Fallout 4

[fragger]

Indeed Art, I well remember your "Hall Of Power Armor" Looks really cool that, I like it.

Same, D_B. Those Raider PA suit pieces from the motel showed up as "stolen" (or would be when I took them) when I pointed my view at the suit, i.e. they were in red text if I got close enough to make the "Transfer" interface appear. If I want to keep "stolen" PA bits, I use the console to "unsteal" them by dropping the pieces on the ground, opening the console, clicking on each piece to get its ID, then typing "setownership" to make the piece mine (but since I was going to sell those Raider PA pieces, I didn't bother). You can do the same thing with a frame itself, so that when you put a Fusion Core in it, the Core text doesn't turn red in the "Transfer" box as though it's been stolen.

[Art Blade]

 

[fragger]

You guys may have discovered this already, but here it is for what it's worth:

You can place those small blue pump-handle water pumps (the ones that produce 3 Water and don't need power) in Garden Plots and they will w0#k, even if the Garden Plot is placed on an elevated floor section that is way up off the ground. The pumps will only go in the corners of the plots and seem to be dependent on which way they're oriented, so you may have to rotate them this way and that before they'll go in. Even then, the concrete bases of the pumps may overlap the wooden frame of the plot a little, but if you're not fussy about appearances, they'll still w0#k just fine. You can squeeze four pumps into one plot. Handy if you want to keep your water source indoors and behind protective walls, or up off the ground, while conserving power.

I have my entire settlement at Coastal Cottage build high up off the ground and this trick saves me having to leave my water source vulnerable at ground level.

Spoiler

Here are four pump-handle jobs in a garden plot, in an enclosed room with two large petrol gennies
(the pumps don't need power, but I just wanted to keep the settlement's basic utilities together)...

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...which in turn is in this structure, which, as you can see, is nowhere near ground level.
The pumps w0#k just fine up there, giving me a total of 12 Water for no power usage.
Below that structure you can see the roof of the original garage with the Workbench in it.

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Here's a view of the settlement from the opposite direction.

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Here we are at deck level. The settlers' sleeping quarters are in a sctructure to the left,
power and water in the raised structure on the right.

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[Art Blade]

hehe, nice one

Although I knew about "planting" pumps, I never tried that on an elevated structure. I like the looks of your settlement there, fragger

[Dweller_Benthos]

Never knew that, pretty good trick. Coastal Cottage too, I never bothered with that place, nice build, makes it look actually nice.

[mandru]

Nice post fragger on two fronts.

First the placement of hand pumps on resource garden plots.  Very cool, I'll now need to see if the dry land water purifiers will also utilize that same trick. 

Secondly that is a sweet build for Coastal Cottage.  It's rustic but in its own way elegant and outside of my normal brute force method of building. 

I'm always interested in seeing how you guys tackle the same conditions in dealing with these shared problem situations.  In this case stuffing a settlement into an awkward, congested or problematic space.

Coastal Cottage presents it's own difficulties by having non-scrappable preexisting buildings (the house being ramshackle), that huge hole, and dead trees that you have to build around or over. Plus there's that nearby Deathclaw who can be easily attracted if things become too noisy during an attack.

Up front I'm a cheater.    Building in godmode let's me place a huge number of Concrete elements (like solid walls) with minimal impact on the initial settlement build limit.  It lets me quickly establish living conditions for the settlers and start populating the location.

I've fallen into the habit of throwing up a concrete wall as close to the settlement boundaries as possible and high enough that it can't be seen over from the outside.  Sometimes (exterior terrain dependent) that means I go up to three panels high if I'm building into a space on a steep hillside.

I do this to Block an attacker's line of sight for key targets or settlement personnel.

I've come to suspect that if one attacker can see a key target within a settlement there's a hive mind mechanic where the rest of the attacking group all share that knowledge exactly which enables precise "Over the wall" grenade or molotov tosses instead of random harassment.

Somerville Place also gets the surround wall with only one highly defended entrance.  But it has a unique problem being that most attacking enemies will spawn directly into the original garden plot that exists when you first discover and unlock the settlement.  There's a large footprint at Somerville so I remove all existing crops and replant Mutfruits in an out of the way part of the settlement. Later in the build all crops are moved to the top floor of a sprawling multi level barracks.

As for the spawning enemies, I concrete wall encase (with no exit) that original garden area and turn it into an automated (missile launcher equipped) Pit-O-Death. 

[Art Blade]

 

[fragger]

Thanks chaps

I never bothered with Coastal Cottage before either and used to use it as a dumping ground for unwanted companions It's probably the worst settlement site in the game. The ground is very rough and uneven and there's all that stuff you can't scrap, like those metal containers in the foreground of my second picture. It was actually T.V. who gave me the idea. A while back he posted a screenie of a raised settlement he'd built there. I had actually done something similar before elsewhere, so I thought what the hey and gave it a shot. It worked out quite well and it seems to agree with the settlers (there's only six of them) since the settlement Happiness level went up quite fast.

Might try something similar with Murkwater Construction later. It'll mean rebuilding the settlement, but I love building stuff, so that's not really much of a deterrent

mandru, I too like my big concrete ramparts around my settlements, where doable Coastal Cottage doesn't have any as it doesn't really need them. There's only one way up to the deck and any would-be interlopers would have to run a gauntlet of turrets and irate settlers to get up there. My people have the high ground all the way!

Another settlement site where care needs to be taken with walls - or a wall, anyway - is Warwick Homestead. I built a concrete wall right at the very edge of the build area, at the approach to the settlement, leaving a covered gap for an entrance. During the course of the settlement being populated, a Brahmin showed up so I made a fenced enclosure for it right inside that front barrier wall, on the eastern, seaward side. Unfortunately some attacking Super Mutants not only spawned inside the wall but right inside the Brahmin enclosure and the cow got pasted in the ensuing crossfire. So I'll be moving that wall back a bit, methinks.

[Art Blade]

I love the mod I've been running since the very early days. It stops attacks on settlements altogether. No more enemy spawning inside or outside of settlements. I can just do whatever I want without having to worry constantly about that nonsense

[Dweller_Benthos]

I found some of the building mechanics awkward as well, so the two mods I found indispensable were scrap everything and place anywhere. First one lets you remove any object that is otherwise not removable, and the second lets you place anything practically anywhere, but even with that in some cases you just can't place something where you want. Scrap everything also had the ability to scrap the entire map surface, so the ground you walk on, so it needed to be used carefully.

[Art Blade]

map scrapping.. I got that one as well, scrap everything, which is extremely useful. I don't need the place anywhere mod, though. And yes, I once accidentally scrapped a huge chunk of the broken tarmac of Sanctuary, rendering the place looking a bit too weird so I reloaded.

[mandru]

Even without mods there was one time while cleaning up a settlement's boundaries using the console 'remove from game' code I accidentally eliminated the build perimeter.   It gave me quite a scare. 

I too had to reload a previous save. 

[Art Blade]

those types of unforgettable moments are invaluable teachers

[fragger]

I've discovered all sorts of tricks and workarounds when it comes to buildings. Some of the pieces from one building set will snap to pieces from another set, and some will not. Sometimes, pieces will only snap to where you want them depending on the order in which they are placed, even within the same building set. Sometimes a temporary piece can be used to get a piece from the same or another set to snap to a place that it normally wouldn't, then the temporary piece can be removed. Some pieces can even intersect or overlap others, but only certain pieces in certain circumstances, and/or depending on order of placement.

The "Scaffold" set, for instance. By default, the only floor pieces that will snap to the top of a scaffold frame are the Scaffold floor pieces. However, if you place a Scaffold frame, then snap a Scaffold floor to the top of it, you will find that a floor piece from another set - let's say, the "Barn" set - will snap to the side of the Scaffold floor piece. Once the Barn floor is in place, you can remove the Scaffold floor piece, snap another Barn floor in its place (because the second Barn floor piece will then be snapping to the first one, not to the Scaffold frame), then remove the first Barn floor you placed. You will then have a Scaffold frame with a Barn floor on top of it. This can make for more aesthetically pleasing, or more plausible-looking, constructs. Let's say you have an overhead catwalk made out of the small metal floors from the Concrete set and you want it to look like it's actually supported, not just miraculously hanging in mid-air. Build the catwalk, then pull out a floor piece where you want a supporting Scaffold frame to go. Snap in a Scaffold floor in place of the metal one, then snap the Scaffold frame to the underside of that. Then you can take out the Scaffold floor and replace the metal one. Voila, a metal catwalk with what looks like supporting scaffold-w0#k beneath it.

[spoiler text=I used that technique to build this]

Of course, the Scaffold frames don't have to be there - it's not like the catwalk will fall down if they aren't!
But this looks like a more realistic structure than if the catwalks and stairs appear to be unsupported.
I can't help it, it's the frustrated architect/engineer in me

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[/spoiler]
Sometimes this sort of thing can be done even with pieces from the same set that won't normally go together the way you want. A very handy piece in the Concrete set is the skinniest Wall piece, the one that looks like a very narrow square column (piece number 6 in the Concrete "Walls" menu, reading left to right). This piece will often snap to where other Concrete Wall pieces won't, which makes it an ideal "temporary" bridging piece.

There are lots of these kinds of ways around things, you just learn by doing and experimenting. I'll leave you with one more example: You can place a full-sized Barn floor piece, then snap a Concrete wall to one side of it, then snap a Barn wall to the same side of that floor piece - because Concrete walls snap to the outside of a floor piece and the Barn walls snap to the inside, so they can co-exist. This only works with some floor pieces, not others.

[mandru]

Great new building ideas fragger. 

By employing the Group Select Function that skinniest piece of concrete wall can also be used to partially sink another building element (like a wall piece) into the ground or merge a piece of junk wall into a gap of hedge or brush when setting up a boundary perimeter.

To engage the group select start in a clear area with no other constructed objects nearby as group select can grab on to entire buildings and foul up what you are trying to do.  Place the piece you want to manipulate and then set the narrowest wall as close as you can in front of the object to be manipulated.  Those narrowest wall pieces can be stacked 2 or 3 high for a deep merge.

Making a save at this point can save you a world of grief if your intended final placement of the group placement is near or into another structural element and has to be torn out.  Trust me on this. 

By pressing and holding the "E" Key focusing on the wall narrow piece (for consoles I would assume it would be the grab button) until the wall piece and the object being manipulated both are outlined as grabbed.  From there the group will move as a single unit.

I had a Nukacola machine West side of the Red Rocket near Sanctuary that would not sit tight against a wall so I dropped a doormat on the ground so I could grab and place the machine on half of the mat.  Then by group selecting the doormat I was able to press the machine into place or even partially into the wall if I had so desired.