Building in FO4 is Terrible

[maestro]

Just as the title says.

Sometimes you can clip stuff into terrain... sometimes you can't. It seems to be completely arbitrary whether or not something will clip. Sometimes you can put 90% of a piece of floor or wall into terrain, other times it shows red if it's just barely touching a terrain piece.

Like, for example, Hangman's Alley. I don't know who thought it'd be a good idea to make a tiny cramped space into a settlement, but trying to build anything in there is a nightmare with all the tall buildings everywhere making it hard to place more than a few one-square buildings in there.

And then there's the snapping. So you build some floor and you attach a wall, or two, and then suddenly it wants to snap everywhere EXCEPT where you want it to and it takes some serious finangaling to actually try to get it to snap to the correct position you want it to snap to.

And then there's how the game gets picky about what will snap to what... for example, you can build walls and try to build thin floors ontop of those walls... nope, it's gotta be "upper floor" which is way thicker and more difficult to clip into terrain. Or you could build the roof tiles... oh wait, walls won't clip ontop of it so you can't use roof tiles as a second floor.

And then there's power. I for the life of me can't figure out what conduits actually do. You'd think they are meant to be junction boxes that help you string wires (because for some stupid reason, wires won't go through walls like they do in other games that feature them), but no. You can't attach a wire to a conduit. I mean... you'd think that'd be its intended purpose? What are conduits even for, then?

And then, you apparently can't string items together. Like, for example, I tried to build 2 small generators, a population management computer, a radiation arch, and a settlement beacon. I tried wiring the two generators to each other, and then wire a generator to the computer and the arch, and because the beacon had a fence between it and the generators, I wanted to run a wire from the arch to the beacon. Nope. Wasn't gonna work.

Wound up having to grab the one generator and move it which kinda looks stupid, but whatever.

I mean, IRL, you can just run 1 circuit and attach several devices/outlets to said circuit, but apparently you can't do that in the game for whatever reason.

It'd be nice if the game would actually somehow explain how these mechanics work, because they definitely don't work like you think they should.

Another point, are the prefab buildings and how hilariously small they are. Too small to even fit more than a couple beds in them, with the largest prefabs maybe getting 3 beds if you really squeeze them in there.

Placing down furniture is also not fun whatsoever, rather than simply clip through walls and show up red, it wants to zip up onto the roof if you touch it against the wall and just barely touching the RMB rotates it like 45 degrees instead of allowing you to fine-tune its alignment, rather it forces you to side-step to get it to rotate slowly.

But when buildings have to be so small because there's not a lot of room to build (and the prefabs are tiny with lots of interior pillars blocking you), you don't have a lot of room to move around to try to perfectly line up a bed along a wall.

Sometimes the mouse wheel will let you dictate how far or close to put an object and other times it does exactly nothing, you can scroll up or down until your finger falls off and the object doesn't budge an inch. Most games let you aim at the ground in front of your feet to place something close and then slowly tilt up to slide the object along the floor further away but not this game. Aiming up zips it halfway up the wall and turns it red for some dumb reason.

For the game to focus so heavily on building settlements, its build mechanics are just so terribly bad that it's not funny whatsoever.

I used to think that No Man's Sky was too fiddly, but hot dang, that game is absolutely perfect by comparison.

[Wokelander]

Correct

[milo29]

This is why the modding exist

[thafool]

Laying down electrical connections is by far the worst thing to me. There's nothing worse than building a beautiful mega-palace only to discover there's no way to put lights in the damn thing without 10,000 miles of ugly wiring.

[Ben.E]

when the script extender is updated (F4SE) the first mod you should try is Place Everywhere
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/9424

[Praesi]

Not only is it terrible designed. Its also useless.

[DeltaWolf7]

Check out SimSettlement 2 for something better https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/73394

[Cor.]

Originally posted by thafool:

Laying down electrical connections is by far the worst thing to me. There's nothing worse than building a beautiful mega-palace only to discover there's no way to put lights in the damn thing without 10,000 miles of ugly wiring.

Thats why there are power pylons and street lights.

Also there is a Power Radiator that will supply power to lights without wires.

I use connectors instead of conduit. but would love an option like what ARK has "Hide all Wires" that you can select from a generator or console

[A. Silvermane]

Originally posted by DeltaWolf7:

Check out SimSettlement 2 for something better https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/73394

Better if you like games like Sim City, if you don't like those types of games it can be considerably worse than the base game. Either way I recommend it too simply because its also got a great questline and does have options to cheat if you get stuck

[id795078477]

SImSettlements is great, but requires a lot of care. I would not recommend someone who just starts to mod their game to go for it.

Your good old friend Place Anywhere comes to the rescue. As usual, modders pick up the slack left by developers. I think F4SE has an experimental update so it might even work with the update.

[wtiger27]

Originally posted by thafool:

Laying down electrical connections is by far the worst thing to me. There's nothing worse than building a beautiful mega-palace only to discover there's no way to put lights in the damn thing without 10,000 miles of ugly wiring.

You need to watch The Skooled Zone YouTube videos on wireless wiring for settlements. He uses no mods ether. Awesome on settlement building tips in Fallout 4.

[TemplarGR]

I play vanilla and it is not that bad. You get used to it. Yes some settlements are a pain, they are not designed for large settlements with lots of items, but you aren't supposed to turn all of them into metropolises.

[maestro]

Originally posted by Cor.:

I use connectors instead of conduit. but would love an option like what ARK has "Hide all Wires" that you can select from a generator or console

No Man's Sky has this too, in the form of a small thing you can tuck anywhere in your base and it instantly causes all wires to become invisible while you don't have the build interface up.

And it lets you run wires through anything though that gets a little confusing to see what wire goes to what, lol.

BUT

NMS also allows prefab buildings to power everything inside of them, so long as the prefab itself is connected to something that has power, and any generators/batteries automatically power a prefab if they are built on/in it.

[TheVibinFrog]

Really? I think turning sanctuary into the next diamond city is fun to do.

[maestro]

Originally posted by Thevibinfrog:

Really? I think turning sanctuary into the next diamond city is fun to do.

Maybe building in a huge open area might be okay but throw some terrain into the mix and the bad building system rears its ugly head.

And even then, I was trying to build a decently large building to make a bed depot out of, because placing beds in the existing structures is a PITA, I ran into the snapping issues where walls would want to snap the wrong way every single time.

And now that I know about the whole upper floor issue, I shudder at the thoughts of having to replace the roof of that building with upper floor panels instead, esp. when the outer pieces were made with "wall with roof" tiles and so I bet it won't let me build ontop of that..

ugh.

[TemplarGR]

The cool thing about the settlement system, is that it is optional. And even if you create all settlements on each playthrough, which is something i do, you don't have to spend much time on each settlement. It is extremely fast and easy to get a basic settlement up and running with all 4 basic needs fullfilled for your character's charisma limit. You only need to spend more time if you just want to make the settlements cooler for the fun of it, otherwise, just plant some food, some water pumps, some guard posts + a couple of turrets, and sleeping bags number=your charisma, and voila, settlement ready.