Settlement Building Tips
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In Fallout 3 ("F3") and Fallout New Vegas ("FNV"), you (should have) started out picking up everything you could to sell for caps. As your level of caps increased, continuing to pick up junk (bottles, books, etc.) worth only 1 cap each was a waste of time and effort, so you probably quit picking up the cheap junk.
In F4, junk can be broken down into its component parts and used to build/modify weapons, armour, and other items. So count on continuing to pick up junk throughout the game, although there will some common, low-value items which you will still leave behind. Even roach meat, as well as meat, hide, teeth, etc. from other critters, can be used at the Chemistry and Cooking stations.
In addition, you get XP for picking up stuff. It is a small amount, but since there is so much stuff to pick up, the XP can gradually add up.
Pick up everything you can on the way out of the vault and scour the area around the vault exit picking up stuff. Cross the bridge into Sanctuary and find the workshop in a carport of one house. The workshop area contains the general workshop bench and a weapons bench. Other work benches/stations can be found around Sanctuary. In the Build mode, they can be moved to the carport where the workshop bench is, or wherever you want.
At any of these stations you can select Transfer and move the junk you have picked up into the workshop so that you will have room to pick up other things. If you have any weapons, armor, food, etc., which you don't need right away, you can also transfer them and retrieve them later.
Weapons do not wear out in F4, so you don't need to use duplicate weapons for repairing other weapons. For now, just transfer them to a workbench. Later you may get the Scrapper perk (INT=5+ required), then in the Weapons workbench you can scrap them and get useful parts out of them. The same is true for excess armor. Alternatively, you can sell/trade them later.
Because many components for building things are so scarce, the components can be worth more than the item you are getting them from. So unless a weapon/armor has a particularly high value, you are probably better off scrapping it. The exception is that if, even with the Scrapper perk, it only breaks down to some common element like steel, then you are better off selling it.
It is probably best to complete the first mission to Concord before trying to build up Sanctuary because some of the people in that mission will come back to Sanctuary with you, giving you some people to assign to tasks, mainly tending crops. Also, you may not have enough supplies to create things you will need to get going until after your first mission and looting experience.
But before starting the mission, you should go through every house in Sanctuary to pick up anything worthwhile. Don't miss the You're Special magazine on the floor of the house across the street from the workshop.
If you come across a locked safe or container which you cannot open, go into the Build mode and scrap it. The contents will appear in the inventory of the settlement's workbenches. For example, if you scrap a safe which has loot in it, the pop-up window will show that you are getting 2 Steel from the safe, but you will also get the contents even though they are not shown.
One of the houses on the east side has a root cellar with the entrance at the back left outside corner of the house. It's the blue house on the left just before you enter the cul-de-sac which has the big tree in the center. The house also has a tree fallen across the back of the house. Go up the tree to the roof for more loot.
The next area after Sanctuary is the Red Rocket. After looting it, don't miss the cavern below it (the entry is around back and down a hill). When you exit the cavern, you can go straight back to the water tower to pick up some loot.
As you head to the water tower, look to your left and see some buildings. Head there after the water tower. After looting the first house, cross the road and circle the town, going into the buildings and picking up whatever goodies you can.
If you cannot Fast Travel ("FT") to a mission destination, you will be walking and probably picking up stuff along the way to the extent that by the time you are ready to start the actual mission, you already are carrying a lot of weight with a lot more to come.
When you approach a named building or area, you will get XP for finding it and will be able to FT to it in the future. So any time you are running out of carry space, you can FT back home, dump all your Junk, excess gear, etc., restock needed supplies, and FT back to the mission site.
Once you are back in Sanctuary and have thoroughly looted it, the first step is to scrap or store everything. To do this, you have to go to the general workshop bench and activate it. After this, you can activate and deactivate the building mode by pressing buttons/keys indicated for your system.
When you look at something which can be used, it will be highlighted. If it is trash, such as a fallen tree or old tires, just scrap it. If it is something which may be useful, such as a bed, or if it is an item which cannot be scrapped, such as a Nuka Cola, use the Store option.
The reason for storing something to use later instead of just breaking it down into its components and using those components to build it again later is that when you scrap something, you don't get all the components which are needed to rebuild it. For example, a basic turret requires steel, gears, and oil, but if you scrap it all you get is steel, yet the gears and oil are much scarcer..
Only things which you can build can be stored for later use in building. For example, you can build a bed, but not a BBQ grill so you cannot store a BBQ grill. You may want to decorate with some things which cannot be stored; if so, you can easily move them wherever you want them by clicking on the item in the Build mode.
F4 Clarification: When you have stored something, such as a bed, then when you need a bed later on, F4 is a little confusing. When you click on bed in the building menu, it will show you the components needed to make a bed (wood, cloth) and you have to click on Build. If you have stored a bed, you will notice that when you click Build, the bed will appear, but the quantities of Wood and Cloth will not decrease. There is no way to display what items are stored as they do not appear in the workshop inventory.
1. You gain XP for building/crafting things. Since you always earn a 10% XP bonus when you are well rested, you should start every building session with an hour nap (or longer if you wish; the bonus does not vary with sleep length). The bonus XP effect lasts for 6 hours (in F4 time), so for long building sessions, you may need to nap again.
One idea is to put a sleeping bag down near the workstation and put a Fast Travel mat (find it in Resources - Misc.) down in front of it. That way, when you leave for supplies or to do missions, then when you come back, you will be reminded to take a short nap before building or crafting.
If you have a supply of Berry Mentats, you can also take them for an XP bonus, though the effect only lasts 8 minutes, so take one before cranking out a lot of items such as beds, walls, turrets, etc. If you get the Chemist perks, the effects of chems last much longer.
Some clothing raises INT, so watch for them.
2. When you are scrapping/storing and come across something you would like to add to your Pip-Boy inventory, you can exit the Building mode, pick up the item, then reactivate the Building mode. But an easier alternative is to Store it and when you are finished your building session, go to a work bench, select transfer, scroll left/right through the categories and find the items you wanted to keep and transfer them over.
3. Scrap all the fences in Sanctuary. They don't do you any good, often get in the way, and are a good source of wood and/or steel. Some people spend a lot of time putting fences around a settlement. It may look good, and if that is your goal and have wood and steel to spare, go ahead, but your first goal after making beds, water pumps, and plants should be to build turrets to raise Defense points. Fences and other barricades do not increase the Defense rating. In fact, attackers can actually materialize inside the fences. The best Defense is to put up lots and lots of turrets in the center of the settlement to kill attackers no matter how they get in.
And before you decide you have wood and steel to spare, keep in mind that Sanctuary has a ton of such scrappable items, but other settlement areas do not, so your "spare" supplies will be needed in those. Also, early in the game you will not have much loot to trade and may need the wood and steel to trade for expensive weapons and ammo. See Getting the Best Weapons in the Game Early.
4. After you start other settlements, you will be able to share any supplies or items which can be used in building or crafting between them. Things which can NOT be used for building/crafting, such as weapons, armor, and ammo, can be transferred into the work benches and retrieved later, but you can only retrieve them in the settlement in which you stored them.
If you store items you have built, such as beds or turrets, you also cannot get them out while in other settlements, even if you are "sharing" with them. If you scrap the same items, the components from them will be shared with other settlements if you have established a trade route (see below).
So if you only need, say, 20 beds in a settlement and accidentally build 30, you may as well scrap the extras because you probably will never be able to use them anywhere otherwise.
5. Scrap all the dog houses in Sanctuary except one, and move that one to the house with the workshop so that if you have to send Dogmeat back to Sanctuary, he will be easy to find, but remember that if you leave him there, he takes up the same resources as the humans and can't do any work.
Look on YouTube to see some amazing settlements people have built, from giant tree houses in Sanctuary to downtown night clubs. These require a lot of supplies and until you amass a fortune in caps or things to trade with vendors, your main sources of supplies will be from scrapping new settlements and picking up junk when you are doing missions or exploring. So the reasonable plan is to start with the basics and get fancy later when you have more assets.
If you really want to get into building fancy settlements (more than you want to do missions), then it makes sense to use mods and cheats to help you since the challenge is in the design, not in finding supplies to use.
Supposedly, the maximum number of settlers you can get in a settlement is 10 plus the number of points you have in Charisma (plus points from any other Charisma-increasing items), of which I have 6. That means that the most I should be able to have is 16, yet I have 17-18 in some settlements, so who knows. There are a lot of mysteries about how things work in F4.
For the sake of discussion, we'll say that that your max is 16, with the understanding that your actual max could be higher or lower. So say your supposed maximum is 16, then you need 16 beds, 16 food units, 16 water units. You should go a little over these numbers in case you get more settlers than the supposed limit.
Defense points should be equal to or greater than the total number of food and water units. This will discourage attacks by Raiders, Super Mutants, etc. Ultimately, your goal should be to reach around 100 Defense points. As noted in the F4 Help system, increasing Defense points increases settler Happiness. If you decide to generate a lot of water for the income, you may need more than 100 Defense. And a couple of settlements are so spread out that it may take more Defense to fully protect them -- anywhere from 150 to 200+.
Having said all that, for many years I took the above advice regarding defense and never had a settlement get attacked... until today (Dec. 2025). I decided to fast travel to Abernathy Farms, which I had built up with the above specs, including a fence around the whole settlement with just one entry on each side.
When I arrived, not expecting any trouble, I heard a lot of noise and got turned in time to see a a bunch of Super Mutants storming through one of the entrances with their hounds, killing some of the main residents.
There was no way they should have gotten past the turrets, so I reloaded a little earlier save, fast traveled to AF, and again arrived just as they came storming through the same gate. Reloaded an even earlier save and the same thing happened. Obviously F4 was just cheating to have them attack just as I got there, whever that was.
So I reloaded to my first fast travel, but knowing what to expect, I quickly turned and killed the Super Mutants as they came through the gate. Meanwhile, settlers had gone out through the gate on the other side and killed all the Super Mutants at the other spawn point. Not a single settler died.
The point is that F4 cheats and the only way to survive it is to cheat back.
Stores also increase happiness. Beds (preferably sleeping bags) should be indoors, or at the least with a roof overhead, but it is just as effective to cram as many beds side-by-side into a room as to give each one its own tricked-out condo.
IMPORTANT: When building up a new settlement, the first thing you should build is a sleeping bag so that you can take a nap for the 10% XP bonus before building everything else. Building generates a constant flow of XP and the 10% bonus really adds up. And don't forget to change into your INT producing clothes and to pop a Berry Mentat each time you are getting ready to crank out a lot of some item (beds, housing, water pumps, crops).
After taking a nap, the first thing you should build is the generator and recruitment beacon so that you can start attracting settlers as soon as possible. If you have a max of 16 settlers, you will want to plant enough to generate 18 food units. Three settlers are needed to tend 18 food units of plants. But if you start putting in plants before you have settlers to tend them, the plants could die.
While waiting for the settlers to show up, you can start building other things.
If your mission was to set up a settlement, building the generator and recruitment beacon completes the mission and you can turn it in. You are not required to build a settlement, though again, doing so generates a lot of XP for you.
Some settlements have ponds or streams inside their boundaries. In such cases, it is possible to put a large water purification system in the water and attach a large generator to it, though using purifiers is not the most economical way to go, as will be seen..
The largest water purifier requires 4 oil, 2 ceramic, 10 rubber, 4 copper, 4 cloth, and 6 screw. For this you get 40 units of water a day. In addition, the purifier requires a generator producing at least 5 units of power, which requires 3 screws, 3 gears, 7 steel, 3 rubber, 3 copper, and 3 ceramic.
So the total items needed for a generator and purifier are
A basic water pump generates 3 units of water per day and requires 1 concrete, 1 gear, and 4 steel.
Thirteen pumps gives you almost the same as the largest purifier for
Concrete and steel are relatively plentiful. As for the gears, a Desk Fan has 2 gears. An Adjustable Wrench has 1 gear. A Typewriter has 3 gears. You can pick up each of these items in every building you enter. They are VERY common.
In contrast, the oil and copper needed to build Purifiers are some of the scarcest supplies in the game and they are better used building Turrets to raise Defense points.
Each settler needs 1 unit of water per day. Excess production shows up as bottles of purified water in the workbench inventories and from there, you can move them to your Pip-Boy inventory to use or sell or to use in crafting valuable items at Cooking stations. Oddly enough, water from basic pumps is just as pure as water from big purifiers. Both generate excess water to use or sell.
So while virtually every F4 video and comment on YouTube talking about generating income says to build Purifiers, you can see that not only is that strategy limited to settlements with ponds or streams within their boundaries, but it is more costly than building pumps.
With corn, tatos, and mutfruits, you can make adhesive at a cooking station ("vegetable starch"). Since adhesive is hard to find and expensive to buy and is used to craft almost all weapon and armor mods, these are the 3 plants that you will want to grow in your settlements.
Unfortunately, you probably will go a while before coming across any corn, so you will have to make do by planting tatos and mutfruits until you get some corn. But if you get just 1 corn, you can plant it, harvest it, and plant more corn. Also, any settlements you go to which are growing food will let you harvest their food, and many grow some corn.
Even Diamond City has a garden from which you can harvest, though it doesn't have corn either. However, if you follow our instructions for getting two of the best weapons in the game very early, you will come across a farm named Graygarden which has tatos, mutfruits, AND corn, and the robots who run the place don't mind your harvesting their crops. And every few days you can fast travel back to harvest more.
One unit of food is required for each settler. So for a max of 16 settlers, plus a couple more just in case, figure on 18 food units. A mutfruit is 1 unit, but tatos and corn are each 1/2 unit, so a total of 6 mutfruit, 12 tato, and 12 corn for a total of 30 plants would be needed which require 5 settlers to tend them.
To start, you may have to plant melons, gourds or other crops to get up to 18, but once you get the Big Three plants, you can remove the others. And while you will want to use some of the crops to make adhesive, you can also plant them to grow more crops.
In Sanctuary, a few plants (melons and gourds) can be found growing behind the workshop house. In order to have everything easily observable, you should move them (in the Build mode) around front and plant them in the grass across the street.
The most efficient way to arrange the beds is to build sleeping bags and put as many in a building as you can. All the other furnishings, including nicer beds, seem to have no impact on Happiness. (I don't know if having a place to sit impacts Happiness, but I hate going to a settlement and seeing 16 people standing around. Since a bench doesn't use many supplies to build, I usually put 3 or 4 where I see people standing.)
Later in the game when you have amassed a larger collections of supplies, you can get fancier if you wish, but earlier on, when you run out of steel for, say, repairing and upgrading your power armor, you will wish you had built simple cloth sleeping bags instead of regular beds which use steel.
Housing is plentiful in Sanctuary, so you don't need to build housing for the beds there, but in other settlements, you will almost always have to, so the rest of this applies to them.
Some people have seen the videos of how the floors with concrete foundations under them are good for patching the walls at The Castle and think that you have to use them to get a level floor on sloped ground. You don't. They are a waste of concrete.
Instead, find the highest land point where you want to build a structure and put a floor section there, then attach the other floor sections to it. They will float off the ground where it slopes down. If you have tons of concrete and think that the concrete foundation looks better than having empty space under the floating floors, then use the concrete foundation, but that is a luxury which you can forgo in early parts of the game.
Other uses for floating floors:
In the Floor section of the Building options, under Wood structures, is a "floor" which has a built-in ladder going to a top floor. Wherever you want a floating floor, build one of those floors first, then start attaching floors to the top of it to create the structure you want. When you are done, you can scrap the starting floor unit with the ladder and you are left with a structure floating in the air.
This can be taken another step. At the top of the floor-ladder unit, just adds some floors where you would like to put turrets, add the turrets, then scrap not only the floor-ladder unit, but all the floors and you are left with turrets floating in the air. This is good for places where you want turrets but no more structures.
The most efficient housing:
The most efficient way to build housing for beds is to use the pre-fab room which has a floor, one wall, and a 2nd-story floor on top. Make a row of such rooms with the wall at the back, then add a wall at each end (though that is not absolutely necessary).
While building fences is a waste of resources, since you have to build the sleeping buildings anyway, you may as well line the back of the row against a settlement border if one is not too far from the center of the settlement and if there is room for them.
This accomplishes two things -- blocks out some attackers (to the extent allowed by F4 which likes to cheat and just have attackers spawn no matter how strong your borders are) and creates a place to put turrets. Just put a ladder up to the roof and build the turrets.
The third advantage of this approach is that since no front walls are put up, you can see the whole row of sleeping bags lining the rooms, making it easier to find someone at night...
That is... if settlers actually go to bed at night. In the old days, I would see a lot of people hitting the sack at night. Now (Dec. 2025) all I see is settlers standing around at night. I've tried assigning them bes, but that is a pain and doesn't seem to help.
When I noticed at Abernathy Farm that all the settlers were standing around inside the farmhouse at night, so during the next day when everyone cleared out, I used the Locksmith mod to lock the door. I left and when I came back, half of the settlers were missing. I unlocked the door and went in to find at least half of the setters inside. F4 cheats!
While trying to do something about the broken down building at Tenpines, I built my usual row of pre-fab rooms side-by-side with their backs to the old building, decked them out with good beds, lights and benches, but while doing this, I noticed that most of the settlers were gathering inside the old broken down building. I give up.
According to the F4 Help section, you only need whatever power is required to run whatever equipment there is in the settlement. Sometimes when in the building mode, the status bar at the top will show power in red, indicating that you do not have enough. This may be a glitch because I have tried adding a lot of big generators and the number stays red no matter how much power is added. So as long as everything has power to it and is running, don't worry about the number being red. However, it is possible for a generator to get damaged in a battle and need to be repaired, so watch out for that.
Copper, needed for generators and for running wire (as of patch 1.3, copper is no longer deducted when running wire), is hard to come by, so think twice before using it to run lights and other non-essentials until you reach a point in the game where you have plenty. While the actual lights do not require wire run to them, they do require running wire to at least one unit to power the lights.
I have plenty of settlements which have only 3 units of electricity and few or no lights and they do fine in terms of number of settlers and having a high Happiness rating.
Just like with Water, the smallest machine gun turret gives the most bang (literally) for the buck (or components) invested in Defense. You can have wall-to-wall machine gun turrets for less than a few missile turrets.
Some people spend a lot of time and resources building walls around settlements. Three things are wrong with this approach:
If, instead, you reach the goal of having 80+ defensive points in each settlement, not only will you have few if any attackers, but you will have a ton of turrets to quickly kill the attackers, and settlers will be happier.
Most settlements have good line-of-sight from one side of the settlement to the other, meaning that turrets on one side can help against an invasion on the other side. A possible exception is Jamaica Plain, which has a large house in the center, which means that each weak point in the perimeter must be guarded separately and where in most places there isn't much room for attackers to spawn between the perimeter and the house.
In those places, it makes more sense to wall up vulnerable spots in the perimeter.
Guard Stations add points to Defense, but only when a settler is assigned to them. Unlike a turret, a Guard Station itself is not going to kill an attacker. It's the settler and his gun which will do that. If you have ever been in a settlement when it is attacked, you will see that everyone drops whatever they are doing and grabs a gun to go after the attackers, usually running right past the guard stations, so I rarely build guard stations.
One way to increase security, even though it won't raise Defense points, is to give more powerful weapons to settlers. For example, if you have a spare missile launcher, transfer it to a settler with a Trade and give him 1 piece of ammo for it (which will spawn more ammo indefinitely). After transferring it to him, be sure to go into his inventory menu and equip it for him.
Sanctuary is large and can be attacked from many directions. One solution is to group everything in the center of town between the workbench house and the house across the street, except for water pumps which can be put around back since they don't need tending.
Crops can be planted in the grass across the street from the workbench house.
Eighteen sleeping bags can be put into the workbench house.
A single wooden floor-and-top-floor structure with no walls can be put in the street between the two houses. Line the top of the structure with as many turrets as will fit and a sofa and chairs on the floor of the structure where people can lounge. (As a side benefit, Trashcan Carla - discussed below - usually waits there.)
Additional turrets can be placed on the street a few houses down on either side of the central turret structure. With Food and Water ratings of 18 points each, Defense points of at least 36 is enough to discourage attacks, with the more Defense points the better. My goal is always to get around 100. Some settlements have 150+.
Which Turrets to use:
Components required for machine gun turrets and a missile turret:
| Basic | Heavy | Missile | |
| Steel | 8 | 10 | - |
| Aluminum | - | - | 6 |
| Circuit | 1 | 2 | 6 |
| Gear | 2 | 2 | 5 |
| Oil | 2 | 4 | 6 |
| Screw | - | - | 5 |
You can add 40 to Defense with 8 basic turrets or 5 heavy with the following total components:
| Basic | Heavy | |
| Steel | 64 | 50 |
| Circuit | 8 | 10 |
| Gear | 16 | 10 |
| Oil | 16 | 20 |
For the same 40 points of Defense, the Heavy turret requires 25% more Oil and 25% more Circuits, which are the scarcest components in the lists. (Gears can be found in common items such as Fans.)
You can add 60 to Defense with 12 basic turrets or 4 missile turrets:
| Basic | Missile | |
| Steel | 96 | - |
| Aluminum | - | 24 |
| Circuit | 12 | 24 |
| Gear | 24 | 20 |
| Oil | 24 | 24 |
| Screw | - | 20 |
While the basic machine gun turret uses 96 steel versus 24 aluminum for the missile turret, aluminum is much scarcer. The biggest difference is that the missile turret uses twice as many Circuits. The four missile turrets require a Medium Generator which require 3 screw, 3 gear, 7 steel, 3 rubber, 3 copper, 1 ceramic. More copper is needed to attach each turret to the generator. The basic turret doesn't require power.
Instead of running wire from the generator to each turret, you can save copper by stringing the wire from one turret to the next, but if the first turret is damaged in an attack, those following it will lose power and not work. Also, if the generator is damaged, none of the turrets will work.
The bottom line is that like with water producers, generators, etc., the most basic item needed to produce the same effect as more advanced units is the cheapest way to go in terms of scarce components. While a Missile Turret seems sexier, the Damage total for some number of basic machine gun turrets has the same killing effect as the same Damage total for missile turrets, just like 40 units of water production from basic pumps provides the same excess purified water as from the largest Industrial Purifier.
Be sure to see how to create floating turrets in a previous section.
The Size Limit:
If you build a lot of water pumps in order to generate excess water to use/sell/trade, then you also have to build more turrets to defend them. Or in some large, spread-out settlements like The Castle, you may simply have to build a lot of turrets and walls to adequately defend the settlement.
Either way, when the Size bar at the top right of the Build screen gets full, you will be told that you cannot build anything else in that settlement.
See the Exploits page for a way to circumvent this and build more.
Stores require caps to create, as well as the usual building supplies. You also need Local Leader 2. Stores earn profits/caps which appear in the stores' settlement's workshop inventory when you select Exchange. Profits are based on the number of settlers in the settlement.
Obviously, you will not be able to create stores right away, but when you can, there a couple of things to know.
If you have, say, 10 people in a settlement and you have planted 18 food units, only 3-5 settlers are needed to tend crops, as seen above. One settler is needed to establish a trade route (see below). In Sanctuary, a couple of NPCs have come along who won't work and you can't get rid of them, but in most places, out of 10 people, you will have at 4-6 people to tend stores.
This is handy because there are 6 types of stores. The more advanced (and costly) the type of store you build, the better and rarer gear they will carry (which you can buy) and the more money they will make for you. It is also handy to have stores nearby to which you can sell excess gear and from which you can buy needed supplies.
The first type of store to build should be the highest level of General store you can. The General store is the only one which has Junk in its inventory, as well as every other category of inventory. A Weapons store is also handy for buying ammo when you run low.
It does no good to have more than 1 store of any one type in the same settlement. For example, if you have two General stores and get all of the cash one has by selling it excess gear you have picked up, then if you immediately go to the 2nd store, it will also be out of cash, even if you checked beforehand and it had its full allotment of cash.
Likewise, if you buy all of one type of Junk from one General store, then the second General store will also be out of the same junk. With this being the case, it would seem that two stores of the same type cannot sell any more in total than just one store could, yet it cost quite a bit to create each store.
If a store has run out of cash when you are selling to them, they will replenish cash and supplies if you sleep or wait for 48 hours. You can also travel to shop from stores in other settlements and from unaffiliated vendors in other areas such as Drumlin Diner and Diamond City, as well as the roaming Trashcan Carla, though each of these (individually) also takes 48 hours to replenish after being depleted of cash and/or specific items.
Is building stores worth it? -- I don't think so. While it may be handy to have stores near where you live, a better solution is to live (or at least frequently visit) where there are stores. The reason is that the stores you build will have very little cash compared to the merchants in Diamond City. While you can get a home site in or near Diamond City, you can also just live in Sanctuary or Red Rocket and fast travel to Diamond City and/or Goodneighbor after a mission to sell loot and buy supplies.
While you make money from stores you have built, you also have to invest a lot of money to build them. If instead you build Scavenger stations, they cost very little in terms of steel and wood needed to build them, they keep settlers busy and thus happier, and they also make money for you from the items which they put into your Workshop inventory which you can take out and use or sell.
Settlers will tend crops without being assigned (as long as you don't have excessive crops), though it is possible to assign settlers to specific crops. However, other things, such as stores and artillery units, must have settlers assigned to them.
To do this, highlight a settler in the build mode, select Go, then go over to the store and click Assign. The person will shortly wander over to the store and be ready to deal.
Patch 1.3 update added a feature where in the Build mode, when you point at a settler, it will show what s/he is assigned to do and says "unassigned" if that is the case.
The number of settlers you can have in a settlement is 10 + your Charisma level, which is 6 for me. So when I look at my list of settlements, they all show 16. For tending crops, I assign 6, then five for scavenger stations and five for stores. If you can't make stores yet, then you don't have much choice but to assign 10 to scavenger stations.
If you have started a new settlement somewhere else and it needs more settlers, you can always send some of your excess settlers to the new settlement.
Keeping track of settlers and jobs: I outfit settlers with clothes which reflect their jobs:
Cleaning out the Workbench: I build a trunk to leave near the workbench. I visit each settlement every couple of days and empty their workbench into my backpack, then I transfer that into the trunk except for any good stuff that I want to keep to sell or use.
There are caps on how much surplus food, water, cash from stores, etc., workbenches allow. If those caps are hit, the workers quit working. However, even after clearing out the workbench, I see settlers wandering around instead of working, so who knows.
Once you get to higher levels and have amassed more supplies and caps, you may want to go back and enhance your settlements.
My home base was the workbench carport in Sanctuary. I put the Fast Travel mat there and a sleeping bag in front of it so that I would remember to nap before doing anything in order to get the XP bonus.
I finally got tired of settlers being in my sleeping bag and hogging the work benches, so I decided to build a private house on a slab where I had scrapped a whole house. You can see it here.
The bed hogs can be more easily handled by assigning them to their own beds.
Just after you cross the bridge out of Sanctuary, you will run into the Red Rocket Truck Stop. It has a workbench. Any place with a workbench can be turned into a settlement after you get rid of all the critters and other enemies, though you should wait until Sanctuary is established first.
When you complete the first mission, some people will come back to Sanctuary, and having people to help will make it easier to get things going in Sanctuary. When you have attracted enough people to tend crops with a couple of people extra, then you can develop other settlements.
When creating additional settlements, you may not have scrapped enough materials to build everything you need. Here is a list of supplies needed in a Settlement Building Kit to build all the necessities. Once that is done, you can bring back to your home base everything left in the settlement's workshop inventory. The link just given explains more.
If you prefer to establish trade routes, here's how:
Again, if Sanctuary still only has the original 4 settlers plus ones who are tending crops, you will have to wait for more to come in before you send a settler out to establish a supply route for sharing supplies.
To create a trade route, go into the build mode, highlight a settler, and click on Supply Line. This settler becomes labeled as a Provisioner. (Most of the people you see walking around with pack-brahmins are provisioners, not traders, and won't sell their supplies.)
By the time you travel back to the new settlement, the things you scrapped there will have been added to the supplies from other settlement(s) and shown when you try to Build or Craft something, even though the shared items do not appear in the new settlement's workshop inventory.
Notice that this also applies to Crafting something for which you do not have the ingredients with you. As long as another workbench in the sharing network has what you need, you can craft the item. Same for repairing or upgrading weapons and armor, including sharing Mods, and planting crops
If you are upgrading a weapon or armor and have a Mod available in inventory for the upgrade, F4 still shows the components needed to build it and you have to click Build. The only way you know that it used a Mod instead of building it is that the amount of components doesn't change after you click Build.
Unfortunately, if you are in the Build mode and Store an item rather than Scrapping it, the item cannot be shared; it can only be used in the settlement in which it was Stored.
Personally, I prefer to take everything back to my home base's Workshop.
Sending multiple Provisioners from the same settlement:
A Provisioner is still counted as a member of the settlement from which he originated, and since there is a limit on how many settlers one settlement can have, you do not want to send all the Provisioners from the same settlement or you won't be left with enough settlers to tend stores and crops.
Instead, start by sending one settler/Provisioner from Sanctuary to Red Rocket, but for the next settlement, such as Ten Pines, send one from Red Rocket, then for the next settlement, send one from Ten Pines, etc.
Say that Ten Pines doesn't have a settler to spare to send as a Provisioner. You can go back to an earlier settlement which has some spare settlers, such as Red Rocket or Sanctuary, Move a settler from there to Ten Pines, then go to Ten Pines and establish the trade link to the new settlement.
This is a bit of trouble, but it pays off the in the long run by assuring that no settlement has more than 1 Provisioner in its count of settlers.
Again, it is not that big a deal to carry needed supplies to other settlements and you don't need the Local Leader perks.
Checking on settlements:
Once you have a bunch of settlements set up with stores or scavenger stations in them, you will want to pick a time between missions to do the circuit and visit each settlement to pick up any caps (from store profits) and excess food and water. If you have scavenger stations, you need to pick up all of each settlement's Junk or they may quit producing more.
At the same time, you may need to repair turrets and other items if there has been an attack. This is done in the Build mode when you look at an item needing repair.
Players have reported that your presence in a settlement increases Happiness, which may be considered another reason to make the rounds.
Locating Settlements on the Map:
When you want to travel to a settlement you have already built, the easiest way to find it on the map is to go to the Data tab in Pip-Boy, highlight the settlement's name, and press the reload button (X on the Xbox).
Everything is a lot more expensive in F4 than in earlier Fallout games. On the plus side, if you have put 6 points into Charisma and have gotten the Cap Collector perk(s) in order to more easily/better develop settlements, that will also bring the cost of items down and increase the caps you get when selling. See Increasing SPECIALs for more tips.
The Scrounger perk is also useful as it is far better to find more ammo than to have to have to buy it. At the start of a game, I always get a weapon which uses a lot of .45 ammo. When I didn't get Scrounger, I was constantly having to buy .45 ammo to have 1000-2000 rounds that I needed to carry. In the current game, I got the first 2 levels of Scrounger and not only have 3000+ rounds most of the time, but a lot of other ammo which I can trade for .45 ammo and other items.
Some people like the Scrapper perk (under Intelligence) which lets you get scarce components such as screws, copper, and aluminum when you scrap weapons and armor. On the other hand, you may be able to sell unwanted weapons and armor and buy even more screws, copper, etc. But if you reach a level for which you don't have a Perk you need, you could do worse then the Scrapper perk. (See Perks.)
One easy source of items to trade is to produce and sell excess water. Since pumps don't need to be tended (like crops), they do not use up any human resources. Since each settler only needs 1 unit of water a day, anything in excess of that will show up in the workbenches (in the same settlement as the pumps) as bottles of purified water.
As noted earlier, some people assume that a big, costly-to-build water purifier and accompanying generator are required to produce purified water when, in fact, simple, inexpensive pumps are just as good. All excess water is stored as "purified water", no matter what the source.
A pump only requires concrete, steel, and a gear. The gear is the scarcest of the three, but isn't really that hard to find. Just start building pumps and when you run out of some component, mark that component (most likely gears) as something to look for. Then when you loot/shop, things with that component will be marked with a symbol. One of the early missions is at Corvega which is a good source for gears.
Build as many pumps as you can. Stories are told online of people financing their whole war effort in F4 by selling excess bottles of purified water. But remember that Defense points must be kept higher than the total of Water and Food to discourage attackers. I usually get 60 Water and 18 Food and 100 Defense because the higher the Defense, the higher is settler Happiness (see the F4 Help system).
While you can install excess pumps in all your settlements, the excess water from them will only show up in the workstation of that settlement and you have to make a trip to get it. (Although it can be used for crafting/cooking in other settlements.) But it is a good idea to make the rounds in your settlements to pick up cash earned from stores, excess crops, etc., so you may as well get the water at the same time.
When doing a mission or exploring, I pick up absolutely everything Dogmeat and I can carry.
When developing settlements, you will need to build lots of turrets, all of which require oil, as do many other important items. So be sure to mark it as something to look for when looting.
Some vendors (but not those in Stores you build) have Shipments in their inventory where you can buy something like oil in bulk, but at a very high price per unit. But if you need a lot of oil to build turrets, for example, it will be hard to get the amount you need by buying/finding junk items with oil in them.
Most general vendors will have some items in their Junk inventory which have oil in them. Look for the cheapest item. For example, a gold Flip Lighter has oil, but it also is made of gold and sells for 49 caps (with CHR=6 and Cap Collector perks). A bar of soap is 9 caps (or less) and has the same 1 unit of oil. A used oil can is probably the cheapest item you can buy with oil.
You can get these prices down further by wearing and eating specific items which affect Charisma in general or Bartering in particular. Commonly found items with Charisma benefits include suits (2 CHR), hats (1), some glasses (1), and most alcoholic drinks (1). Just those five items will bring prices down by 33%, such as from 900 caps to about 600. And the benefit is even greater when you are selling, since a 600 cap item increases to 900, which is a 50% increase.
Grape Mentats gets you 10% better prices when bartering, If you have CHR of 6 or more and have +4 from CHR-increasing apparel, then taking a Grape Mentat gets you the best prices you can get. That is, no other CHR-increasing items, drinks or drugs taken at the same time will get you any better prices.
Day Tripper temporarily increases Charisma by 3. It is also a drug, but it cannot be crafted and is fairly scarce. Here are some known locations.
At the Longneck Lukowski's Cannery, you can find a Barter Bobblehead plus a Junktown Jerky Vendor magazine side-by-side, bringing prices down even further.
Here's a printable list of some vendors and what shipments they have.
A good general approach to using vendors:
1. When doing a mission or exploring, pick up everything you and Dogmeat can carry. If you can't carry anymore, you can either follow the rest of these steps to unload what you have and then come back, or start dumping items that have a high ratio of gear's weight to value. Regular armor is usually the first place to look.
2. Fast travel home:
3. Fast travel to Diamond City or any other place with vendors:
Sell or trade ammo as a last resort, since it is weightless. Same goes for pre-war cash.
When you dump all your Junk into a Workbench, check for valuable items (worth 20+ caps) which will get broken down into low-cost components. Instead, sell them. Also make sure you don't Junk pre-war cash which gets broken down into paper.
You can build a cabinet to store such items and before you dump Junk into the workbench, go through it and transfer items to keep into the cabinet. Then when Trashcan Carla comes around or you know you are going to a merchant, get them back out.