Dev Blog : Settlements

With the removal of SS2 from the list, there is now something of a gaping hole where it's settlement system used to be. SS2 has been in the list since it first came out, and as a result settlement building was never an area I developed much. Also, because I don't particularly enjoy settlements. It's fun to set something up the first time, but honestly after that going through all the trouble to decorate something with shit that literally has no in game purpose ended up feeling hollow. Which is what lead me to create Home Unimprovement. And while that does more or less what I want in terms of simplifying what the player can do, there are parts of the game that are just build for the vanilla settlement system.

The following are my goals for the next few months worth of updates.

Player Homes

 Vanilla Player Homes need decorating, and quite frankly I cannot be bothered to do it. Luckily, other people have. These mods, or other potential alternatives are likely coming to the list in a future update, with the goal of giving players interesting spaces to use as a primary base.
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/44101
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/15814

I was also interested in Commonwealth Courrier Stations, but that mod seems to have vanished off the nexus. If anyone knows what happened to it and if it's still available on another platform get in touch. I'm also interested in adding a few more "decorated" player homes to the list, although this is a low-priority thing.

My hope is that with with the new Shared Stash mechanic, you won't need to fast travel back to your primary base as often, but when you do make it home you've got somewhere worth coming back to.

More Settlements

With SKK Player Undeath respawning you at a nearby settlement, and Home Unimprovement being geared towards setting up forward operating base camps (especially with the new Shared Stash it has), it might be nice to have a few more settlements in the list, which is something I didn't want to do before because of the danger of creating new "Triangles of Death" by adding settlements that were too close together. But without SS2 in the list, and the relatively restricted settlement building, it's not likely to be a problem. The trick here is to find stuff that doesn't conflict with the precombine setup in the list.
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/17681
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/20588
Are currently my short list, as well as Glitchfinder's We Can Live In series.

Settlement Plans

I also recently found the Living Settlements series of mods, which are basically just simple, built up vanilla settlements.
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/search/?BH=0&RH_ModList=nav:true,home:false,type:0,user_id:0,game_id:1151,advfilt:true,search%5Bfilename%5D:living,search%5Bauthor%5D:zed,include_adult:true,page_size:20,show_game_filter:false,open:true

Which is super interesting, but has some issues. For starters, it's "always on", even for settlements that are supposed to be abandoned. Which breaks quests, and causes issues. The good news, is that in about 5 minutes in FO4Edit I was able to create a patch to put everything the mod adds under a parent ref marker, which I was able to enable in game as a quick test. From there, it's a pretty simple thing to create a craftable activator that you build in the workshop menu that will enable everything. This gives me a proof of concept level implementation for how to do a dumbed down version of SS2's city plans. To start with there won't be multiple levels, but it's definitely something that's possible to implement (although it's probably going to require someone with more patience for the CK than I have to do something like that). I think it might also be possible to use a settlement transfer blueprint to do something similiar, but I've not tested that yet.

Minutemen
And lastly, the other major thing I want to add is Glitchfinder's You And What Army 2
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/78925

With the overall goal of taking the "rebuild the commonwealth" depth that SS2 brought to the list, and instead letting the Minutemen questline step up and fill a bit more of that role.