Ranking Every Settlement Location In Fallout 4

hey folks, this is a re-upload, the backing soundtrack was flagged for copyright, which is wierd because I've used it several times before with no issues, and all of the checks after upload checked out, but that's youtube for you. it also gave me a chance to make a few minor corrections.

My only complaint of F4 for Settlement building is the inability to clean up areas. From a lore perspective, people want to clean their living space. Even in a future dystopian post apocalypse people will inherently desire to remove garbage from their homes! 🤦‍♂️

I would have LOVED if settlement mode allowed you to repair structures that you couldn’t scrap. Even if they looked a little mismatched or scruffy, it would have been amazing to restore roofs, walls, and flat floors!

I always ranked the Red Rocket gas station pretty high just because it's so cozy and it's like a 'no Preston's allowed' club where I can just chill and let the jukebox play.

i wish we have more prebuilt houses (the ones we can build) that didn't look like they could colapse at any time

It's kind of an interesting design choice to make everything half destroyed, but then to make it invulnerable.

I discovered that scraping mods bring problems of their own. Some places don’t have a collision mesh under the junk. Also scraping normally unscrapable structures doesn’t necessarily get rid of npc interaction markers. I once scraped the stilted building in hangman’s alley. I returned to find a settler five feet above the ground hammering a wall that no longer existed. 😅

Theres something ridiculously funny about the pathing of the settlers to go around in circles and not interact with anything in the settlement but somehow manage to walk around the rooftops

I've had a permanent glitch where the Fogcrawler at Dalton Farm is invincible and cannot be killed no matter what I try (even console commands, it still respawns whenever I return). It just adds to the fun of the settlement as I've had to restrict access to the ground floor for settlers. They pass the time listening to the permanent sound of dozens of turrets opening up on the crawler while they go about their business.

An important tip i learned too late, and caused me to go back and re-do settlements: If you have to kill people or creatures to obtain the settlement, do NOT engage the workshop once you've cleared the settlement, until AFTER you have left the area, and stayed away for 2 in-game weeks. That will allow the dead creatures to disappear. This only works for the ones you've killed, not for dead bodies baked into the terrain. But it does work, as it was the only thing that eliminated things like the dead mole rats from Starlight Drive-In.

I just wish more settlements could be established in the vanilla game. Many locations have great potential. Also the build ceiling in most settlements causes some eye twitch...

Watching this video made me realize exactly how dependent I am on mods. I like a lot of the bad settlements you listed and it's all because I have a mod that lets me scrap way more stuff.

You can get the lighthouse to shine if you wire up to the top

Just to add flavor. The battle of Bunker Hill was fought from Breeds Hill. The British from boston wanted Bunker Hill for high ground placement of armies and artillery. The patriots found out and loaded Breeds Hill with militiamen. The men on Breeds Hill were able to hold the British at bay till their ammo ran dry. The British, while technically winning by taking the hills after patriots could no longer fight, actually lost about 4 times as many men as the patriots did.

As an avid hangman's ally user; i see the error's in my way, but i refuse to change. Thank you

The mechanist’s layer has one purpose, it’s a really good settlement to make your “logistics hub” as it’s literally a settlement that you can just forget about and not have to walk in on only to find the place crowded by settlers assigned to resource transportation. If you really want to, you can also decorate the place to make it feel like a professional logistics hub and not like just a place to dump your settlers assigned to logistics.

I always build the castle. I think it works nicely trying to cram everything in the middle and growing crops on top

I’ve found that there’s functionality 3 types of settlements that exist in the game, and this has really colored my experience in both how I build and how favorable I am to certain places since what might be bad at one thing is perfect for another. The big three types are, safe house, settlement, and NPC home. Also should be stated I play in almost entirely in survival mode so take what with a grain of salt since I am playing a different game to the standard play through. For safe houses you have things like Hangman’s Alley, Jamaica Plains, and RedRocket. They are more designed to be rest stops for refilling needed resources, and dumping inventory as well as a safe and sanitary place to save. They are also never supposed to support more than say 1-2 people at any given time since the place is really only suppose to support the player with what they need, and not sustain a village. For these places it’s almost more important where they are than what they have. This is crucial for the vast majority of the game until you get to later stages where you have enough vertabirds grenades to consistently take you places. This is why hangman’s alley is so beloved. It is in the perfect location with the only problem being the vertabird drop point being on a random encounter. Also a settlement like Summerville Place works really well in this light since it’s the perfect rest stop before the glowing sea. Settlements are exactly that. Places like Sanctuary, the Slog, and Starlight Drive In where they are just a place for a village. They are exactly what people imagine when talking about settlement building so I don’t need to say anything else. Finally we have NPC homes. Places like Finch Farm, Grey Garden, and Abernathy Farm. Though these can be perfect examples of the above mentioned types. I find they’re main point of existence is to be the quest they have with just the reward being that you get a settlement, and sometimes a settlement with a quirk like grey garden. Not much to say, but I personally try to leave them more or less as intended, and just let them be what they were. There’s no reason in my mind to build here since these aren’t really my places.

Hangman's Alley is one of my most frequently used settlements because of its location. My main home is either Red Rocket or Sanctuary Hills but they're miles away from everything else

You can also unlock Warwick immediately by going to the atom cats and doing the chores they have for you.