Fallout 4

[fragger]

Cool screenies, BinnZ Love what you've done with the place!

I never realized you can put stuff inside those cabinets with swing-out doors Will they stay there, though? Often when you use junk or food items as decorations, after a while they either fall through whatever you've put them on, or they disappear. Some furniture pieces seem to be more reliable than others. There are a couple of desk types that I've used for putting things on which seem to w0#k very well, i.e. whatever I put there will stay for an entire game, but others eat my items with monotonous regularity. I've gotten to know which furniture items w0#k best for putting junk items on, but even the most "dependable" ones can still sometimes swallow stuff put on them.

Similarly, some junk items are more dependable than others. Globes and Desk Fans seem pretty stable and remain where they've been put, but Typewriters are hopeless - they end up all over the place.

The most probable cause for this happening is that when you fast-travel into a settlement, everything you've built has to be loaded into memory, and if the game loads the junk items in before the furniture, the junk immediately falls to the floor and the furniture then gets loaded in on top of them. Usually when that happens, if you move the furniture piece (and sometimes even the floor tile under it) you'll find the junk items underneath. But sometimes the junk simply disappears altogether, seemingly having fallen right through the ground.

In my first playthrough, I had a quite elaborate bar setup, with heaps of bottles, glasses and ashtrays on top of counters, but after a while they started disappearing. I found some on the floor, and others just vanished. So I do very little of that anymore - got sick of retrieving things and putting them back

Junk items used as decorations can also be very easily knocked over or pushed around by NPCs, or by the player if bumped into.

Apparently there is a mod you can get for turning junk items into proper decorations so that they don't move or disappear after you've placed them, but I've never tried it.

[Art Blade]

I had the same experience with disappearing junk decoration and gave up on it, too.

[fragger]

It's a shame that happens, because there's so many different junk items and so much you can do with them to jazz up a place, or make it look properly lived in. I even once went to a good deal of time and trouble to set four places at a dining table with plates, cutlery and glasses, but that was before I knew about how unstable junk items were. Needless to say, before long the junk ended up all over the floor under the table, or just gone.

One exception is a Giddyup Buttercup (a complete one). When you place those, they can't be knocked over, even if you walk into them yourself (although once I placed one right next to a chair, and when I sat in the chair - or rather, when I got up out of it - the horse went flying). I've still had one or two disappear on me though.

[BinnZ]

Art already warned me for the disappearing junk, but until now everything inside the cupboard stays untouched and in order. I hade the same experience with the other junk, I tried and left the globe on the main diner table in that same room for quite some time but I kept replacing it because it had fallen over, or off the table.
I also put a comfy pillow on my bed, which seems to stay there. But it's only 2 days or so since I put it there.

[fragger]

It's pretty unpredictable. Sometimes things will stay put for an entire game. In my first game, I set up a pool table and dropped a full set of balls at random on top, and they stayed there for the whole game. I did the same thing this time around, but some of the balls keep ending up on the floor, so I've gotten rid of them all.

I've heard of the following technique but haven't gotten around to checking out the accuracy of it:

- Drop all the junk items you want to use for decorations on the ground in your settlement.
- Fast travel or leave the settlement and move well away from it (travel to a whole other map cell, so that the part of the map with your settlement gets taken out of memory).
- Return to the settlement and place your junk items (using the Workbench method, so that the items automatically right themselves when you pick them up).

Apparently, this should increase the chances of the items staying put, but there is still no %100 guarantee that they will.

Another thing I've heard about is that if a particular junk item stubbornly refuses to cooperate, scrap it and obtain a fresh version of the same item. The new one might behave better. It seems that once a particular item does the falling-off thing, that item will just keep doing it, so it's better to replace it entirely.

I can't verify any of these theories at this point.

[mandru]

It's fun to have you getting hooked into the game BinnZ.  It's interesting to hear other players take on our common in game experiences.

I've heard that placing an item while in build mode will have a different durability outcome on setting the same item while not in build mode but I've not experimented with it enough to be able to say which way is which. 

At least when you are in build mode something that you pick up will try to orient itself in an upright alignment so it will stand up when you place it.  That is (as opposed to) if you simply drop an item out of your inventory. 

I've made an effort (where possible) to place Giddy-up Buttercups into the living spaces of the children I've encountered in game but many of those children are not in areas under the influence of a workshop.  It's been my experience that without build mode helping Giddy-up Buttercups are too heavy to pick up to align them for proper out of the way placement.  The best you can hope for is to drop them and have them at least land on their feet.  It would usually require many drops to get it actually land upright in a desired location.

In Far Harbor (on The Mariner's dock) getting a Giddy-up Buttercup placed for Small Bertha and her brother Tony took me far longer than I care to admit. 

Even after hundreds of real time hours when I go back to those locations where I've placed Giddy-up Buttercups (even if they're not in a settlement) the Giddy-up Buttercups will still stay where they've been placed.

[BinnZ]

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Take a closer look at my whisky bottles. I put one on a different spot, more to the left, on the other side of the bourbons. This bottle is smaller. It is not partially sunken in, nor is it pissing anything, it's just smaller than the other bottles. It's the only bottle I found like that. It will always stay that size, even if I pick it up and put it back. It's not named differently in the inventory, and you can't see any visual differences except for being smaller. Weird, isn't it?

I keep using the 'drop out of inventory and pick up' method to place my items. Can be a pain in the arse when they drop on their nose or side, and I keep using my ground safe to align them in a way I can easily shove them up the cupboard shelves. For the highest shelve though, I'll have to place a bed or crate of some sort first, otherwise I can't put them there. The angle is too large to be able to pull them to the back of the shelve carefully. I also have to admit I spent too much time aligning those bottles. And of course I occasionally drank one or two, for pressing the wrong button

[Art Blade]

this game isn't suitable for anyone suffering from an OCD.

[BinnZ]

 

Indeed, especially with the present bugs. Damn they annoy me as hell. The game freezes when I'm afk for like 10 minutes, often resulting in a mandatory reboot. And whenever I open steam overlay, the game decides to stop the tab key from working, which is important for all the menu scrolling, and drawing up the pipboy to begin with. Have to alt+tab out of the game and back in to bring back the tab functionality

[fragger]

One advantage of placing junk while in Workshop mode is that if you place items on a table, say, then if you move the table, the junk items will stay stuck to the table and will go with it while you're moving it around, whereas if you just drop junk items on the table straight from your inventory, when you move the table the junk items will be left behind (and will just float in mid-air once the table is taken from under them). You also have precise control over junk item placement in Workshop mode since you can rotate the object left and right and can zoom it towards or away from you, just like you can when you're placing proper Build menu items.

If a junk item you've already placed has fallen over, simply picking it straight back up while in Workshop mode won't make the item automatically turn itself right-way-up. You need to pick it up outside of Workshop mode so that it goes back into your inventory. Then drop the item from inventory, enter Workshop mode and pick it up, and it will automatically right itself again.

You can also "store" Build menu items in the Workbench, such as wall and roof sections, decorations and anything else found in the Build menu. For instance, let's say you've already built a bunch of concrete wall slabs but later you want to temporarily remove them - you don't want to get rid of them entirely but you just want to get them out of the way for the time being. You could just move them out of the way, but you can also store them. If you highlight each wall slab in Workshop mode and hit TAB, it will ask if you want to store the slab in the Workbench. If you say "yes", the slab will disappear and be stored. Let's say you store four wall slabs. Next time you navigate to the wall slab option in the Build menu, a small number "4" will appear under the wall slab thumbnail. You can then place the stored slabs the way you normally do, but without using up any materials (because they're already built, just stored). You won't get any XPs for "rebuilding" stored items.

With the smaller bottle in BinnZ's example, I've noticed lots of examples of that sort of thing in the game. I've seen Teddy Bears and Basketballs that are only half their normal size (and somewhere, I can't remember where, there is a BIG Teddy Bear that's about four times the normal size), and I once found a tiny Pram with a ridiculously small Baby Bottle in it (the bottle was about the size of a Flip Lighter). It's because all items in the game are scalable in size - there is even a console command you can use to scale items and even characters up or down in size (doing the latter can make the game unstable though). When you find a resized object in the game, it may not necessarily be glitched - the devs may have deliberately resized that particular object for some reason. Near one end of Mass Pike Tunnel is half a bus, and whoever was living inside that apparently had a fondness for collecting Teddy Bears. There are about half a dozen of them in assorted sizes. They are there in every game, and they respawn the same way after a while, so the different sizes of the bears is a deliberate thing, not a glitch.

Just thought I'd put all the above out there, even though it's probably common knowledge already The storing in the Workbench thing actually was news to me not that long ago...

Odd how your game freezes when you leave it for a while, BinnZ. Mine won't freeze but will usually minimize itself if I leave it paused for a while, and will just come back up when I click its icon on the taskbar. I don't know why yours is freezing like that, but it sounds flipping annoying.

EDIT: Just remembered where the big teddy is - it's in the driver's seat of a bus at the collapsed bridge near the WRVR Radio Station. If you pick it up though, it reverts to normal size once it's in your inventory.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah they scale things to fit the scene they are making, like the Vim bottles from Far Harbor, the ones in the fountain at the factory are huge. There are also some Nuka Cola bottles that are scaled, because the Nuka Cola machine where you'd think you could store them has a space that's too small for most of the bottles you find, except for a few, which are shrunk just enough to fit, but you have to figure out which ones they are and try to place them.

[Art Blade]

I ended up finding an item, admiring it, and scrapping it.

[BinnZ]

Today I was thinking over my freeze glitch again, and I remembered that I had once before an issue with a game, don't remember what game that was cured by activating windowed mode. It also had to do with alt+tabbing out or something. I noticed that in the options menu there's an option to put the game into windowed mode (borderless). Gonna try that, see if it does any good

[LowPolyOWG]

Yeah they scale things to fit the scene they are making, like the Vim bottles from Far Harbor, the ones in the fountain at the factory are huge. There are also some Nuka Cola bottles that are scaled, because the Nuka Cola machine where you'd think you could store them has a space that's too small for most of the bottles you find, except for a few, which are shrunk just enough to fit, but you have to figure out which ones they are and try to place them.

They even place trees under the map for making a small bush That's what they get for re-using Gamebryo as a foundation for the Creation engine. Other companies like R*/CDPR/Ubisoft don't have those problems with their engines.

Binn, you might want to check the nexus mods for fixes etc. It's a thing with Bugthesda, you need the customers to fix their *bleep*

[mandru]

My experience with God Mode Building is that you don't exactly get infinite resources.  You get a lot of concrete (possibly infinite) but there's usually just a smattering of other essential building materials.  How much you can build (even when sticking to using concrete items) is constrained by the settlement's current allowed build limits as displayed by the meter.

This time through the game (as I've set up each settlement) I've created a surrounding concrete wall with one or at most two heavily over defended entrances into the settlement.  The walls are high enough that approaching enemies can not see over them.  I make the walls capture as much perimeter space as I need to establish reasonable settlement needs or in smaller locations (like Jamaica Plains and Hangman's Alley) as much as the build boundaries will allow.

Regularly I will receive the "Nothing more can be built" message even when working in God Mode.  So I need to make forays to collect scrappable resources to lower the gauge that displays build limits so I can start building again.  I encounter this even though before I begin the walls (long before plunking down each building) I use the console code format "player.additem xxxxx xxxx" to drop 5000 of each building material item (e.g. acid, adhesive, aluminum, and on through wood) into the Workshop.

With that glut of content within the workshop I've come to believe that dropping an item in mass (let's say Acid) that has a quantity of 5000 units and scrapping it as a whole doesn't decrease the build meter as much as making 5000 single drops and scrapping them one by one. 

Yeah, me too.  That's not a reasonable course of action.  5000 units scrapped "en masse" appear to have as much build meter impact as scrapping a single unit of the same object. 

But what I do after establishing a fat resource rich foundation in my workshops I then go out roving around a while collecting weapons, armor, and junk and upon returning to the settlement I'm building up I will drop all of the multiples of items in my inventory one by one to best impact the build meter.