whats the best place to set up my settlement

[natemilligan108]

Like the title says what the best place to build my settlement on, also can i recruit an entire settlement or do i only get one i feel bad taking one away, does the whole settlement go away if i get one like sod2?

[SteeamRentShop]

1. If we're talking about a permanent base then for me it's a place that have any kind of natural border on at least one of its side, like map edge, map corners or on some rare occasion a hill that have one or two of its sides impassable.

2. Yes, you can recruit an entire settlement by using different recruiters to circumvent the negative opinion mallus. Some people that's close relative to its leader won't leave "normally" though.

3. The whole settlement won't go away if you nab one of its people, unless that guy is the last remaining guy in that community.

[Albert the Handsome (Not)]

Just make sure the area you are in has lots of building space, trees, and rivers. Don't camp near towns cuz lots of zombies... I mean infected.

[sorrynameused]

I like to build in the dead center of the map so that I have equal access to all corners/sides of the map without having to travel across the whole thing.

I restart/refresh the map until I get a somewhat decent center map area, ideally a flat open space near a creek so that I don't have to build a well right away and I can see enemies coming from all directions, plus a flat space is just a nicer aesthetic to build on generally, bonus if there's a forest nearby for hunting wildlife/chopping wood.

My build always starts with a small basic camp, with a tent or shack, a campfire, a well, a toilet, and a ideally a wire fence around it (you can shoot enemies through the fence with arrows). I will then just build adjoining areas to that camp once I get more crafting materials, generally cabins and barns for storage, crafting buildings, and another barn with a small farm and another well for convenience. I then work on building more wire fences around that and will stick a basic watchtower in the outermost corners. Note that the buildings will act as obstacles so you don't have to build the whole fence all at once. As I advance, i build a perimeter fence with watchtowers, the purpose of this is to keep looters out of range for throwing Molotov cocktails at my barns/farms/animals/people. The extra building space near the edge of the perimeter is useful for farmland, kilns, mines, but I keep my storage buildings with valuables closer to the center and camp area (which has the most traffic due to the campfires and therefore the most amount of people to defend it), though I don't think looters really try to damage buildings, it always seems like their molotovs are just aimed at me.

You will find settlements with communities of looters that you can kill but it will take some building resources to renovate/claim ownership of existing structures, you can just take ownership of the gates to start though. If you leave the settlement untouched, there's a good chance a random refugee/raider group will claim it and start a new small community.

[sorrynameused]

Also you can always choose to abandon buildings and settlements that you don't want to use/maintain, this will leave them available for roaming npcs (refugees/raiders) to claim so claiming a settlement is not permanent if you don't want it to be. :)