Fallout 4

[Art Blade]

'ere, 'ave one from me as well, fragger matey +1

[fragger]

Thanks Art

Here's a new one for me. I built a settlement at Murkwater Construction according to my usual methoidology - build and set up everything first, then build and hook up the Recruitment Beacon to start attracting settlers. I went away for a short time, then returned when the first settler turned up. He had already put himself to w0#k on the crops, as the first one or two settlers usually do, so I kitted him out with a new outfit and a decent weapon. It was then that I noticed that the settlement Happiness level had already gone straight up to 100

Completely uninhabited settlement sites usually start with a default Happiness of 50 or less, and provided you've done everything right, as more settlers arrive it will gradually go up over time. This one went straight from 50 to 100 with the arrival of the first settler.

Never seen that happen before.

[Art Blade]

maybe the well was poisoned.

[Dweller_Benthos]

That's how I got the 100% settlement happiness achievement, only with what's his name in Far Harbor. One guy, by himself, tending some crops. Though I think it took a couple games days before that happened.

As for Murkwater, I hated that place so it's only robots there, and one of them attends to the artillery which is essentially the only reason I had anything there at all.

[fragger]

Murkwater is not my favourite settlement site by any means, it's a pretty dismal place.
However, I found a good way to deal with it - build everything up off the ground:

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

The site has a fairly high build ceiling, so you can get everything well up above the original structures.
The framework shack with the Workbench in it is enclosed within the central ground-level concrete base area.
Power and water is in the other ground-level structure towards the right.

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

View from the "back". The build area at ground level is not great - very uneven and with that big pool of water
taking up a lot of the space. But once you get above it all, there is a good-sized area to build everything:

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

You can see the site's partially-ruined house at bottom-centre.
The high tower is my personal residence - it has a power door to keep the plebs out

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

The Workbench at left, down in the stygian depths below the settlement.
It's only accessible via steps from above, there is no ground-level access to it from outside.
The game won't let you scrap the old forklift-type machine at right, so I had to build around it.

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

Inside the "utilities" structure, which encloses part of the pond to take advantage of the water with two purifiers.
Power is also generated inside this structure by the fusion reactor at upper-right.

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

At ground level, Murkwater is a pretty crappy site, but once you get everything up off the ground, it can be made to w0#k quite well.
I went through a shipload of concrete and steel building this though...
It's only new and so far just two settlers have turned up. Aiming for a population of 12.

[Art Blade]

that's really a good idea and well done fragger

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah that's extensive and actually nice looking. With indoor crop planters you don't even need to go down to the ground.

[fragger]

Cheers lads

I did something similar at Murkwater in my last game, but not as extensive as this. FO4 being FO4, sometimes when I travel to Murkwater a few of the settlers will be standing around at ground level, but after a little while they find their way topside. Same thing happens at Coastal Cottage, where I have another elevated settlement.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Coastal Cottage is another place I never did much with, it's too far out in the sticks to be useful as an artillery site and that's pretty much all I wanted settlements for, LOL!

[Art Blade]

funny I only ever used artillery when forced to by a mission.

[mandru]

Sweet build at Murkwater fragger. 

While less aesthetically pleasing my site there is also elevated.  Mine is actually looking more like an ugly brick barracks with a sunroof for gardening.  I've closed off the sites outlying build boundaries with a protective wall that is two concrete wall sections in height and only one entrance to the entire enclosure.

Murkwater has regular attacks from either Raiders or Gunners who always approach from the same side of the settlement.  The single entrance is 90 degrees around to the right from where they want to strike.

The invaders (after running around the corner to the entrance) find that they have charged into a long narrow corridor created as a death gauntlet that is bristling with missile launchers and less cover than provided by a microkini. 


Murkwater while mostly peaceful (if dreary) there is a spot of wet marsh inside the build perimeter that you need for placement of a couple large water purifiers.  Unfortunately it's a spawn point for a Mirelurk Queen who occasionally comes to visit when I travel fast travel to that settlement.

I bid her welcome with a liberal surrounding of heavy machine gun turrets. 

[mandru]

While typing up the above post I had a stray thought and realized I needed to hop into FO4 and check something out regarding building elevated buildings in a settlement.

I'm embarrassed to say because of one thing or another that it's been a couple months since I'd last ventured into FO4 but seeing fragger's greenhouse atop his impressive build got me thinking about the place anywhere garden patches.  I went into the game and jumped to one of my settlements that had a covered rooftop garden to run a test.

 A quick aside that can be skipped

First a side note.  We count the number of floors (the height of a building) differently depending on where we live.  I know (compared to the U.K.) what we here in the U.S. call the "First Floor" they call the Ground Floor and the next floor up for them is the First Floor.  I don't need to understand the reasoning for why our 2nd floor is their 1st floor but I was made aware that it exists after a confusing online conversation with a Brit.

I kept trying to explain that while we call it the 1st floor we also call it the ground floor but for us the next level up is the 2nd floor unless the designers tried to get fancy and added a Mezzanine which would shift the 2nd floor up to where the 3rd floor should be.

I think he would have crushed my tea biscuits if he could have reached them.  End of side note

Anyway back to my experiment: The roof top of the settlement I went to had four floors below where I stood.  The type of roofing material was concrete with the steel diamond shaped mesh used to keep out random grenades while still allowing sunlight to reach the protected garden patches and an area set apart for a top floor dwelling Urbanite Brahmin and her food trough.

I placed a garden patch squarely on one of the concrete diamond mesh panels.  Then I managed to jimmy into place one of the water purifiers of the type that requires a spot of dirt instead of being situated in water.  The purifier wouldn't allow a neat square placement into the garden spot but by wiggling it around I saw there were skew locations on where the purifier would flash green for being OK to set in place.

With a bit more fiddling I successfully got the purifier to mount and while monitoring the the amount of water already being supplied to the settlement I connected power and the settlement water level went up by 10.

I had successfully created a well that was drawing water out of thin air 5 levels above the ground.  It's true that the cement block the purifier is mounted in protruded quite a ways into the ceiling space impinging some awkwardness for the floor below not to mention annoying the Brahmin who was inadvertently blocked from accessing her food trough.

So I quickly scrapped the experiment and apologized to the Brahmin for upsetting her and rushed back here to file my report.

I probably would never have thought of this if not for the time I spent in my reply about elevated construction from fragger's post. 

Thanks fragger!

[Art Blade]

excellent posts, mandru

+1 for the elevated pump

[mandru]

 

[Dweller_Benthos]

funny I only ever used artillery when forced to by a mission.

Yeah after setting up the network of artillery, I found that the response time is usually too long to be useful. A few times it would succeed if you carefully placed the smoke marker and were still hidden. Those times it's pretty funny.