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Hello Survivors, Caedo Genesis here. In this guide I'll be covering how to construct and maintain basic settlements in Fallout 4! There are numerous perks tied to settlements themselves, primarily Local Leader. If you intend on spending a lot of time and resources on building up a thriving community, Local Leader will ensure that you get repaid through extra resources, food, and/or caps. Let's not jump ahead too far though, we'll start with the basics.

Workbench Status HUD (0:40)
People, Food, Water, Power, Defense, Beds and Happiness are displayed here. As long as your Defense, Food, Water and Beds are even or higher than your population, settlers will stay happy!

Scrapping EVERYTHING (1:18)
Wood and Steel are your primary building materials, and the most plentiful. After a workbench is accessable, potential settlements come with their own resources in the form of piles of junk, trees, and various other items which can be scrapped and recycled into useable components. Anything you scrap will have its materials transferred directly to the workbench. If you find yourself coming up short for components, I recommend taking a trip to nearby locations, scavenging all the junk you can carry that isn't nailed down, and returning to the workbench, at which point you can use the 'store all junk' function to offload all that you gathered!

Creating Shelter (1:55)
Many of these settlements have perfectly useable pre-existing structures and buildings that can't be scrapped. These can be built onto, or reconstructed and furnished at the cost of less materials to be used by you and your settlers. Starting a structure, you have the choice of using prefabricated pieces, or starting from scratch. The prefab choices have connecting pieces, partial, and even full shacks for you to use, and are great if you want to just get established. If you'd rather start from scratch, your starting point should be shack foundations, both are in the wood floor section. These will make a nice flat building platform atop the uneven wasteland terrain. After this, you can throw some walls around it, add a roof, a doorway, prop some stairs up to it, and there's a bare shack! At this point is when cloth becomes useful. You can go to furniture, and set up a bed, shelves, a table, maybe some chairs and decorate to your heart's content. As per the usual, sleeping in a bed in these settlements will give you a rested bonus!

Power & Lighting (3:04)
The basics of setting up a generator and connecting it up to a building for the sake of lighting! Firstly, set a generator near the place you want to power. Secondly, stick a conduit to the structure. Third, place wall mounted or free standing lights near this conduit and there should be light!

Food & Water (4:06)
To sustain a population, you'll want the other necessities aside from shelter, in the resources section you have food and water. You can place water pumps with concrete, steel, and a gear just about anywhere that's not paved for a basic water source. Crops can be placed the same way, but just require that aid item, such as Corn, Melons, Mutfruit, Tato's, etc...

Settlement Goals (4:32)
What's your settlement's goal going to be? Farm, Trade Hub, Salvage, Player Home, or any combination of those? This helps visualize a finished settlement and solidify what direction you'll want to go with it.

Recruiting Settlers (5:01)
When you're ready to take on some settlers, you'll want a recruitment beacon and a way to power it. It requires Circuitry, Crystal, Copper, Steel, Ceramic, and Rubber. If you don't have the components on-hand, like mentioned before you can tag the items for search so you can find them easier during your time scavenging other areas. After constructed, you need only wire the beacon to the generator, and await your new arrivals!

Settler Assignments (5:26)
Settlers can be assigned to Crops and Salvage Stations to generate Junk items and/or produce. If assigned to a store, they'll generate bottlecaps. Unassigned settlers will passively generate junk and components over time, all of which gets transferred to the workbench.

Defenses (6:06)
Defenses are an important part to any settlement. You don't want to come back to find your crops and generators destroyed. To resolve this you can build guard posts, turrets and traps. Guard posts are the most cost effective however, and three of them can be manned by 1 settler for a total of 6 defense.

Happiness (6:39)
Keeping settlers in a sunny disposition is simpler than you'd expect. The Core of your community's happiness is having enough beds under a roof, food and water to supply everyone, and decent defenses. Setting up shops will also create a positive environment. Beyond that, settlers will sometimes ask for help with rescuing a fellow resident, or pest control...of the local marauders, which will also raise happiness if completed.

Micro-Management (7:13)
If you're looking to work on a new settlement, you can command almost any of your settlers to relocate to that new area so long as you have access to the workbench there. As mentioned before, Local Leader is an excellent perk to have, especially when it comes to managing multiple settlements. With the first rank you gain the ability to assign a settler to a supply line, and connect to another settlement. This allows resources to be shared between connected settlements for the sake of workbenches, as well as armor, weapon, cooking, and chemistry stations. The second rank of local leader allows for some more advanced items to construct, like setting up shops and workstations, really helping to fill out an already thriving settlement.

And that is the basic settlements guide! Explore your options and experiment with your settlements. Have you built one already? What's it like? Have any tips on settlements? Leave a comment, I'd love to hear about it! If you found this guide useful, entertaining or a little of both, you know what to do! This is Caedo Genesis, and may you wander the Commonwealth like you own it!