house). But like the mods, they had no real idea of how to give it any gameplay significance to the people that don't just take pleasure in playing house. So they kinda tried with the random attacks on settlements, but it all barely matters because they were probably afraid of pissing off players that have no interest in messing with the system.

It is a bit strange, but ultimately I think it's a good decision. It would be annoying if it was mandatory, but now it's just a fun thing you can do if you want.

Well, settlements really only give you access to some shops if you build them and also generate a small amount of money (again from the shops).

Raiders can kill settlers (which affects happiness) and destroy buildings/equipment you built (which means you'd have wasted materials and would have to repair those things).

I'm guessing hardcore survival mods will be created where settlement building, resource management & defense are critical to success. In the vanilla game, that stuff is really just optional for people who just like the sandbox fun associated with building and defending a settlement.

@bisonhero: the mods that are gonna come out that use the new settlement system are gonna be sick. Vertibird attacks, son.

...but why? if it's just a closed loop with no impact on any other system in the game, why does it exist? Unless there's actual value in having more settlers, it just seems like a pointless feature.

At the very least it will be a built in tool for modders to take advantage of. Adding extra objects and stuff. I always wanted to customize my megaton house in Fallout 3. I placed my weapons down in a room and used it as an armory and put cool artifacts, like nuka cola quantums, from my adventures around the house. Ended up looking pretty great.

@the_nubster said:

Settlers can be assigned to scavenge for you. If you have enough settlements doing it, you basically end up sitting on a pile of hundreds of all item types. If you are the home building type this stuff will go to building more homes/decorations, but if not, you can use it to mod all your weapons/armor for basically nothing. Setting up a recruitment beacon and maybe a turret or two at all the locations you get sent to help by the Minutemen/Railroad takes like a second total, so it's not like it's super taxing.

If you lean into Local Leader and build the storefronts, you can also use that to get basically thousands of free ammo. Your settlers sell to you at an extreme cost, and when you add in the benefits of Spender 2/any Tales of a Junktown books, you can easily end up buy thousands of rounds of ammo for ~100 caps off your storefronts. Same with Stimpacks, Chems, etc etc.

Or you can use them as forward moving strongholds if you don't want to fast travel ( I dislike fast travelling ). Build up a few defenses around the Red Rocket, store your Power Armor there, suddenly you don't have to walk as far in your Power Armor. Once you take the Drive In, set up a stronghold there, with turrets/workbenches/a new Power Armor stand/etc. Again, now when you get quests from Sanctuary/the near locals, you can run over to the Drive In, grab your Power Armor, and go from there. It's far less lost Fusion Core if you depart from the Drive In then it is if you only store/repair your Power Armor in Sanctuary.

I've just been barely engaging with the system, mainly just doing the bare minimum of what it wants, and it's been paying back to me in dividends.

You get to kill raiders. Killing raiders never ceases to be fun.

I haven't heard of any sort of in-game hook for settlements in any conversation I've had about the game, so thank you for actually shedding some light on what it does. Do you think it breaks the game in any way? That seems like a really big leg up for relatively little investment. Bethesda games have always seemed to have a really serious economy problem in the early-game, and it doesn't sound like FO4 is much different in that regard.

Not really?

I mean mods are fantastic, and having 20-30 people devoted to getting you glass/optics so you can make tons of them is nice, but they aren't a necessary feature of the game. As Jeff said, he beat the game without a single point in Gun Nut/Science, which means he just used the basic guns. Really, the scavenging bench feature just removes a lot of the busy work of you bringing home 30 toasters/microscopes to turn into parts, since the settlers will just get them for you.

The ammo/stimpack merchant guys are really nice, but they also cost me something like 5k caps to make both of them. Sure, now I can buy bullets for all my guns for 100 caps total, but I'd say I put more then a little investment into the game to get that nice benefit.

I'd also argue neither benefit is really "earlygame". Settlers bringing in scav for you only really gets lucrative when you have 5+ish settlements going, which means you are probably at least 10+ hours into the game. And you aren't ponying up 5k caps for a long while, at least not till midgame. It's just a nice benefit for you so you don't have to explore every single nook and cranny in the game looking for more ammo for your gun.

For how little actual work I did ( for half those settlements I literally just dropped a turret or two, maybe a recruitment beacon if it needed it ), I'd say it's a good way to remove some of the sidework the game asks you to do, but it's no Skyrim with it's blacksmithing, that's for sure.

Because I like role playing

Actually, I wouldn't be pissed about it at all. I'm actually more pissed off that defending bases in this game literally doesn't matter. If you look at the Wasteland in general and the fact that almost EVERYWHERE you go has raiders in it, then it tells us that there are a lot of raids happening. When those raids are of no genuine threat, it just means that we have this gameplay mechanic that doesn't mean anything other than "look, people weren't satisfied with their housing options in the last two games, so let's just give them a patch of land and the tools to make what they want, then throw some random bullshit about raids in there."

In something like H1Z1 (which, sure, isn't a great comparison, but follow along), raids can be DEVASTATING to a player. You spend all this time getting all of this stuff, and then *poof* it's all gone...AND you could end up dead as well. I would love to have something like that in Fallout as well, particularly on a harder difficulty setting that really made me hunker down and work on getting my shit together at home. If you're going to have me be the general of the Minutemen, then give me a genuine reason to build more than the five sections of wall and four turrets that I have up in Sanctuary. People depend on me to lead, for fuck's sake.

It's just a sad thing that one of the coolest aspects of this game turned out to be the one that mattered the least.

Everything about settlements seems completely pointless and I'm leaning towards never engaging with anything. I'm stretched for time and unless my settlement is going to start outputting caps or bullets or something I care about I probably won't touch it again.

I honestly can't tell what happens when you fail to defend a settlement. My partner was doing a main story mission when we got a defend quest for a place with 0 defense. We ignored it because...we were on a main mission. It eventually said we failed to defend it. Once we finished the mission, it said the settlement had a population of 0 so we assumed the raiders killed everyone. We decided to fast travel there and when we got there, the same settlers who were there originally were still there, totally not dead and our population was back at the normal amount and we hadn't lost happiness or anything.

We like the settlement stuff, actually. Sanctuary has become a massive fortress with walls surrounding it and turrets everywhere as well as all our companions who aren't in use. We made a house from scratch with a bar+bar stools on the roof and fully decorated. We've lit the entire town with lights and most houses are occupied by at least one person. We love it because it's made us feel like we have a place to go to get out of the horrible wasteland and feel super safe. We want to do similar things to all of the settlements we like the looks of aesthetically (we found a cool raider camp that's mostly fenced in with a concrete building in the center).

The settlement stuff is great for us but yeah, I think we're in the minority on that. It doesn't have real benefits but it is nice to have a place to go back to every now and then that we know we crafted and relies on us to keep going.

I lost a crop once....

It's kind of funny comparing this game to MGSV. Almost makes me wonder if they saw the reaction to the FOB stuff and altered their bass building last minute. Either way, it's pretty great when a game has a mechanic that doesn't exist in any way to make the player experience worse. The base building in Fallout 4 is something I find rewarding on its own, albeit a little clunky. And I'm happy that players who don't want to engage with that sort of thing don't feel pressured to. And I'm happy that it isn't an area of stress for me while I'm trying to do other things in the game.

I think the two games approach similar ideas very differently. I've been permanently putt of MGSV by the way they treated their systems post-launch. I can't really think of another game that put me off so much that I feel this much worse about it than I did when I was actually playing it.

@strangestories: Y'all sound like me. I have been fantasizing all day at work how I want to turn Sanctuary into a massive walled-in fortress. I already built a large watchtower on the empty plot near the bridge.

I just spent an hour building a wall around sanctuary. It's the most busted ass wall in the history of the universe, but no raider scum will get through it.

To answer your question with a question, why do people play Minecraft? Doing this kinda stuff just hits home with some people, even if it seems aimless from the outside.

Exactly this.

@the_ruiner: @rongalaxy: I don't have anything against the base building stuff. I think it's really cool, actually.

I should probably clarify that I totally get the satisfaction that can come from building something up like this. What I meant by my question wasn't as much "why would anyone want to do this?" as it was (intended to be) "if I don't feel like spending the time building my settlement up to a minimum level of defense and self-sufficiency at the very beginning, is that going to bite me in the ass later on when I DO want to play around with that stuff?"

And the answer SEEMS to be "no, even if raiders attack, all my stuff stored in the workshop is still safe", unless I'm misunderstanding what people have said so far.

*edit: But I'll still probably build a little fort at some point anyway*

I think you have to have a base operational in order to use any artillery you placed there, so I usually just defend based on where I built cannons.

I'll echo this because that's all I want from this feature. I've always wanted more control over my home base in these games. Hearthfire didn't really satisfy that desire - this does.

This mostly probably. And maybe xp also, and/or supplies?

@bbalpert: Think of raiders as delivery men. They're bringing you packages (gun parts) that require your signature (bullets.)

The whole build your town- thing was neat when you have like four different settlements. I'm not even done and now I have close to twenty and I just don't give a damn about building anything in them.

@terjay: Ya they went way overboard with how many there are. Who wants to manage 20+ of these damn things.

And last night I had my first one attacked. But I didn't get a notice it was, or I missed it. All I saw was I failed to protect it message. Then I looked and everyone was dead, and there was no food anymore either. Oh well, I'm not rebuilding it.

So raiders can kill your settlers and destroy your crops? Bummer.

They didn't do anything to the stuff stored in the workshop, did they?

@bbalpert: I never keep anything in the workshop at any of them other than Sanctuary. So I don't know. Once I build stuff there, I then take all the junk out and take it to Sanctuary. I didn't even go there after I saw the message, I just pulled up the pip-boy data page for them and saw those two things were now at 0 and most everything had the warning ! next to it.

Yeah, same for goes for The Sims. I usually spend more than half the time building a grand home for my sims, and by the time I have had them earn enough money to move them in to their newly built home, I usually stop playing with them and go on to build another one :)

I find one well kept settlement to be enough. It's definitely not useless.

For some reason on my game I had a little pop up that said you dont have much time left to complet your objectives for red rocket station so I went through my quests and couldnt find anything mentioning red rocket so i ignored it thinking it must be something ive already done, then i get a quest called clearing the way for red rocket pop up with the already completed objective saying inform garvey that we wont be recieving the help of red rocket. I cant understand this for multiple reasons, the main one being it's the only settlement I've upgraded so far and has no unmet resource requirements and then theres the already completed objective which makes me think it's a bug rather than something ive done wrong. Has anyone experienced anything to do with this? Any help would be appreciated :)

Yea I think there is a bug with the notifications. After prolonged play I stopped being notified for settlements being attacked, over encumbrance, etc. pretty much anything that pops up in that corner besides radio stations going in and out, stops working for me.Has anyone else had this issue?

How often are the settlements raided? I've obviously heard a lot about it but am 12 hours in and just generally wondering around the wasteland and have no notifications that one of my settlements are being raided. Is this something triggered by story or just happens at random?

@stealthoneill: It happens at random. But as far as I can tell, only to those with no or low defenses.

It is completely random and the game will notify you when it is being attacked. I have been attacked 4 times but I was only notified one time because of some glitch. But with that being said if the game is working as intended then you will be notified if and when it is attacked and you will have some time to go defend. Also I'm assuming that you might have to do that settlement building tutorial level before anything happens but I'm not positive.

Often the people attacking settlements are lead by a Legendary so it gives you a chance to score legendary loots.

I've spent a stupid amount of time building in this game now. I'm not even huge on previous building games but it's tapping into that plus my love of Bethesda RPGs. It actually reminds me of fun I had building in The Sims.

I think it's great that it doesn't detract for people who aren't interested but it could have more depth and be more rewarding for those who get into it.

Can't wait to see how the modding develops on the Settlement front.

Tried to surround the Red Rocket settlement with wood walls and now I'm almost at the build cap. Haven't even started furnishing my base yet. FUUUUUUU

When I see the message pop up that one of the settlements is under attack I just ignore it. I don't fast travel most of the time so, sorry, but I'm not going to drop everything and race to the rescue. I gave you the means to handle it yourselves, so handle it.

The worst thing that's happened is some turrets needed to be repaired, and some settlers were killed. I'll repair the turrets the next time I pass through, and there's an infinite supply of settlers as long as the radio beacon is on, so whatever.

@artisanbreads: I'm not sure if this is possible since adding objects is done based on your character location, but I would love if someone made a mod where it zoomed you out overlooking the entire settlement, a la Sims.

@mrsensible: If you're feeling adventures, drop some big guns/armor and store it in the building mode. It'll perceive it as a build item and will give you more room to build. I've done this some and so far it's not been a problem.

@nickhead: Yeah that would be fantastic. I am building a multistory building right now and I've fallen off of it multiple times while trying to build.

That kind of usability stuff plus more objects, mechanics, etc and that stuff could be even deeper.