To all the builders: Greentop.

[Draughir]

Is it just me or is Greentop one of the hardest settlements to do anything with? (No mods, just the workshop/automatron DLCs). Ten Pines and Taffington are up there too.

If any of you have managed to do something decent with it, I'd love to see pics for ideas.

[Shellbie]

Enjoy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wml15wujqBA

[Nite69]

Use Concrete or Shack floors, You can build a good size long double floor (maybe even 3 floor?) building along the east side of the greenhouse since that area is not even ground

Taffington Boathouse you have plenty of room, build some shack floors along the top of the water section

Tenpines Bluff, same as Greentop Nursery, use Concrete or Shack floors in the uneven areas

[DrNewcenstein]

At first I was obsessed with putting walls around open settlements like County Crossing and Greentop so I could control the flow of traffic and set up defenses, but when I saw Gunners spawning inside my walls, I put more resources into turrets.
Dwellings get turrets on the roof at the corners and middles.

As was stated, go Up as often as you can. I use the wooden Shack Floor with the pillars on uneven ground. The concrete's nice and all, but I prefer the stuff on stilts.

I made my own settlement cleanup mods where the junk gets cleared away, especially the old house at Coastal Cottage and the excess houses in Sanctuary (everything except the Player's original home and the one where the bunch from Concord end up). I build a Clinic on one slab, a Trader on another, a Clothing store on another, and an Armory and a Gun Shop and an Inn/Tavern (booze on the bottom, beds on top), and still have room for a 3-story all steel Power Armor mini-storage AND at least one empty slab.

Taffington is annoying but can be done if you're slow and methodical. It fills up quick, though.

Nordhagen is easy - beachfront Hotels!

Covenant I just ignore. Short ceiling, can't replace the original turrets, settlers won't claim the Owned beds, and you can't clear out the chick's store to put your own in. Not to mention the skimpy front yard. My mod expanded that to cover half the road, at least, so I could build a shelter for the caravan.

Murkwater is tricky, especially on Defense.

Croup Manor is do-able, but you gotta get rid of the dead Ghouls.

Bunker Hill is limiting.

Oberland is small, but again, going vertical is best.

Finch actually includes the overpass above it, but you do need the elevators from Workshop to get there. Staircases up that high is just asking for suicidal settlers.

Worst one is probably still the Mechanist's Lair, though.

Boston Airport relies heavily on Supply Lines from other settlements. You also have to maintain the surrounding areas to keep the roads safe.

Hangman's Alley is all vertical. Bottom is crops, merchants, and a Bar, 2nd and 3rd levels are living quarters.

Sunshine Tidings is pretty easy, but it has a small budget. Need the exploit of dropping heavy weapons and picking them up in Workshop mode to clear it out some.

Abernathy is ideal, though; plenty of land.

However, what I found that did work out well was that if it had a Farm map marker, like Abernathy, Finch, Greentop, and Greygarden, I make them farms and run Supply Lines to settlments that have the tents or other non-farm map markers. This means you don't have to have 4 people on 6 Mutfruit rows each to feed 20+ people at Hangman's Alley, and can have more room for living space.
That worked out pretty well, especially with the Minutemen built up to the point you're seeing regular patrols and checkpoints on the roads.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

Croup Manor is do-able, but you gotta get rid of the dead Ghouls.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=734199461

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=734199270

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

Taffington is annoying but can be done if you're slow and methodical. It fills up quick, though.

I did a boathouse/restaurant/hotel like it was sitting on the docks. However ran into issue that NPCs working at stores above water do not function to talk to.

[DouglasGrave]

Covenant was the only one where I found I couldn't do much of anything; I installed a few extra turrets (and replaced the originals back when you could still do that), and built some platforms along a few walls so that I could run up and shoot at attackers, but it's hard to add anything useful.

Sanctuary, surprisingly, is the main one that I haven't bothered with all that much. It's huge and spread out, but full of unscrappable buildings. I only recently bothered to go back and stick in some parts to patch up all those horrible buildings. They're just not fun to work on, especially when you have to do it all over again for each building.

I've surrounded pretty much every location with massive concrete walls, which I like even if they don't offer perfect protection against attacks (but they can still do pretty well if you position them correctly). One of the few settlements that doesn't have them is Finch Farm, since I decided that I'd prefer to put everything up on the overpass where no-one could shoot it.

[Dimathiel]

You can "pretend" the greenhouse wasn't there and build a platform on top of it on stilts then build whatever you want on said platform

[Shahadem]

Greentop is super easy. The one that annoys me is the one that is situated in the middle of ghoul town and 1/3 of the space is taken up by a house you can't enter. Whose idea was that? It was a terrible decision.

[sdack]

Originally posted by Shahadem:

Greentop is super easy. The one that annoys me is the one that is situated in the middle of ghoul town and 1/3 of the space is taken up by a house you can't enter. Whose idea was that? It was a terrible decision.

While I could agree with you do I think that each settlement provides a different challenge. It's actually not unrealistic having to work with preset conditions that sometimes can be unbearable. It's the genius who then can make it happen against all odds.

You have super easy settlements with lots of space to waste, with settlers already in it and most resources. Others are definitely more challenging. It is a whole new way of fun and far from using a pickaxe to dig for diamonds for instance. It makes the game last so much longer.

Imagine what it would be like if you were always given an empty canvas. It would always be a quick and easy task, but also uneventful, not challenging, possibly even become repetitive and ultimately not much worth remembering. It's one of the things that makes it an adult game.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Shahadem:

Greentop is super easy. The one that annoys me is the one that is situated in the middle of ghoul town and 1/3 of the space is taken up by a house you can't enter. Whose idea was that? It was a terrible decision.

Jamaica Plain? It's not as bad as it seems if you fix up the main building around the workshop. It's not very tall, but you've got a decent patch of land for a farming section next to that unremovable building, and I even managed to stick a nice multi-turret emplacement on the roof. I've currently got about 23 synth settlers in there (culled from my other settlements).

Fun fact: If you've got the church door open, it's possible to run out of the settlement zone, grab the campfire cooking station in the church, and place it back inside the settlement before the building mode times out.

[sdack]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

Fun fact: If you've got the church door open, it's possible to run out of the settlement zone, grab the campfire cooking station in the church, and place it back inside the settlement before the building mode times out.

*lol* Awesome!

[JOW]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

Fun fact: If you've got the church door open, it's possible to run out of the settlement zone, grab the campfire cooking station in the church, and place it back inside the settlement before the building mode times out.

Of course you know that a big bunch of us now will not rest until we have done that :)

I have a fun fact that I just discovered this time through. You can have a 'dead body leaf blower' that blows dead bodies out of your settlements. The thing even blew the dead Mirelurk queen out of Mukrkwater. It's Lorenzos's Artifact gun that you get doing the Cabot House quest.

I have always ignored it before because it has no scope or proper sights to aim with but this time I modified it at a crafting station to have more range and power and I discovered this use for it.

[litbolt]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

Fun fact: If you've got the church door open, it's possible to run out of the settlement zone, grab the campfire cooking station in the church, and place it back inside the settlement before the building mode times out.

That's really funny, I'll have to try that.

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

Jamaica Plain? It's not as bad as it seems if you fix up the main building around the workshop. It's not very tall, but you've got a decent patch of land for a farming section next to that unremovable building, and I even managed to stick a nice multi-turret emplacement on the roof. I've currently got about 23 synth settlers in there (culled from my other settlements).

I got tired of the uneven ground and made a floating settlement out of barn parts; I don't use any of the existing buildings. I'm on survival and Jamaica Plain is my home base for the south part of the map. Only problem is that I maxed out the build size and have to scrap junk every time I want to add something. I managed to get defences, food, water, beds and stores set up before that happened though.

[DrNewcenstein]

The arguments of realism and challenge with regards to building a settlement are invalidated when you're faced with a building that, in real life, you'd easily be able to dismantle and salvage, especially one made of wood. Even if you didn't have rudimentary construction skills, setting a wood house on fire will remove it, as will a few explosives.

And then you run across that neighborhood where most of the houses are intact but boarded up, and you somehow are unable to knock the boards off the doorways.


Sanctuary actually does have anough open space between the unscrappable houses that you can build new houses, but it's just so much better when you can remove them and have those bare foundations. You get so many more options, and it's 100% realistic to be able to do that. Communities do it all the time when tornadoes decimate a town. They clear the rubble and rebuild, so Bethesda's decision to not let you do that makes no sense.

[sdack]

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

The arguments of realism and challenge with regards to building a settlement are invalidated when you're faced with a building that, in real life, you'd easily be able to dismantle and salvage, especially one made of wood. ...

No. The point is that one in real life can face challenges that are impossible to overcome. If that's an old building, which you're not allowed to tear down because it's now a memorial, or if you have a height limit for your street. Even building into the ground can require permission and you may not be allowed to go to a certain depth (big issues with rich people in London who want their basement pools...).

Learning to deal with such challenges is the lesson here.

[Draughir]

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

The arguments of realism and challenge with regards to building a settlement are invalidated when you're faced with a building that, in real life, you'd easily be able to dismantle and salvage, especially one made of wood. Even if you didn't have rudimentary construction skills, setting a wood house on fire will remove it, as will a few explosives.

And then you run across that neighborhood where most of the houses are intact but boarded up, and you somehow are unable to knock the boards off the doorways.


Sanctuary actually does have anough open space between the unscrappable houses that you can build new houses, but it's just so much better when you can remove them and have those bare foundations. You get so many more options, and it's 100% realistic to be able to do that. Communities do it all the time when tornadoes decimate a town. They clear the rubble and rebuild, so Bethesda's decision to not let you do that makes no sense.

Originally posted by sdack:

Originally posted by DrNewcenstein:

The arguments of realism and challenge with regards to building a settlement are invalidated when you're faced with a building that, in real life, you'd easily be able to dismantle and salvage, especially one made of wood. ...

No. The point is that one in real life can face challenges that are impossible to overcome. If that's an old building, which you're not allowed to tear down because it's now a memorial, or if you have a height limit for your street. Even building into the ground can require permission and you may not be allowed to go to a certain depth (big issues with rich people in London who want their basement pools...).

Learning to deal with such challenges is the lesson here.

Both are true. My biggest gripe in the midst of this argument is the inability to remove piles and piles of garbage, or clear the brush. You can scrap entire cars, but; gee, here's a piece of plywood. It is apparently glued to the ground. Gee here's a pile of trash. Nope, that's glued to the ground too. You would think that after food, water, and shelter; that clean up would be a priority. Even if it just vanishes over time, like the settlers are doing something other than hammering the same piece of wall for days, opening every door and gate in the village and stealing my stuff.

You can build mass production components, robots, automated laser turrets, fusion generators that run off a device the size of a coffee can, and terminals to control all of that; but can't remove a pile of trash, or patch a roof. Or drill a hole in a wall to run a wire.(I know the wires through walls glitch fixes that, but it shouldn't be a glitch)