I've been playing with the "place anywhere" and "scrap everything" mods so long I genuinely forgot how much of a pain settlement building is without them
👍 This video just reminded me of how mediocre and annoying Bethesda games are in stock form. I've used the mods you mentioned forever, too. Then again, I'd never WANT to play one of their games without mods.
You forgot the worst part about Vault 88: the AI pathfinding When the DLC first came out, I was super excited and finished the whole thing. I built a large enclosed vault in the main cave chamber, only to realize all my effort was wasted, because the settlers would constantly spawn outside the vault walls and get stuck in the cave. I built additional doors, scrapped entire walls, and they were too stupid to even find their beds. Eventually I just gave up and dismantled everything that was nonessential.
Same. Any effort is wasted because your settlers will just stand around in the cavern doing nothing. Luckily it is a great location for a tato and water farm as long as you don't mind defending it.
That's if your game doesn't bug and the settlers never even head down the stairs into the vault proper during the quest making quest unfinishable and the vault practically worthless.
The vault-tec DLC itself got released in a shady state. Some of the roof types on the atrium would kill the nav meshes on the tiles below. The game itself still has to rely on mods 100% to make game of the year every damn time. I have 0 to no hope for starfield. In a nutshell its going to be settlement building in space with astronaut preston.
@youcansave15ormoreoncarins75 I vary for mine. For outpost Zimoja, I went for a military checkpoint and even put the sentry bot prototype in a little shack to look as if the people were trying to reprogram it. And I also use murkwater construction site as a "raider" base. And now I'm finally working on King lighthouse as a minuteman outpost. Since technically it's the best spot to look for flares. But this is all for rp.
Hangmans Alley is a great site, super useful in Survival mode, super easy to defend Just DON'T scrap the chained door or far wall chained door - Easy access to everything. River travel, Diamond City, Greater Boston, you don't need to spend 2000 caps to buy home plate immediately for sleeping and x1 Settler which you can pick up for a nuka cola in DC makes it great for producing food and water too. It isn't going to ever be a massive location to rival DC, but that was never the intention. Safe storage, easy savepoint, this location is one of the best for a small scale retreat.
The people who don't like it don't like it because they can't exploit it the way they can with most other settlements. It's a settlement for people with a more tactical goal oriented mindset, not somebody who wants to play the Wasteland Sims.
@@JDLT14ven then it can be used. I use the sim settlements mod and my favourite city plan turns that place basically into a two leveled mall. That can also be achieved in vanilla.
@Mowraq This is true, I meant that Hangman's gets undeserved criticism because it doesn't hold your hand like the big open farms or settlements with accessible water. You have to put in effort in some way or another to get value out of that place but the value is high.
I've used hangman alley since the beginning of my first play through. Its amazingly defended and only has one entrance in my build. Although the pathfinder leaves much to be desired
hangmans alley is quite useful during a survival playthrough- several chokepoints, close to diamond city/their traders and plot oriented locations. centrally located for exploration and trying not to die
I disagree, I crash at this location constantly. Which is the worst thing when you’ve spent the entire in game day doing missions. Not worth losing progress over
@@sirspookyface1532 og xbox one? for whatever reason, boston is crash central. i have continued my playthrough on my xbox one x with few issues (in boston) beyond typical bethesda wonkiness
@@sirspookyface1532 like i said fallout 4 works fine on the one x- they're fairly cheap now or just save up for series s/x. skyrim is also fairly smooth too
Honestly the tight inconvenient locations are my favorites. Anyone can build a 30 settler base at Sanctuary. Doing the same at Hangman's Ally takes fineness. But I started with mat glitching even before Place Anywhere was released, so I'm something of a masochist
Hangman's Alley was my favorite even in my first playthrough. I LOVE the verticality it requires to properly build a 20-30 person shantytown in such a tight space, though I admit I would've appreciated an increased build height. It honestly feels like it loses something when you add in mods like settlements expanded, when all the buildings around it open up for your use.
I found that Hangmans alley was a pain the ass until i made it into a kinda superhigh defensive Checkpoint settlement, some where to pass through store / restock Md modify gear in-between quests ,i found coastal cottage was the worst for me
@@typhousneon-777 See, I usually theme Hangman's all as a combination military base and logistics depot. The idea being that it is how the [Faction of choice] settlements do business with DC as well as were the [Faction of choice] patrols near DC are based. It is also were several trade routs end up, so it usually looks the part.
I actually love Hangman's alley, its my favorite places to build, as if you accept its limitations and try to build within them, it creates an incredibly interesting challenge to overcome. One way in which I did this was by learning to construct half tile by 1 tile sized npc homes, as well as allocating the back half of the alley as literal farm area, rather than just where i stuck some crops, the NPC's cant path there, but By constructing a bar on the bottom center of the alley the path-confused npc's mill around the bar area. By limiting construction to to rim of the alley otherwise, I created a 4 level megaton-esque town, that's mostly open in the middle. Additionally by playing around with the build dimensions of concrete walls (since they have separate placements from other walls) as well as the ladders and wall sizes of barn and workshop wall, you can build a structure using pre-fabs ABOVE the build limit, that furniture and NPC's can be built on and have access to, because the floor of the 4th story is just below the build height limit. Its one of the most limited build spaces yes, but once filled in it feels INCREDIBLY fallout. do I wish there was a higher build hight, as well as the ability to build on the roofs of adjacent buildings? yes, I would have loved to make a Pitt style Up-Town area, but what I do have is tons of fun. And as a bonus, my personal home build above the farm, is spacious, and never suffers the threat of NPC's stealing my goodies since they can't reach it.
Yup. This was the first place I liked and just used console commands to get rid of the bodies. Never played more of 4 to really look for better locations though
I basically turned Hagman's Alley into a little extension of DC where the rejects can go if they don't want to be in Goodneighbor. I moved Piper, Nick, & Sheffield there. I used that unscrappable raider Shack as Sheffield's place & put Nick's & Piper's offices on the other side of the alley. The middle is just a few shop keeps & their homes. I think the highest I go is 3 stories, tops.
#1 do not open any of the doors, this limits attacks to just one area. #2 The fact that NPCs won't go around the corner keeps them stealing the players stores when they are placed there. #3 building there is a challenge but when overcome a satisfactory settlement very possible.
Hangmans Alley definitely wasnt easy, but I have 38 settlers there and its a major hub for my settlement network consisting of 13 other settlements and 8 raider settlements. The key to success at Hangmans Alley is building a second floor and layering with garden plots for crops.
That's exactly what I did, the second floor area enormously increases the amount of building you can do & I've blocked off all but the main entrance to stop enemies from attacking from anywhere except the front entrance, which I've heavily fortified with every defensive weapon system you can build🫡
@@Foxbody429 Ive found that enemies spawn within the walls though, no matter how heavily fortified the entrances are. Of course I used a "delete everything" and "no borders" mod, so hangman alley is more of a hangmans blvd 🤣
@@ej732 I've noticed that too, so I've put shotgun turrets inside the settlement & guard posts with heavily armed settlers equipped with the best armor & the most powerful weapons that I can give them & when random enemies appear, they are quickly annihilated 😅
@@Foxbody429 Good call. All this talk of F4 I may have to turn on the xbox. Ever since the Redfall debacle I swore to not turn it on till I sat down to play Starfield.
Hangman's alley is unironcally one of my favorite settlements with mods, I usually like to make it a shanty town or a "mini" NYC like location with neons lights n all
I actually managed to make something interesting at Murkwater Construction! Granted, it was a Railroad safehouse, so it was literally a nicely-decorated shack with a Railroad flag up, but...
I literally poured like 15-20 hours making a multistory floor on Hangman's Alley. A shop on a second floor and a bar at the third floor. You just have to think creatively as obvious lol. Btw it's a great settlement sight for me.
I actually built a really cool looking 'swamp village' at the Murkwater Construction site once. Granted, I used a ton of mods to expand the borders and stuff, and it was a pain in the ass to build, but it ended up being really atmospheric and was one of my favourite builds. The whole town was made of wood and was up on stilts, and it had a ramshackle wooden walkway going around the whole town with buildings on the outside of the walkway. I had a giant, guarded front gate at the entrance and walls around the whole town. In the middle of the town was a military watchtower, a greenhouse and Tarberry farm. I placed a load of coloured lights in strategic places too so the place always had a cool 'glow' to it. I had a really cool pub in that town too, with the arcade machines from the Creation Club, and I'd set up a stage with a fake Magnolia from the Third Rail 'performing' her songs (it was just a female settler in a sparkly red dress and a wig, assigned to a DEF6 guard mat placed in front of a microphone, with modded radios that only played Magnolias songs dotted around the stage, but it was a pretty good illusion lol)
The Vault can actually be connected to all the caves, I've done it in vanilla. My vault had a five story atrium, a club, a dedicated science lab next to the water purifier, and a gun range and 3 story basketball court. It's not without its problems, like adequately lighting everything, but it's awesome when you put work into it.
I’m glad someone else brought up Vault 88. It was meant to allow us to build our own vault but it’s designed so poorly that you have to pack everything into the main area or else you’ll be forced to go through the caves because connecting things sucks It’s almost impossible to build a nicely sized and fully connected vault
If using the prefab tunnel parts connecting the caves isn't that hard at all. I used the entrance as starting point and it lines up quite good actualy. The tunnels and vault walls are also connecting electrics, no need for complicated wiring.
I built a banger vault but I made the mistake of going 4.5x the settlement limit on the Xbox one. The New Xbox does a little bit better in the vault but it's alot of quicksaving just to walk from one end to another. But its got everything including a comic book store, a casino, and a super duper mart.
@@A_Smart_Donkey hahah you to?!! I also built a settlement a settlement that’s so damn large that it even lags the hell out of my next generation Xbox? It can’t even render the darn thing
V88 is best as a squatter settlement, small individual spots with a bed or 2, some furniture and a campfire, candles or a barrel on fire, spread em out all over, and you have a shanty cave town. Setup concrete walls, turrets, traps and catwalks at the interval tunnels, and you got the perfect defense
There are spots in The Mechanists Lair that you can sink water pumps. There are small piles of dirt on the floor that will count. The problem is that when you scrap some of the junk on the floor, it also cleans up your dirt. I usually spin a water pump over some of those piles until I get a green place item prompt.
@@Leotheleprachaun I have from day one, but the smaller pump is easier to get to place. The smaller pump alone is a bit finicky, the larger powered one I was finding was a real pain the butt to rotate into the "Dirt" piles. I can place several small pumps around the room and get all the water I need for about 25-30 people.
Hangman's Alley is good if you don't want to spend hours building a giant base. It's easy to defend and can look decent with a minimal amount of effort. I just store the recruitment beacon after getting about 4-5 settlers since that's all you really need for that location.
I just build 6-8 Assaultrons, scrap everything else, take the scrap with me and leave the Assaultrons to guard the area/ store them until I need extra supply caravaners.
Yeah, one thing I like about it is how the borders already have walls. Easier to set up a perimeter, even if you can't put up turrets outside of the walls.
I honestly love hangman's alley, it's been incredibly helpful in hardcore playthroughs, and on my latest playthrough where I build a themed settlement at every available site in the game, I chose to make a very vertical bustling town. Stairs and walkways galore, rooftop bars, bus homes, beds under boards, covered ground level walkway with all the food and trading stands, houses farther up, some drug dens. No electricity, all fire barrels, candles and torches lighting the community. Very comfortable
To me, every settlement with a massive building area with no unique characteristics to it is a difficult settlement. Take Starlight Drive-in for example. Coming up with an interesting layout, and building designs to fill up all of that space is so much harder than fixing the broken house in Coastal Cottage.
@frosty Starlight is nice for someone who likes to build a massive concrete fortress but it's not my style and I find it really hard to work on. I had to stop building when my game performance got a noticeable hit. I had to leave 1/4 of the settlement empty and it already reached 5600 pieces.
Starlight is good for big building builds. Like was mentioned, a lot of people build forts & fortresses there. I've also seen hotels & apartment complexes. I once built an entertainment center with a mall & an MMA arena I generically called The Fight Pit. Had AFT mod, so I took Tommy from the Combat Zone & made him run it.
@@BraddahSpliff Yep, I usually make Starlight into an apartment building fortress. Build a giant box around the water, one entrance, farming and stores all in the center, everyone's happy.
I think the head of Settlement-Command at Bethesda was someone called Zackery Prial and horribly made the border limits of this videos mentions and received a decent amount of hate, he did promise to join the team to overhaul the game's world but not the story, which is a false hope with Todd Howard being the mass of cancer he is. Steam does have a couple of good mods that puts in the unofficial patch and make settlements much better with smaller settlements like Jamica Plain border the entire town and a bit of the park where two raiders spawn in to harass your camp. We shouldn't defund Bethesda, just send the team to deep rehab!
(fuppping comment cut me off!!!)...of the park where two or three raiders go to harass that settlement. We shouldn't defund Bethesda but, send the entire team to deep-rehab!!!
I often find the settlements with the most "challenges" are actually the easiest and most entertaining to build in because of the limitations they impose forcing you to both be creative but not have it be impossibly open ended so that you don't know where to begin
@@alexanderraz. No he absolutely has a point, the places that are hard to build around, can look simply amazing when you build creatively around them. I absolutely love what some people did with hangmans alley for example. That being said, not being able to scrap really annoying stuff sucks because there are obviously limits to what you can do. And yeah the settlement feature is slapped on top of a game never intended for it. Typical Bethesda indeed.
Facts! And you have al these people commenting talking about “well I use all these mods to play so it wasn’t a challenge for me” or “Bethesda games are so bad you have to mod to get a decent game” idk I sound alike you suck to me. All of these hard locations were actually annoying but once built around look so cool. Like you just gotta get creative
@@dicedude1071 I do to now after passing the game and it’s the mods for gun skins, pip boy skins, and the sanctuary hills hot spring one to check it out lol
I personally find the best use for the Mechanists Lair is to have it be a robot provisioner hub. It costs a fair amount of resources like you said, but it makes my settlements look better. Plus if all my Robots are based out of the Lair I'm not losing happiness in other settlements as a result.
I agree. Not useful as a true settlement, but I found it makes a great robot provisioner hub, plus a safe warehouse to hold my bulk supply of crafting components, water, food, weapons, etc. Lots of floor space, so perfect for storing complete sets of power armor, plus extra frames and pieces. In the main section I strung loads of lights so it's nice and bright. Built a living space in one corner, and along one wall built all the crafting stations. I use it frequently to drop off extras and do overnight rests. Built some machine gun turrets just in case something found it's way inside, but I don't think they've ever been triggered. FYI, there is one spot on an adjoining hallway where there is a bit of dirt, and you can squeeze in 2-3 water pumps. But of course no way to grow crops.
@@daneaster7 I have seen that video, but had come to the conclusion on my own well before that. Although at the time I was unaware of the happiness penalty of robot settlers and had made it in a very in efficient manner.
Vault 88 is one of my favorite settlement. I didn't build a vault, I made an entire undergroung town, Diamond City style, with wood, concrete and metal. I used a warehouse elevator to make three floors filed with shops, houses and wathever your imagination provides you with. The result is a great post apocalyptic atmosphere and the size of the town makes Diamond City look like a village. It's easy to defend if you don't spread into too many caves. Anyway you can't if you don't want a gost town since there is not enough settlers to live in. Entering the main cave and looking up at a three story town provides a very nice view. The main problem: like mentioned above, all settlers remain in the same spots. But still, it's worth it.
wish I'd thought to do that! On the other hand, I wish they'd thought to just give us a cave system with the intent to have us make a subterranean city rather than framing it as a vault. Imo the vault concept would have been better if it was a set of prefab rooms you could choose between without having you manually place walls and floors like skyrim's house building dlc, and then you just decorate the interiors to your heart's content
@@Romanticoutlaw Realistically the game would have needed a real "build mode", like literally something from the Sims. Hell the construction kit offers way better funcionality to place stuff than what they did in game. With enough resources they could have made it into a game inside the game with real settlement management, ordering settlers around etc. all in isometric view.
Open the wall to the Deathclaws and scorpions area but try not to kill all of them. They will finish of any raiders which spawn or pass nearby their area.
i’m starting a new play through with some i guess “cheat” mods but i’ll try out making Vault 88 a post-war town to the best my ps4 can do because ps4 mods suck so i’ll have to see how that works. anyone know of any good building mods for ps4?
For me, it's Murkwater. All the swampy ground, the unscrapable trees and most of all the Mirelurk Queen that can spawn just outside means I never touch it. Of course, to be honest, in most of my playthroughs nowadays, the only settlement building I do is the stuff around Sanctuary that Sturges wants and fixing up the Castle if I'm going for a Minuteman ending.
Just a suggestion but personally I just like to build lil shanty villages everywhere. Simple and fun since pretty much all you do is take the premade workshop buildings and throw em around then spruce the place up a bit, sometimes I add more unique touches like houses on top of eachother or walls if the location is convenient or dangerous. I also like to keep the population of my villages between 10 and 15, gives me a good growth goal to reach while also keeping every random settlement in the commonwealth from basically nearly rivaling diamond city
for Murkwater I built a square cement habitated-wall. Sort of like a military fort- but instead a star fort, its just a square. use the middle area for crops and what not, build the "walls" as hallways with various built-in rooms. Make it two or three stories tall. Have outward facing concrete-windows with guard positions there. Works well.
Tip for Vault 88: avoiding scrapping the two barricades (the one in the subway area, and the other in the pharmacy area) prevents attacks from the caves, as those two points are enemy spawn poinst who gets activated by removing said barricades. At that point, the only enemy spawn point will be the one at the front gate. Close the gate and watch raiders rant about it ^_^
Exactly. I didn't destroyed the barricades and closed the door. However even if they get in they encounter codsworth&ada in exchange. Fully modified killing machines 😂
There is definitely a reason that whenever I build Vault 88 it becomes an underground city where each building is its own Vault Tec style build. It's far too difficult to make an actual Vault without mods so I just make a town.
@@halflife2fun Yeah that too. I know its to help performance but why give us basically the entire south eastern part of the map in build size but set the build limit to the same as red rocket.
@@LordPhantomWolfe could have done something like multiple sectors with individual settler caps and build limits but count as one in total food, water, defense, and settlers. Would have made it feel a lot more populated and vault like. Maybe even a additional "overseer's office" sector as a player home. I mean sectors as in going through load screens thereby circumventing performance issues
The thing about Hangman's Alley is that it's unfortunately the best settlement for Survival Mode. It's close to Diamond City, in the middle of the map, but most importantly it's right next to the CIT ruins, which is the only location you can teleport to in Survival Mode.
Coastal Cottage would have been number 1 on my list. Not only is it a bad build area, but the site is so far north east that it might as well be in Far Harbor. I can only think they put it there because at the point in game that you get there, you should already have done a bunch of other settlements. Therefore you should have some kind of skill beyond beginner. But still, that place is horrible. I think I only ever built there like 3 times. & once was only because the Railroad made it their Mercer Safehouse.
Coastal cottage is my favorite, I made a bunker under the damaged house. Made it look like it was hidden and built before the bombs dropped. I keep the entire area simple and use it as one of my main player homes.
Just a little addition to the vault 88 buildable area. The way it's walls are placed is just infuriating. They are just like 20 cms shorter than the size of a block and so when you're planning to place 2 additional blocks on each side of your vault, you burst in tears having to replace everything you've made already.
@@joaquinvideo2959 I wouldn't know how to rate that one, honestly. I never used it after I got it lol I kinda want to see what I can do with it now though
The Mechanist's Lair is a very good settlement for the one thing I saw it used for, supply lines. The guy built one robot for every settlement that exists, didn't modify them at all, and sent them to supply line all of the other settlements. This way, having the robots doesn't lower the happiness of the settlements because every robot is considered to permanently have 50% happiness, and now all your settlements are connected without losing manpower. The guy also built a fun crazy contraption with conveyor belts in there because he could.
For Jamaica Plains I usually put crops and water pumps in the parking lot, then use the broken second story to place building tiles to have people live there; by using the balcony pieces you can have elevated watchmen during attacks. The bus on the corner can't be scrapped but you do have _just_ enough area within the buildable zone to put a turret up there. Since enemies can spawn to the south it is best to point the turret in that direction. Settlers don't go south normally either, so you can even put some traps at the extreme end of the buildable zone and have them hit enemies(a rarity given how much of a PITA it is to use traps normally).
Jamaica Plains was actually fun for me, I built an urban fort around the two ruined buildings side by side, with artillery on the roof and crops inside in planters. Hangman's Alley is also a fun build site. Meanwhile Murkwater Construction Site is somehow not even on this list?
The bus can also be used as a secure entrance wince you can run up the broken lamppost and run across the bus to jump over a wall if you wall in a portion of the compound. The AI is not smart enough to make that jump.
I went with a tall concrete building on top of the parking lot with a full-height gap underneath for stairs and water pumps. One of my busiest settlements
Using some settlement mods that allow you to scrap and place much easier, I've actually found Hangman's Alley to be one of my favorite spots to make a settlement. I love verticality, and that settlement pretty much forces it.
I actually really like Hangman’s alley. If you just take it from the North side and don’t unlock any of the other doors, it becomes one of the most easily defended settlements in the game. All that space that settlers don’t go to is perfect for making a kill box that shreds, burns and bruises whatever’s stupid enough to come waltzing on in. Yeah it’s a small build area but it doesn’t have to be a sprawling township either. Just enough food and water to be self sustaining and maybe a shop or two and you’re golden.
Protip for most of these; use the scrap everything mod. I think it's available on every platform and it definitely helps in Coastal Cottage and Hangman's Alley
I've actually used Hangman's Alley as my primary player character residence in most playthroughs, mainly for it's central location. For whatever reason, I have never had as much trouble with spawns and attacks - about four turrets overlooking the doors and 1-2 NPC guards seem to make short work of them. It is much better with mods to increase the scrapable material, of course.
I've refrained from unlocking the "back entrance" (the chained door) and thus eliminated a bulk of the invader situations; that said you CAN construct turrets that gun down anything loitering outside of that gate has had positive results. I've built upwards pretty effectively to become an average sized settlement, which is impressive for how it begins
@@abelsabrowsky4470 Yep, I do that sometimes as well. With a little maneuvering you can also place turrets on the fire escape on that side, giving them a pretty good field of fire over the alleyway beyond.
If you use the mod "better hangmans alley" then this would likely be why. It raises build ceiling, makes things scrappable, and fixes the spawn locations of attackers to be outside the settlements area. It's a great mod and I consider it a must-have if you want to build there. I tried building there vanilla on a vanilla play through last year, and had all the issues mentioned in this video. Lost all my settlers to a super mutant attack and then got suicide nuked when I fast traveled to help clear them.
I once made Hangman's Alley my player home. To each their own, but I grew to really dislike all those windows of the buildings that surround the buildable area. Yes, game wise I know they are walls. But it bothered me thinking that in the "real" world it would be easy for an attacker to break into those buildings and use those windows to snipe from to attack Hangman's Alley. In my current playthrough I used Sim Settlements 2 to build something basic there and use it only as a place to store companions.
If you don't open up the back entrances to Vault 88, you can bottleneck your enemies at the Vault Entrance and it takes seconds to repel an invasion. It's actually THE easiest to defend that way even without mods.
Hangman's Alley is actually my favorite. Don't get me wrong, it's a pain to fit in builds, but not impossible. Usually my central hub for northern and southern settlements.
I use it as my waypoint between my north and south networks. I usually hub The Castle in the south and Starlight Drive-In in the north. I build up Hangman's Alley a bit and put in enough settlers to hold it so that my supply chains don't get broken.
I actually find the vault one to be my favorite, it can give you a lot of resources and it's easy to defend since enemies can only come from 3 places as long as you stick to one area of the vault that is
@@thomas.parnell7365 i just stick with heavy lazer turrets at all entrances 2 each except for the primary entrance that gets 3 and i just give settlers armor and weapons i get on my journeys (the air port is a godsend for combat armor)
@@codyholley Exactly. I have every entrance so heavily fortified that NOBODY could get in. At the sewer entrance I built a long, complicated maze with machine gun turrets throughout and at every turn. At the pharmacy entrance, the whole shop is filled with machine gun turrets, and so is the cellar. And so far I have NEVER had even ONE attack get through.
For Vault 88 you can save yourself a lot of hassle if you don't open the other two entrances. As long as you never scrap the barricades blocking them, attackers can only spawn at the main entrance which is pretty easy to fortify.
hangmans alley is good as a hub in survival mode. You can "quick travel" to the institute by teleporting and so reach it very fast. It is big enough to build some food, water and glue production and all the workbenches you need to modify your equipment. For a big lively settlement it is not the right place.
The Mechanists is one of the more aesthetically pleasing settlements, seeing as it appears to look like it came straight out of a comic book. I was able to build a realistic looking vault with Atrium within the large room so, I don't think it's as bad as you said it was. In fact I think Vault 88 is possibly one of the more underrated settlements in the game. Although I agree that it's genuinely a hassle to find attackers though, I manage. It helps to put heavily armed guards and turrets at all exits, no matter if it's distant from the center. I recommend putting a robot settler as the provisioner for Vault 88 to deal with that high radiation.
Hangman's Alley is my favorite personal settlement in the game. It's easily defensible with just a few turrets and by not unlocking the front and side doors. It has space enough for food and water to make it self sufficient and while every settler might not get their own house, I found there to be enough space for the limit to hit. I've also never encountered the problem of AI not going to the back.
I absolutely LOVED the format and the commentary of this video. It was so engaging and I couldn’t help but stay attentive the entire time. Super witty and super entertaining! Subscribed 😎😎
I actually really liked the mechanists layer, especially in combination with the contraptions DLC. I set up a massive underground factory, that i supplied with scrap etc from ther settlements, and in turn i turned that scrap into guns, and ammo via the presses in contraptions. I also built some original looking industrial protectrons, and guarded the entrances via mag lock doors, and turrets.
Yeah, I think that's actually the point that I minutes later. Not supposed to turn it into a settlement for people, you're supposed to turn it into a manufacturing plant that produces goods and scrap. No need for food or water, just a whole bunch of industrial equipment and scavenging stations for the robots and you'll never need to carry around junk again because it'll produce a ton of scrap for the other settlements
You can actually get more settlers by going back to the Mechanist and she will send you out destroying rogue robots. Sometimes you will encounter Synths, Minutemen or BoS where the robots are located, but sometimes there will be 3 settlers (usually) wandering around, and you can engage with them and send them to any settlement you like! Be careful not to kill them during any melee though. ;) 👍
Yeah, I like to use it only as the Mercer Safehouse for the Railroad. It makes sense to funnel synths toward Far Harbor. Even the half-ruined house has a terrible scale for attempting repair work. On the flipside, it is fun to give Laser and Institute weapons to everyone there to see a laser lightshow at night when the place gets attacked. Just be mindful to keep turrets at the north end for when the nearby Deathclaw gets attracted by the noise.
I like to have Hangman's Alley as something like an outpost where I'd make my favorite types of settlers live there and dress them up and equip them with guns to have them look like a spec ops squad stationed there. When the Supermutants get into a fight with the DC guards or me, they'd always come out from the alley around the corner and start blasting. It looked so awesome the first time I saw it, especially seeing the guy who I made something like a squad gunner with his LMG and heavy equipment just walking up at them and emptying the drum mag on them.
Dude... hangman alley is excellent. Easily defended, and plenty of vertical room to lay down 20 beds. Building shops is harder, but being a short walk from diamond city, this is a bonkers useful settlement.
@@hotdognl70 I used 1 level of prefab wood to build a level above ground. The roof has planters and multifruit trees, and middle has the bunks with turrets on the sides overlooking the entrances. The limited space naturally funnels attackers into choke points which are easily defended. My ground floor is used for shops, work stations, and two artillery guns.
@@hotdognl70 I don't think that creativity is needed. It's a very basic design that works in all settlements, and which mirrors the real work. Shops & Industry on the ground Housing in the middle Security and gardens on top
First and foremost, the 2 best "settlement" locations are hands down Starlight Drive-In and Spectacle Island. Huge building locations and where Starlight gives you a mostly flat plne to build with ease, Spectacle Island gives you a varied but not impossible sloped terrain for different flavors of layout. I fully agree that the building zones listed in the video are not ideal for "settlements" but perfect for player homes. The concept of building a series of safe-houses and supply depots prior to kicking up the difficulty and activating survival mode has always been my bread and butter. Hangman Alley is always my first supply depot because you can build it into the perfect choke point by blocking off one of the entrances and littering turrets across the other so long as you don't unchained the 3rd entrance. Coastal Cottage on the other hand is great for a small military outpost. Don't build wide, build tall. Think like the Iron Islands from GoT. Tall towers protected by a turret network and place an artillery piece or 2 at the tops of your towers and connect them with catwalks. What would have been amazing is giving your settlements more weight to the story. If you "claim" all settlements but don't build them up you get a prompt about having enough resources but not enough man power. If you build a few settlements extensively you get a prompt about being prepared but outnumbered for a final battle.
Ah Costal Cottage. I remember this one vividly It was a fun challenge to conquer, and I'm happy with what I ended up making... But damn, I do *not* want to do that again
The issue I still have with the vault location is that you can't seem to build an upstairs area in the main chamber. If you put a stairwell in to go to a second floor, they absolutely will refuse to go up the stairs. Instead they'll just crowd around the base of the stairwell and just stare at the forbidden high ground.
Airport is best used as a Gunner farm with the cages, you can fit up to 12 cages against the back walls and place a fence in front, rig up a switch, a turret and some cover and bam, you can farm all the high level equipment for yourself and your settlers with ease, making the Airport one of the most useful locations in the game. Hangman's alley is perfect for a 'main base' settlement due to it's location (especially in survival where there isn't any fast travel) don't unlock the side door or the back door though, just the alley, this makes it super easy to defend, and keeping your population low, lets you recruit new settlers really fast, outfit with the gear from the Airport farm and then send them to the settlement where they will live. It always amazes me that people take issue with some of these settlements instead of turning it into an advantage.
I have Gunner- and Raider cages is most of my settlements, enclosed in concrete with turret towers near them. When a gunner or raider is trapped it seems to trigger rescue attempts from his comrades. Always piles of bodies to loot and no need to reset the traps. And indeed, there are no bad spots for settlements. Only challenging spots.
Dude, I've been getting back into fallout 4 (currently over 2k hours) and wanted to master building settlements in every area I can and your videos are straight up golden, and I greatly appreciate your work effort, and time, easily gained a subscriber with masterful writing in this review, hooked me with the Vault 88 review as to me it seems like nobody's really talks about that settlement.
I give them the essentials to be happy and to defend themselves (including arming the settlers with the best armor and weapons I can acquire over time). I went crazy with the design initially when it was all new to me but now given it obviously has no real bearing on the game, I don't bother much with it.
@@moboatz lmao also... how tf did you clock over 2k hours? I'm on 700 now and that's mostly because of mods, usually building something, decorating or just trying to make my character look as good as possible.
@@pbluma it's just me coming back every year playing for like another 200-500 hours lmao. I swear I'm always finding something new and that's what makes it so special to me
@@moboatz As long as you're still entertained by FO 4 after so much time is all that really matters. There's always a settlement to build and improve. I'd play it more if my gametime wasn't monopolized by Neverwinter. Damn dragons....
I love Hangmans Alley! As a recruitment area. I build a concrete block house to block the street/sidewalk entrance with about 10 beds and stop in occasionally to send everyone not involved in the 12 food production to actual settlements.
Murkwater construction site. With a mirelurk queen that constantly respawns _inside the settlement._ I didn't realise she would respawn, and I put my main building directly over her spawn point. Result: Whenever I arrive, there's a mirelurk queen clipping through the floor of my settlement.
Vault 88 is actually one of the easiest settlements to defend. If you don't scrap the barricades that create the other entrances, the only place enemies spawn is at the vault door. Just fill the welcome area with turrets and you're done. That said, I absolutely hate building there so that's pretty much where I stop. 😅
I'm perpetually frustrated by Covenent, because it looks like it should be a great location, but you have to contend with owned items, unscrappable turret remains, and just overall inexcusable bugginess.
I gotta disagree with your main point on Vault 88. I always connect several of the large rooms without needing to leave the vault at all. There are stairs in the vault tileset and the different levels are designed to be at the perfect height to build on after you go down the tunnel with a staircase. Scrap the wall behind the water purifier pond and you can go around the other way to build a non broken vault all the way from the entrance to the water purifier room, I like to make a little maintenance catwalk around it. Another fun spot is you can build above the ceiling I-beams in the main area if you use an elevator to get up there. Settlers can't use an elevator, but it's a great spot to build your private suite. Where it seriously fails without mods is the settler sandbox area. By default the settler AI sandbox area only covers the main central chamber so any builds that you make in the other chambers will be fully ignored by settlers. Nothing like arriving there to find all your settlers standing around in the middle of your atrium unable to find their jobs. If you want settlers to use what you have built you have to use a mod to expand the sandbox size or be limited to only the main chamber. EDIT: Oh yea, and the light range is terrible by default. I would never be happy in my vault without a mod that gives all the light fixtures a larger radius. Without that mod the place is more a dungeon than a vault.
I agree. Figuring out how to snap the Vault 88 pieces together made me want to tear my hair out, but that was the hardest part about building in that space, to me.
@@micahsimon94Late answer,but that was literally easy for me. Even for the first try. Also you have power by default. Water if you connect generators to the purifier. You don't need to connect that purifier/generator the your vault directly. If its running,then the water problem is solved. Problem is with Vault 88 (i want achievements on Xbox so mods out of the question) is the settler Ai. They do something or they stand in the middle of the atrium. My other problem is the building size. Thankfully i'm not a fan of building in Fo4 so the entrance area is more than enough for me even tho i could increase the settlement size with the weapon glitch. Food also can be solved with gardening pots. Its one of the safest settlements in game. If you don't destroy the 2 barricades then they don't attack from multiple direction. If you close the door that solves the siege problem completely in my experience(Vault 88 only got attacked after i destroyed one of the barricades) I built it and in most of my playthroughs Vault 88 is my homebase. Because most of the time i deal with Barstov and go on without its quest 😂 However one of the downsides (if you want it) building Vault 88 will be a horror game if you have a fast robot companion
I actually love hangman's ally. It's so fun stacking buildings and scaffolding on top of each other to make a towering alley town. Its challenging to work with in all the ways I personally like, and its SUPER dependable. On top of all, its it's aesthetically pleasing to me and great for survival playthroughs, since it's pretty much at the center of everything if you need a place to stop doing your travels. Seeing settlers all huddled up in darkness around fire barrels while armed to the teeth at night just makes me feel so cozy
As someone who does no hit runs, hangman’s alley is my absolute favorite as it’s easy to stay low profile, easy to defend, near diamond city and vault 81 for safe trading, and near the river for stealthy travel. However I totally get that it sucks for big/resourceful settlement building.
I love Hangman's Alley and Coastal Cottage! The odd terrain and surrounding dangers make for a fun challenge to make the base "work" - which is why I didn't bother with the Diamond City site or those two other bland ones that are underground. Spectacle Island, with all its mirelurks and sprawling territory, is another fun one to develop so I'm guessing it was considered for this video too :}
About Hangman's Alley - it's actually quite useful, more as a base of operations more than an actual settlement. As you said, it has an amazing location from which to access Diamond City and the rest of the Boston Ruins, making it perfect for an early game survival base.
These are the type of settlements that I simply build just for myself so I have a place to put my stuff while I'm traveling between places. I like to play on survival so no fast travel makes it a little bit more useful.
As a Survival mode player, far-flung settlements are my least favorite. Somerville, Coastal Cottage, Murkwater, Ozinga, even Sanctuary! I grew to dislike putting in lots of time and resources into a place you rarely see. Even Starlight Drive In starts to feel out of the way. I’m more focused on building up settlements that I visit often. For me, County Crossing is #1. What puts it over the top is being located at the shore, near the waterway crossroads. Swimming everywhere is a cinch, and fast . (And a brief respite from encounters) (remember to get the 25% faster swimming magazine). After that, Hangman’s #2 (DC’s Home Plate can’t be linked with provisioners). And #3 Jamaica Plain.
funny my go to settlements are Sunshine Tidings because I found it the easiest to wall off in vanilla (Auto-Fencing is a such a time save I swear), Abernathy Farm for the same reason and Home Plate because I find it useful to have a central location as a push off point
Nice choice! Never considerred swimming much as I'm an over-user of Power Armor. Might be worth give it a try more often! (My drugs imperium payinf fore the cores needed lol)
@@hotdognl70 Hi. Yes! Swimming! It’s the #1 reason I don’t play using power armor anymore. My first playthrough, I dedicated myself to a power armor build. I was playing on survival, and ever since Concord, where you get the full T-45, it just seemed so cool. No regrets. But I knew swimming was fast. I forget when it finally dawned on me. I just knew that on my second playthrough, I would try Survival without power armor, so i could swim. It’s so powerful. Swimming gets me places, often in half the time or less. Especially since there’s no fighting. Which is great for a couple reasons. One, fights take time, and resources. It makes planning what to take easier, if I don’t have random encounters. Two, I can get more use from the bonuses given by Well Rested and Lover’s Embrace. And three, after completing a quest, or after getting a particularly strong legendary, there’s nothing I want to do more than save my game. And swimming is safe. Overall, the time saved swimming is too good to pass up. Some of the benefits i listed, you can do walking in Power Armor, on the floor of the sea. It just takes too long for me. Survival is already a lot of travel time. Cheers.
Red Rocket was the hardest for me, but it was mostly due to how I'd set things up. I used it as a hub for followers by completely abandoning the ground level and building a big industrial shelter on the roof, complete with indoor plots for food and stored water. I then put a reactor genny on top, next to the shelter, ran walls all the way around the perimeter, put two different entrances in different locations and made a giant maze for invaders. Instead of traps, I loaded the place with bottlecap mines and shotgun turrets. Plus, there were parts of the maze that had no ceiling, letting my allies rain hell down from above. It was a bitch to set up and replacing the mines was a hassle (until I peppered the adjacent woods with additional assorted ones), but it was the most easily defensible location I'd made in a while.
If we're doing things without cheats, mods, or exploits, then my least favorite is Homeplate. Not being able to connect it to the other settlements and having to physically carry all my building materials over there has always been enough to kill the location for me. On the other hand, Hangman's is one of my favorites, the shape of it inspires me for some reason. Plus I always make Marcy the provisioner so that she's always under attack. 😂
Vault 88 needs a correction. As long as you DO NOT EVER DISMANTLE THE BARRICADES, all the enemies will come from the main entrance which is easily fortified. Again, if you find your way to the surface through a back route, reload a save. It is never ever a good idea to open v88's back doors.
I’ve gotta say the best one to me has gotta be Spectacle Island. They literally give you an entire island to build whatever on! You could build an actual town in it if you could have more than a handful of settlers.
Spectacle Island is to big for the engine. It uses more World Chunks than the System can handle, what can lead to the engine not registering things like beds, crops, stores ect on the other coast when you´re standing on one side of the Island. Keeping Happiness maintained is a pain there. And don´t send Robots there on their own. Pretty good chance they bugg out on the floor of the ocean.
I use the Mechanist base as a supply/trade node, where every robot is assigned to provide trade routes to other settlements. Just really only need the capacity to build robots there, plus I'll build a small place to sleep and do workshop tasks. I check on the robots regularly to make sure they haven't been damaged.
I actually use Jamaica planes as a central hub for that side of the map on every playthrough. The parking lot I use for trade, I fix the collapsed floor of the house and use it as a defensive balcony and block off all but one door, the area of the house under that new floor I use as a workshop, then the open street I fill with small housing units for settlers and I block the whole place with walls. It has some odd geometry but with some patience it ends up working pretty well.
Usualy I do almost the same, except for doing the housing on top of the workshop and defensive turrest on roofs and balcony. Initialy I only allowed myself to rug glitch the generator into the porch of the inaccesible building behind the parking lot, looks pretty good actualy.
And the thing body said is it’s just a nice looking area to build, it’s small but not too small and the way things are shaped just make it so much fun to work with
Just found myself coming back to this video after almost a year and remembered: "Oh yeah... That video that trashtalks all the locations that made me proud of my mod free settlement builds!"
Sanctuary is the best imo, I only use a few mods for building like place anywhere, spring cleaning and homemaker (i think) which only lets me use more objects from the game. I restore the player's house to pre war state like every playthrough, spend hours decorating it and eventually I planted trees all over the settlement, it looks more like a park now. It's the only place that looks pre war and untouched, had to do all Codsworth's work for him smh
@@Chuked spectacle island is great if you love building freely I prefer restoring or expanding on what's there like croup manor, red rocket or kings port lighthouse
@@michael6880 Red rocket is my second favorite place, I just don't like water locations so I've never even been to spectacle island even with 700 hours
There is actually a *very* tiny patch of dirt in the Mechanist’s layer for a water pump but it requires patience to build onto because the area that will allow construction is so ridiculously tiny. Hangman’s Alley is good for making an artillery array. The central location means you’ll be able to hit a lot of the downtown area if you need to.
Spectacle Island is too big for the game. It loses track of people at one end when they move to the other. Power has a similar problem. I usually build two small independent settlements at either end of there.
I always hated how some junk and overgrown shrubs can never be modified or removed. The ultimate settlement would have manicured lawns, crack free paths and no liter. Small complaint but it would be nice
The only reason I actually build in some of these places is when I have my nuclear winter and survival mode mods on. I disable fast travel as well. The settlements serve as a sort of camp site where I can warm up, eat, drink, and rest as well as stock up on ammo and other supplies for more traveling.
I can provide a couple that I personally love, Total Snapgasm is good cuz it adds snap points to a lot of the settlement pieces that really needed them and Auto-Fencing to save the headache on trying to wall settlements off when used with a mod that makes Settlement Attacks spawn outside the build zone, Homemaker for some of the items that aren't normally able to be crafted, as for actually fixing landscapes I got nothing as the settlement mods I use are just to make placement of stuff easier
The Mechanist Lair is quite possibly the best location for a personal base (not a settlement!), especially for those planning to ally themselves with the Brotherhood of Steel. Here's my 9+ reasons why: 1) It's never attacked, there's very little enemies / encounters nearby, and the elevator access prevents unwanted figures following you in. No need for defenses at all. Even so, the various entrances into the factory can be blocked easily, turning it into an inpenetrable bunker. 2) Since it's unsuitable to house settlers, you won't have to worry about settler's stealing your stored equipment to defend themselves, as they often do in other settlements. You can finally leave your Fusion Cores in your Power Armor! 3) The industrial, subterrannean location gives it a great secret vault/-bunker/supervillian-vibe. 4) It's one of the very few places where the concrete build pieces actually blend in perfectly with the surroundings. 5) Unlike some other locations, it has a flat floor, straight walls, and all current measurements match the standard build piece sizes, making it easy to seamlessly fit in new construction. 6) The main chamber is high enough to build up to 4 full-height floors in. Added to that various antechambers, and you've got plenty of storage and exhibition space for your favorite equipment and throphies, even far into the late game. 7) Compared to the other 'player base' locations, it offers far more physical build space than Home Plate, and a higher build limit than Boston Airport. 8) If you play your cards right during the accompanying quest, it comes with it's own in-house junk trader that can supply you with some rare and useful components for crafting weapons and robots, as well as buy your leftovers. 9) Its location offers a short and safe trip to both the Brotherhood at Boston Airport and the traders at Bunker Hill, and gives pretty good access to the eastern side of downtown Boston. Location-wise, the Lair can be considered a mirror to Hangman's Alley, which is prized by Survival players for it's central location near Diamond City and downtown.
What's funny is that I'm only on day 3 of playing fallout 4 and I've already acquired a total of 9 power armor suits and 2 were stolen from the BOS bay without them even noticing because if your sneaky enough you can stay crouched right behind the armor and when it says hidden,enter into it and you can leave and drop it off at another safehouse and return for the other armor and repeat the process, something else I'm doing for lots of armors is to collect them from all the respawn locations before I'm lvl 28 then the X-01 armor will spawn at multiple locations and then ill get those as well
Like many others have said, I think Hangman's Alley is pretty solid. I used it for the first part of my Survival playthrough before relocating to Bunker Hill, and it was quite useful due to it's central location. The space restrictions made it difficult to make it look good, but it was serviceable. I took the built in hut as my house, kept some of the small shacks and built an awkward floating room above it all for the settlers to sleep in. The biggest issue I had with it was the noise. The settlers, companions and occasional brahmin would not stop talking. Bunker Hill was an upgrade though. To bad I never finished the playthrough due to the Brotherhood questline glitching out on me.
I haven’t done much with hangman’s alley, besides scrap all the useless junk or stuff that’s cluttering the place (like I do with all settlements), put beds in the existing raider structures, put a couple turrets and a couple crops. But it’s very a very unique settlement that is very close to major points of interest, so that’s pretty cool. It’s not exactly my cup of tea for a main or even secondary base (I prefer country living) but I can see the appeal of the place. It’s not a bad little spot, and quite fun if you’re the creative type I imagine.
Every time i play through the game i always make Hangman's Alley my first main settlement. The idea is to have no workers here and make this my personal area where i store all the junk and everything else from my adventuring. 1 turret on each entrance is all that is needed to keep me safe while i work there. 0% random attacks. I of course choose another location as a trade only center and connect to it for access to all my junk. Not all settlements are for giant towns full of people lol, would be boring if that was the case.
Hangman's Alley is my main base of operations while roaming Boston. I was able to block off the entrances with sentry guns and gates, construct a three-level living quarters, and make it fully sustainable with crops and water, in addition to housing an artillery gun, all in the vanilla game. If you can't make Hangman's Alley work, then it's not the location's fault.
For Vault 88, I don't even bother removing the debris blocking the other sections. With careful planning you can get your 20 settlers, shops, crafting, stores, and food/water into that first area. And then I just leave it at that. The resources needed to build all the hallways and door to other sections isnt worth it and makes defending a huge pain. But if you keep it to just the first area, the raids always come from the main entrance and you can just fill the security area with 40 turrets and just pop in to see 5 super mutants get wiped out in 5sec. You do get stuck with the quest to explore and unlock the rest of the vault but it's a small price to pay.
Hangman’s alley is actually one of my favorite places to build, primarily because after a while I started playing mostly survival mode and in regards to that hangman’s is in a great location and while it doesn’t have the most open spaces it’s both easily defensible and encourages more vertical expansion rather than horizontal
Vault 88: In addition, the AI can't handle all that space. You have no choice but to build only in the railyard because the settlers will never leave that area. Coastal Cottage: in addition to that, there's a respawning Mirelurk Queen nearby that can cause trouble. Jamaica Plain: You have to get pretty creative to make it work. It would've been nice if more of the town was within the buildable area. Mechanist's Lair: What was the point of making this a settlement location? Hangman's Alley: I have to agree. It's not easy making a good home here.
Coastal cottage takes the cake for me. The only place that's not buried in unscrappable debris or trees is the side of a rocky hill. I have never even attempted building here without mods that allow me to scrap all the crap
As valid as every critique of Hangman's Alley is, I can't help but love it. I made a dog fighting, gas mask, a brutal forge coded settlement that screams "No weaklings here, you gotta be tough".
I always used the Coastal Cottage as a non-settlement player home. To be fair, I've used mods like Scrap Everything for so long, I actually didn't even know most of the stuff there was unscrappable in vanilla FO4. But yeah, I always make a small mansion with a ground foyer and kitchen, a second floor with guest bedrooms, a third floor with the master bedroom and party balcony ( grill, picnic tables, and one hell of a view), and a basement bunker with a powered door, first aid supplies, ammo, weapons, food rations, a fridge full of purified water, a clean bed, and a radio tuned to Diamond City Radio. Outside, there's a party porch with multiple grills, tables, and patio furniture, surrounded by turrets. Turrets also line the sides and rear of the house, just in case, and the only dedicated path up to the main house is just turret alley. As the only resident, if something follows me up the path, I just make a dead sprint for the bunker, and flip the switch to seal the door, locking myself inside, and the enemies having no choice but to face the turrets.
Settlement expander and scrap everything mods are a must-have. Once those are installed, Hangman's Alley and Jamaica Plain actually become really fun settlements. The alley gets expanded to the surrounding streets with water access in the tunnel below and on the river. Jamaica Plain gets expanded to the entire town, giving you all that space to work with. I do wish you could delete more of the buildings and houses there, though.
Came here to say this. With Settlements Extended and Scrap Everything, all these settlements become much more worthwhile locations. Hangman's Alley goes all the way down to the Charles(?) River. You can even set up some elevated turrets to take out the Raiders that occupy the USS Riptide.
Certainly, major challenges for all these sites. But there are always ways, especially if you aren't trying to completely max out, but instead go for something that is simply basic and aesthetically pleasing. Mods help, natch - those that scrap chunks of landscaping are what I consider essential. For Hangman's Alley, my approach is to think of it as a volume of space rather than a patch of ground. Imagine a space that you're putting one large 2-3 storey building in, with crops being grown in planers on the roof. I've found that this arrangement works admirably well for me. For Murkwater, buildings raised on stilts and foundation blocks, with lots of catwalks
Mechanist's lair and Hangman's Alley are actually both pretty good settlements. Mechanist's lair ends up being a good hub to base your supply chains out of as well as making a good location to set up as a supply depot with manufacturing and basic T3 traders, it is also ridiculously easy to defend. Hangman's alley isn't good for large settlements, but it is quite defensible and makes a good supply chain hub as well as serving quite well as an artillery battery, allowing for most of the map to be covered from that location, and similarly to Mechanist's Lair it can also be populated with traders to act as a central resupply location in survival mode.
I remember Vault 88. Instead of sealing it off like the other vaults, I kept the train in place and cleaned up the rest, transforming it into a futuristic train station with vault technology.
"Coastal Cottage" was designed that way on purpose. It's only function was for the "Far Harbor" DLC. So people could save their game before heading out to harbor, which is getting attacked upon arrival. My guess would be: save point before dlc, save point after, survival difficulty, plus if you needed someplace to store things for the dlc, or the settlement in the dlc, plus bring back loot, so that's why I think it makes sense. "Just a transit for a transient"
I've been playing with the "place anywhere" and "scrap everything" mods so long I genuinely forgot how much of a pain settlement building is without them
You don't enjoy dicking around for hours trying to place a wall and essentially achieving nothing? What's wrong with you?
👍 This video just reminded me of how mediocre and annoying Bethesda games are in stock form. I've used the mods you mentioned forever, too. Then again, I'd never WANT to play one of their games without mods.
Mods are for fk wits and noobs 😂
Agreed. I recently contemplated starting a modless game, and was startled awake immediately by the thought.
For real. I can't ever play without them, otherwise I'd probably have a mental breakdown from frustration
You forgot the worst part about Vault 88: the AI pathfinding
When the DLC first came out, I was super excited and finished the whole thing. I built a large enclosed vault in the main cave chamber, only to realize all my effort was wasted, because the settlers would constantly spawn outside the vault walls and get stuck in the cave. I built additional doors, scrapped entire walls, and they were too stupid to even find their beds. Eventually I just gave up and dismantled everything that was nonessential.
Same. Any effort is wasted because your settlers will just stand around in the cavern doing nothing.
Luckily it is a great location for a tato and water farm as long as you don't mind defending it.
what i don't like is the invaders spawning in vault 88 were too deep inside the cave and hard to find
That's if your game doesn't bug and the settlers never even head down the stairs into the vault proper during the quest making quest unfinishable and the vault practically worthless.
The vault-tec DLC itself got released in a shady state. Some of the roof types on the atrium would kill the nav meshes on the tiles below. The game itself still has to rely on mods 100% to make game of the year every damn time. I have 0 to no hope for starfield. In a nutshell its going to be settlement building in space with astronaut preston.
@@neemojenkins881 well I don’t I like invaders come fight but I use powerful mods 😎
I always felt like the very small settlements are meant to act as player bases rather than a town
Yeah Crystal Cottage really only serves as a "one bed only" resting spot.
facts just small outposts it looks like
I just turn them into minutemen military bases
@youcansave15ormoreoncarins75 I vary for mine. For outpost Zimoja, I went for a military checkpoint and even put the sentry bot prototype in a little shack to look as if the people were trying to reprogram it. And I also use murkwater construction site as a "raider" base. And now I'm finally working on King lighthouse as a minuteman outpost. Since technically it's the best spot to look for flares. But this is all for rp.
Jamaica plain is my South Boston outpost since I play on survival
Hangmans Alley is a great site, super useful in Survival mode, super easy to defend Just DON'T scrap the chained door or far wall chained door - Easy access to everything. River travel, Diamond City, Greater Boston, you don't need to spend 2000 caps to buy home plate immediately for sleeping and x1 Settler which you can pick up for a nuka cola in DC makes it great for producing food and water too. It isn't going to ever be a massive location to rival DC, but that was never the intention. Safe storage, easy savepoint, this location is one of the best for a small scale retreat.
That and if you are able to, you can place crop plots on top of potential buildngs for crops
The people who don't like it don't like it because they can't exploit it the way they can with most other settlements. It's a settlement for people with a more tactical goal oriented mindset, not somebody who wants to play the Wasteland Sims.
@@JDLT14ven then it can be used. I use the sim settlements mod and my favourite city plan turns that place basically into a two leveled mall. That can also be achieved in vanilla.
@Mowraq This is true, I meant that Hangman's gets undeserved criticism because it doesn't hold your hand like the big open farms or settlements with accessible water. You have to put in effort in some way or another to get value out of that place but the value is high.
I've used hangman alley since the beginning of my first play through. Its amazingly defended and only has one entrance in my build. Although the pathfinder leaves much to be desired
hangmans alley is quite useful during a survival playthrough- several chokepoints, close to diamond city/their traders and plot oriented locations. centrally located for exploration and trying not to die
I disagree, I crash at this location constantly. Which is the worst thing when you’ve spent the entire in game day doing missions. Not worth losing progress over
@@sirspookyface1532 og xbox one? for whatever reason, boston is crash central. i have continued my playthrough on my xbox one x with few issues (in boston) beyond typical bethesda wonkiness
Ilove hangmans alley, super useful in survival mode
@@NewPaulActs17 yeah OG Xbox. It’s very frustrating to deal with
@@sirspookyface1532 like i said fallout 4 works fine on the one x- they're fairly cheap now or just save up for series s/x.
skyrim is also fairly smooth too
Honestly the tight inconvenient locations are my favorites. Anyone can build a 30 settler base at Sanctuary. Doing the same at Hangman's Ally takes fineness. But I started with mat glitching even before Place Anywhere was released, so I'm something of a masochist
Agree !! These 5 settlements listed were my favorites because of the challenges the game put on us to overcome.
Hangman's Alley was my favorite even in my first playthrough. I LOVE the verticality it requires to properly build a 20-30 person shantytown in such a tight space, though I admit I would've appreciated an increased build height.
It honestly feels like it loses something when you add in mods like settlements expanded, when all the buildings around it open up for your use.
I found that Hangmans alley was a pain the ass until i made it into a kinda superhigh defensive Checkpoint settlement, some where to pass through store / restock Md modify gear in-between quests ,i found coastal cottage was the worst for me
@@typhousneon-777 See, I usually theme Hangman's all as a combination military base and logistics depot. The idea being that it is how the [Faction of choice] settlements do business with DC as well as were the [Faction of choice] patrols near DC are based. It is also were several trade routs end up, so it usually looks the part.
You're one of those people that enjoys shaving with a weed eater... ;)
I actually love Hangman's alley, its my favorite places to build, as if you accept its limitations and try to build within them, it creates an incredibly interesting challenge to overcome. One way in which I did this was by learning to construct half tile by 1 tile sized npc homes, as well as allocating the back half of the alley as literal farm area, rather than just where i stuck some crops, the NPC's cant path there, but By constructing a bar on the bottom center of the alley the path-confused npc's mill around the bar area. By limiting construction to to rim of the alley otherwise, I created a 4 level megaton-esque town, that's mostly open in the middle. Additionally by playing around with the build dimensions of concrete walls (since they have separate placements from other walls) as well as the ladders and wall sizes of barn and workshop wall, you can build a structure using pre-fabs ABOVE the build limit, that furniture and NPC's can be built on and have access to, because the floor of the 4th story is just below the build height limit. Its one of the most limited build spaces yes, but once filled in it feels INCREDIBLY fallout. do I wish there was a higher build hight, as well as the ability to build on the roofs of adjacent buildings? yes, I would have loved to make a Pitt style Up-Town area, but what I do have is tons of fun. And as a bonus, my personal home build above the farm, is spacious, and never suffers the threat of NPC's stealing my goodies since they can't reach it.
This is what I was thinking! I used the overhead thing to line all my power armor on
Yup. This was the first place I liked and just used console commands to get rid of the bodies. Never played more of 4 to really look for better locations though
I basically turned Hagman's Alley into a little extension of DC where the rejects can go if they don't want to be in Goodneighbor. I moved Piper, Nick, & Sheffield there. I used that unscrappable raider Shack as Sheffield's place & put Nick's & Piper's offices on the other side of the alley. The middle is just a few shop keeps & their homes. I think the highest I go is 3 stories, tops.
Hangman's Alley is good on Survival because it's centralized and near Diamond City. It becomes my main settlement outside Starlight.
#1 do not open any of the doors, this limits attacks to just one area. #2 The fact that NPCs won't go around the corner keeps them stealing the players stores when they are placed there. #3 building there is a challenge but when overcome a satisfactory settlement very possible.
Hangmans Alley definitely wasnt easy, but I have 38 settlers there and its a major hub for my settlement network consisting of 13 other settlements and 8 raider settlements. The key to success at Hangmans Alley is building a second floor and layering with garden plots for crops.
That's exactly what I did, the second floor area enormously increases the amount of building you can do & I've blocked off all but the main entrance to stop enemies from attacking from anywhere except the front entrance, which I've heavily fortified with every defensive weapon system you can build🫡
@@Foxbody429 Ive found that enemies spawn within the walls though, no matter how heavily fortified the entrances are. Of course I used a "delete everything" and "no borders" mod, so hangman alley is more of a hangmans blvd 🤣
@@ej732 I've noticed that too, so I've put shotgun turrets inside the settlement & guard posts with heavily armed settlers equipped with the best armor & the most powerful weapons that I can give them & when random enemies appear, they are quickly annihilated 😅
@@Foxbody429 Good call. All this talk of F4 I may have to turn on the xbox. Ever since the Redfall debacle I swore to not turn it on till I sat down to play Starfield.
Hangman's alley is unironcally one of my favorite settlements with mods, I usually like to make it a shanty town or a "mini" NYC like location with neons lights n all
Gray gaming: Hangman's alley is the worst settlement in Fallout 4 murk water construction site: am I a joke to you
I actually managed to make something interesting at Murkwater Construction!
Granted, it was a Railroad safehouse, so it was literally a nicely-decorated shack with a Railroad flag up, but...
@@anon9469 same it was a SCP containment site for the queen that spawns they're all the time
I literally poured like 15-20 hours making a multistory floor on Hangman's Alley. A shop on a second floor and a bar at the third floor. You just have to think creatively as obvious lol. Btw it's a great settlement sight for me.
@@jonathanm.ollerjr.6486I glad it has its fans but I'm not one of them its
Swampy and the queen will respawn all time
I actually built a really cool looking 'swamp village' at the Murkwater Construction site once. Granted, I used a ton of mods to expand the borders and stuff, and it was a pain in the ass to build, but it ended up being really atmospheric and was one of my favourite builds.
The whole town was made of wood and was up on stilts, and it had a ramshackle wooden walkway going around the whole town with buildings on the outside of the walkway. I had a giant, guarded front gate at the entrance and walls around the whole town. In the middle of the town was a military watchtower, a greenhouse and Tarberry farm. I placed a load of coloured lights in strategic places too so the place always had a cool 'glow' to it.
I had a really cool pub in that town too, with the arcade machines from the Creation Club, and I'd set up a stage with a fake Magnolia from the Third Rail 'performing' her songs (it was just a female settler in a sparkly red dress and a wig, assigned to a DEF6 guard mat placed in front of a microphone, with modded radios that only played Magnolias songs dotted around the stage, but it was a pretty good illusion lol)
The Vault can actually be connected to all the caves, I've done it in vanilla. My vault had a five story atrium, a club, a dedicated science lab next to the water purifier, and a gun range and 3 story basketball court. It's not without its problems, like adequately lighting everything, but it's awesome when you put work into it.
There's one cave that's so difficult to get through that someone made a mod to do mist of the work.
I’m glad someone else brought up Vault 88. It was meant to allow us to build our own vault but it’s designed so poorly that you have to pack everything into the main area or else you’ll be forced to go through the caves because connecting things sucks
It’s almost impossible to build a nicely sized and fully connected vault
If using the prefab tunnel parts connecting the caves isn't that hard at all. I used the entrance as starting point and it lines up quite good actualy. The tunnels and vault walls are also connecting electrics, no need for complicated wiring.
I built a banger vault but I made the mistake of going 4.5x the settlement limit on the Xbox one. The New Xbox does a little bit better in the vault but it's alot of quicksaving just to walk from one end to another. But its got everything including a comic book store, a casino, and a super duper mart.
@@A_Smart_Donkey hahah you to?!! I also built a settlement a settlement that’s so damn large that it even lags the hell out of my next generation Xbox? It can’t even render the darn thing
V88 is best as a squatter settlement, small individual spots with a bed or 2, some furniture and a campfire, candles or a barrel on fire, spread em out all over, and you have a shanty cave town. Setup concrete walls, turrets, traps and catwalks at the interval tunnels, and you got the perfect defense
@@A_Smart_Donkey Shouldn't have to worry about that once the next gen version releases later this year.
There are spots in The Mechanists Lair that you can sink water pumps. There are small piles of dirt on the floor that will count. The problem is that when you scrap some of the junk on the floor, it also cleans up your dirt. I usually spin a water pump over some of those piles until I get a green place item prompt.
*looks at small powered water pump with concrete foundation*
Does nobody have the Contraptions and Workshop dlc's installed?
@@Leotheleprachaun I have from day one, but the smaller pump is easier to get to place. The smaller pump alone is a bit finicky, the larger powered one I was finding was a real pain the butt to rotate into the "Dirt" piles. I can place several small pumps around the room and get all the water I need for about 25-30 people.
Hangman's Alley is good if you don't want to spend hours building a giant base. It's easy to defend and can look decent with a minimal amount of effort. I just store the recruitment beacon after getting about 4-5 settlers since that's all you really need for that location.
I just build 6-8 Assaultrons, scrap everything else, take the scrap with me and leave the Assaultrons to guard the area/ store them until I need extra supply caravaners.
Yeah, one thing I like about it is how the borders already have walls. Easier to set up a perimeter, even if you can't put up turrets outside of the walls.
I managed to jam 18 settlers into hangman's alley, but I also used the gun storing glitch to expand my building capabilities
I honestly love hangman's alley, it's been incredibly helpful in hardcore playthroughs, and on my latest playthrough where I build a themed settlement at every available site in the game, I chose to make a very vertical bustling town. Stairs and walkways galore, rooftop bars, bus homes, beds under boards, covered ground level walkway with all the food and trading stands, houses farther up, some drug dens. No electricity, all fire barrels, candles and torches lighting the community. Very comfortable
To me, every settlement with a massive building area with no unique characteristics to it is a difficult settlement. Take Starlight Drive-in for example. Coming up with an interesting layout, and building designs to fill up all of that space is so much harder than fixing the broken house in Coastal Cottage.
@frosty Starlight is nice for someone who likes to build a massive concrete fortress but it's not my style and I find it really hard to work on. I had to stop building when my game performance got a noticeable hit. I had to leave 1/4 of the settlement empty and it already reached 5600 pieces.
Starlight is good for big building builds. Like was mentioned, a lot of people build forts & fortresses there. I've also seen hotels & apartment complexes. I once built an entertainment center with a mall & an MMA arena I generically called The Fight Pit. Had AFT mod, so I took Tommy from the Combat Zone & made him run it.
@@BraddahSpliff Yep, I usually make Starlight into an apartment building fortress. Build a giant box around the water, one entrance, farming and stores all in the center, everyone's happy.
I think the head of Settlement-Command at Bethesda was someone called Zackery Prial and horribly made the border limits of this videos mentions and received a decent amount of hate, he did promise to join the team to overhaul the game's world but not the story, which is a false hope with Todd Howard being the mass of cancer he is. Steam does have a couple of good mods that puts in the unofficial patch and make settlements much better with smaller settlements like Jamica Plain border the entire town and a bit of the park where two raiders spawn in to harass your camp. We shouldn't defund Bethesda, just send the team to deep rehab!
(fuppping comment cut me off!!!)...of the park where two or three raiders go to harass that settlement. We shouldn't defund Bethesda but, send the entire team to deep-rehab!!!
I often find the settlements with the most "challenges" are actually the easiest and most entertaining to build in because of the limitations they impose forcing you to both be creative but not have it be impossibly open ended so that you don't know where to begin
Cope for Bethesda not having a proper building settlements feature without having to download mods
@@alexanderraz. No he absolutely has a point, the places that are hard to build around, can look simply amazing when you build creatively around them. I absolutely love what some people did with hangmans alley for example.
That being said, not being able to scrap really annoying stuff sucks because there are obviously limits to what you can do. And yeah the settlement feature is slapped on top of a game never intended for it. Typical Bethesda indeed.
Facts! And you have al these people commenting talking about “well I use all these mods to play so it wasn’t a challenge for me” or “Bethesda games are so bad you have to mod to get a decent game” idk I sound alike you suck to me. All of these hard locations were actually annoying but once built around look so cool. Like you just gotta get creative
@@diazce95 I do use some mods, but they're ones that help me emulate an existing town you might find that the devs make
@@dicedude1071 I do to now after passing the game and it’s the mods for gun skins, pip boy skins, and the sanctuary hills hot spring one to check it out lol
I personally find the best use for the Mechanists Lair is to have it be a robot provisioner hub. It costs a fair amount of resources like you said, but it makes my settlements look better. Plus if all my Robots are based out of the Lair I'm not losing happiness in other settlements as a result.
It also never gets attacked making for a great central storage.
I agree. Not useful as a true settlement, but I found it makes a great robot provisioner hub, plus a safe warehouse to hold my bulk supply of crafting components, water, food, weapons, etc. Lots of floor space, so perfect for storing complete sets of power armor, plus extra frames and pieces. In the main section I strung loads of lights so it's nice and bright. Built a living space in one corner, and along one wall built all the crafting stations. I use it frequently to drop off extras and do overnight rests. Built some machine gun turrets just in case something found it's way inside, but I don't think they've ever been triggered. FYI, there is one spot on an adjoining hallway where there is a bit of dirt, and you can squeeze in 2-3 water pumps. But of course no way to grow crops.
You watched the Oxhorn video didn't you? 😏
@@daneaster7 I have seen that video, but had come to the conclusion on my own well before that. Although at the time I was unaware of the happiness penalty of robot settlers and had made it in a very in efficient manner.
Vault 88 is one of my favorite settlement. I didn't build a vault, I made an entire undergroung town, Diamond City style, with wood, concrete and metal. I used a warehouse elevator to make three floors filed with shops, houses and wathever your imagination provides you with. The result is a great post apocalyptic atmosphere and the size of the town makes Diamond City look like a village. It's easy to defend if you don't spread into too many caves. Anyway you can't if you don't want a gost town since there is not enough settlers to live in. Entering the main cave and looking up at a three story town provides a very nice view. The main problem: like mentioned above, all settlers remain in the same spots. But still, it's worth it.
wish I'd thought to do that! On the other hand, I wish they'd thought to just give us a cave system with the intent to have us make a subterranean city rather than framing it as a vault. Imo the vault concept would have been better if it was a set of prefab rooms you could choose between without having you manually place walls and floors like skyrim's house building dlc, and then you just decorate the interiors to your heart's content
@@Romanticoutlaw Realistically the game would have needed a real "build mode", like literally something from the Sims. Hell the construction kit offers way better funcionality to place stuff than what they did in game.
With enough resources they could have made it into a game inside the game with real settlement management, ordering settlers around etc. all in isometric view.
Open the wall to the Deathclaws and scorpions area but try not to kill all of them. They will finish of any raiders which spawn or pass nearby their area.
i’m starting a new play through with some i guess “cheat” mods but i’ll try out making Vault 88 a post-war town to the best my ps4 can do because ps4 mods suck so i’ll have to see how that works. anyone know of any good building mods for ps4?
For me, it's Murkwater. All the swampy ground, the unscrapable trees and most of all the Mirelurk Queen that can spawn just outside means I never touch it. Of course, to be honest, in most of my playthroughs nowadays, the only settlement building I do is the stuff around Sanctuary that Sturges wants and fixing up the Castle if I'm going for a Minuteman ending.
Just a suggestion but personally I just like to build lil shanty villages everywhere. Simple and fun since pretty much all you do is take the premade workshop buildings and throw em around then spruce the place up a bit, sometimes I add more unique touches like houses on top of eachother or walls if the location is convenient or dangerous. I also like to keep the population of my villages between 10 and 15, gives me a good growth goal to reach while also keeping every random settlement in the commonwealth from basically nearly rivaling diamond city
I love it too
Just use murkwater as a water baron location and it's perfect
for Murkwater I built a square cement habitated-wall. Sort of like a military fort- but instead a star fort, its just a square. use the middle area for crops and what not, build the "walls" as hallways with various built-in rooms. Make it two or three stories tall. Have outward facing concrete-windows with guard positions there. Works well.
'Listen, lad - we live on a bloody swamp, so we need all the land we can get...'
Tip for Vault 88: avoiding scrapping the two barricades (the one in the subway area, and the other in the pharmacy area) prevents attacks from the caves, as those two points are enemy spawn poinst who gets activated by removing said barricades. At that point, the only enemy spawn point will be the one at the front gate. Close the gate and watch raiders rant about it ^_^
Exactly. I didn't destroyed the barricades and closed the door. However even if they get in they encounter codsworth&ada in exchange. Fully modified killing machines 😂
There is definitely a reason that whenever I build Vault 88 it becomes an underground city where each building is its own Vault Tec style build. It's far too difficult to make an actual Vault without mods so I just make a town.
Yea they really hooked us in with that one lol. Bethesda has a sick sense of humor sometimes
build limit alone ruined it. built half a vault in the main entrance and ran out for the entire area
@@halflife2fun Yeah that too. I know its to help performance but why give us basically the entire south eastern part of the map in build size but set the build limit to the same as red rocket.
@@LordPhantomWolfe could have done something like multiple sectors with individual settler caps and build limits but count as one in total food, water, defense, and settlers. Would have made it feel a lot more populated and vault like. Maybe even a additional "overseer's office" sector as a player home.
I mean sectors as in going through load screens thereby circumventing performance issues
@@halflife2fun Yeah but Tom doesn't allow us to have nice things.
The thing about Hangman's Alley is that it's unfortunately the best settlement for Survival Mode. It's close to Diamond City, in the middle of the map, but most importantly it's right next to the CIT ruins, which is the only location you can teleport to in Survival Mode.
Coastal Cottage would have been number 1 on my list. Not only is it a bad build area, but the site is so far north east that it might as well be in Far Harbor. I can only think they put it there because at the point in game that you get there, you should already have done a bunch of other settlements. Therefore you should have some kind of skill beyond beginner. But still, that place is horrible. I think I only ever built there like 3 times. & once was only because the Railroad made it their Mercer Safehouse.
Coastal cottage is my favorite, I made a bunker under the damaged house. Made it look like it was hidden and built before the bombs dropped. I keep the entire area simple and use it as one of my main player homes.
I love that one
@@sarris3712 This. It'd be great for your private retreat/personal home if you could actually build on more than 25% of it.
@@anon9469 it would be lovely if you could rebuild the homes instead of having to scrape/build around them
I hate how badly they forced settlements down your throat. Literally two of the main quest lines have no way to avoid using the system.
Just a little addition to the vault 88 buildable area. The way it's walls are placed is just infuriating. They are just like 20 cms shorter than the size of a block and so when you're planning to place 2 additional blocks on each side of your vault, you burst in tears having to replace everything you've made already.
I actually really like hangman's alley. It's definitely one of the more challenging locations and I think that's what I like about it
Same, I liked building a small town down there.
@@joaquinvideo2959 which one is your least favorite?
@@babyatemydingo574 hmm probably the one from robot dlc
@@joaquinvideo2959 I wouldn't know how to rate that one, honestly. I never used it after I got it lol I kinda want to see what I can do with it now though
The Mechanist's Lair is a very good settlement for the one thing I saw it used for, supply lines. The guy built one robot for every settlement that exists, didn't modify them at all, and sent them to supply line all of the other settlements. This way, having the robots doesn't lower the happiness of the settlements because every robot is considered to permanently have 50% happiness, and now all your settlements are connected without losing manpower. The guy also built a fun crazy contraption with conveyor belts in there because he could.
For Jamaica Plains I usually put crops and water pumps in the parking lot, then use the broken second story to place building tiles to have people live there; by using the balcony pieces you can have elevated watchmen during attacks. The bus on the corner can't be scrapped but you do have _just_ enough area within the buildable zone to put a turret up there. Since enemies can spawn to the south it is best to point the turret in that direction. Settlers don't go south normally either, so you can even put some traps at the extreme end of the buildable zone and have them hit enemies(a rarity given how much of a PITA it is to use traps normally).
Jamaica plains is also able to be fully walled off to keep hostiles only attacking from gates in the wall.
Yeah, Jamaica plains is basically a bunch of kill boxes and you can easily turn the central area into a fairly impenetrable keep.
Jamaica Plains was actually fun for me, I built an urban fort around the two ruined buildings side by side, with artillery on the roof and crops inside in planters. Hangman's Alley is also a fun build site. Meanwhile Murkwater Construction Site is somehow not even on this list?
The bus can also be used as a secure entrance wince you can run up the broken lamppost and run across the bus to jump over a wall if you wall in a portion of the compound. The AI is not smart enough to make that jump.
I went with a tall concrete building on top of the parking lot with a full-height gap underneath for stairs and water pumps. One of my busiest settlements
Using some settlement mods that allow you to scrap and place much easier, I've actually found Hangman's Alley to be one of my favorite spots to make a settlement. I love verticality, and that settlement pretty much forces it.
I actually really like Hangman’s alley. If you just take it from the North side and don’t unlock any of the other doors, it becomes one of the most easily defended settlements in the game. All that space that settlers don’t go to is perfect for making a kill box that shreds, burns and bruises whatever’s stupid enough to come waltzing on in. Yeah it’s a small build area but it doesn’t have to be a sprawling township either. Just enough food and water to be self sustaining and maybe a shop or two and you’re golden.
Also, if you screw up and open the other doors, you can place obstacles like concrete or wood walls to block entry.
Protip for most of these; use the scrap everything mod. I think it's available on every platform and it definitely helps in Coastal Cottage and Hangman's Alley
i usually use "Spring Clean" for this. Does the same job and really turns the settlement building into how it SHOULD be.
Breaks the game
@@DirtyDev "Breaks the game" even more.
I've actually used Hangman's Alley as my primary player character residence in most playthroughs, mainly for it's central location. For whatever reason, I have never had as much trouble with spawns and attacks - about four turrets overlooking the doors and 1-2 NPC guards seem to make short work of them. It is much better with mods to increase the scrapable material, of course.
I've refrained from unlocking the "back entrance" (the chained door) and thus eliminated a bulk of the invader situations; that said you CAN construct turrets that gun down anything loitering outside of that gate has had positive results. I've built upwards pretty effectively to become an average sized settlement, which is impressive for how it begins
@@abelsabrowsky4470 Yep, I do that sometimes as well. With a little maneuvering you can also place turrets on the fire escape on that side, giving them a pretty good field of fire over the alleyway beyond.
I preferred the lighthouse. I put a bed in the top part and would regularly take my characters partner there.
If you use the mod "better hangmans alley" then this would likely be why. It raises build ceiling, makes things scrappable, and fixes the spawn locations of attackers to be outside the settlements area. It's a great mod and I consider it a must-have if you want to build there. I tried building there vanilla on a vanilla play through last year, and had all the issues mentioned in this video. Lost all my settlers to a super mutant attack and then got suicide nuked when I fast traveled to help clear them.
I once made Hangman's Alley my player home.
To each their own, but I grew to really dislike all those windows of the buildings that surround the buildable area. Yes, game wise I know they are walls. But it bothered me thinking that in the "real" world it would be easy for an attacker to break into those buildings and use those windows to snipe from to attack Hangman's Alley.
In my current playthrough I used Sim Settlements 2 to build something basic there and use it only as a place to store companions.
If you don't open up the back entrances to Vault 88, you can bottleneck your enemies at the Vault Entrance and it takes seconds to repel an invasion. It's actually THE easiest to defend that way even without mods.
wow that's a good tip
Hangman's Alley is actually my favorite.
Don't get me wrong, it's a pain to fit in builds, but not impossible.
Usually my central hub for northern and southern settlements.
I use it as my waypoint between my north and south networks. I usually hub The Castle in the south and Starlight Drive-In in the north. I build up Hangman's Alley a bit and put in enough settlers to hold it so that my supply chains don't get broken.
Hangman’s Alley, you think, “well, MAYBE I can finagle this to work”
…then the random Brahmin shows up and refuses to leave.
I actually find the vault one to be my favorite, it can give you a lot of resources and it's easy to defend since enemies can only come from 3 places as long as you stick to one area of the vault that is
yes do think 1000 defense and all settlers armed with automatic plasma rifles do the job
If you don’t open the chained doors, I’m pretty sure they only attack from the Vault door area.
@@thomas.parnell7365 i just stick with heavy lazer turrets at all entrances 2 each except for the primary entrance that gets 3 and i just give settlers armor and weapons i get on my journeys (the air port is a godsend for combat armor)
@@codyholley Exactly. I have every entrance so heavily fortified that NOBODY could get in. At the sewer entrance I built a long, complicated maze with machine gun turrets throughout and at every turn. At the pharmacy entrance, the whole shop is filled with machine gun turrets, and so is the cellar. And so far I have NEVER had even ONE attack get through.
@@richardreinertson1335 my second favorite is the starlight drive in (near sanctuary) that's my main base.
For Vault 88 you can save yourself a lot of hassle if you don't open the other two entrances. As long as you never scrap the barricades blocking them, attackers can only spawn at the main entrance which is pretty easy to fortify.
hangmans alley is good as a hub in survival mode. You can "quick travel" to the institute by teleporting and so reach it very fast. It is big enough to build some food, water and glue production and all the workbenches you need to modify your equipment. For a big lively settlement it is not the right place.
The Mechanists is one of the more aesthetically pleasing settlements, seeing as it appears to look like it came straight out of a comic book. I was able to build a realistic looking vault with Atrium within the large room so, I don't think it's as bad as you said it was. In fact I think Vault 88 is possibly one of the more underrated settlements in the game. Although I agree that it's genuinely a hassle to find attackers though, I manage. It helps to put heavily armed guards and turrets at all exits, no matter if it's distant from the center. I recommend putting a robot settler as the provisioner for Vault 88 to deal with that high radiation.
Hangman's Alley is my favorite personal settlement in the game. It's easily defensible with just a few turrets and by not unlocking the front and side doors. It has space enough for food and water to make it self sufficient and while every settler might not get their own house, I found there to be enough space for the limit to hit. I've also never encountered the problem of AI not going to the back.
I absolutely LOVED the format and the commentary of this video. It was so engaging and I couldn’t help but stay attentive the entire time. Super witty and super entertaining! Subscribed 😎😎
I actually really liked the mechanists layer, especially in combination with the contraptions DLC.
I set up a massive underground factory, that i supplied with scrap etc from ther settlements, and in turn i turned that scrap into guns, and ammo via the presses in contraptions. I also built some original looking industrial protectrons, and guarded the entrances via mag lock doors, and turrets.
Yeah, I think that's actually the point that I minutes later. Not supposed to turn it into a settlement for people, you're supposed to turn it into a manufacturing plant that produces goods and scrap. No need for food or water, just a whole bunch of industrial equipment and scavenging stations for the robots and you'll never need to carry around junk again because it'll produce a ton of scrap for the other settlements
Oh, and it will never get attacked because it's security rating will always be higher than the zero food and zero water.
I turned mine into another vault lol
And make it the hub of your robot provisioner network.
You can actually get more settlers by going back to the Mechanist and she will send you out destroying rogue robots. Sometimes you will encounter Synths, Minutemen or BoS where the robots are located, but sometimes there will be 3 settlers (usually) wandering around, and you can engage with them and send them to any settlement you like! Be careful not to kill them during any melee though. ;) 👍
No....what do you mean Cotal Cottage isn’t number 1? 🤯
Too small, ugly, hills, and mobs of all kinds wanting to ruin your day
Yeah, I like to use it only as the Mercer Safehouse for the Railroad. It makes sense to funnel synths toward Far Harbor. Even the half-ruined house has a terrible scale for attempting repair work. On the flipside, it is fun to give Laser and Institute weapons to everyone there to see a laser lightshow at night when the place gets attacked. Just be mindful to keep turrets at the north end for when the nearby Deathclaw gets attracted by the noise.
Wiping out the "mobs" is most of the fun, though!
I like to have Hangman's Alley as something like an outpost where I'd make my favorite types of settlers live there and dress them up and equip them with guns to have them look like a spec ops squad stationed there. When the Supermutants get into a fight with the DC guards or me, they'd always come out from the alley around the corner and start blasting. It looked so awesome the first time I saw it, especially seeing the guy who I made something like a squad gunner with his LMG and heavy equipment just walking up at them and emptying the drum mag on them.
Dude... hangman alley is excellent.
Easily defended, and plenty of vertical room to lay down 20 beds.
Building shops is harder, but being a short walk from diamond city, this is a bonkers useful settlement.
I've placed most shops at groundlevel along the longest wall, opposite f the workbench. Used scaffolding and sleeping bags to build usable bunkbeds.
@@hotdognl70 I used 1 level of prefab wood to build a level above ground.
The roof has planters and multifruit trees, and middle has the bunks with turrets on the sides overlooking the entrances.
The limited space naturally funnels attackers into choke points which are easily defended.
My ground floor is used for shops, work stations, and two artillery guns.
@@justinboyett8843 Nice. It's a good place if you like to build creative!
@@hotdognl70 I don't think that creativity is needed. It's a very basic design that works in all settlements, and which mirrors the real work.
Shops & Industry on the ground
Housing in the middle
Security and gardens on top
First and foremost, the 2 best "settlement" locations are hands down Starlight Drive-In and Spectacle Island. Huge building locations and where Starlight gives you a mostly flat plne to build with ease, Spectacle Island gives you a varied but not impossible sloped terrain for different flavors of layout.
I fully agree that the building zones listed in the video are not ideal for "settlements" but perfect for player homes. The concept of building a series of safe-houses and supply depots prior to kicking up the difficulty and activating survival mode has always been my bread and butter.
Hangman Alley is always my first supply depot because you can build it into the perfect choke point by blocking off one of the entrances and littering turrets across the other so long as you don't unchained the 3rd entrance.
Coastal Cottage on the other hand is great for a small military outpost. Don't build wide, build tall. Think like the Iron Islands from GoT. Tall towers protected by a turret network and place an artillery piece or 2 at the tops of your towers and connect them with catwalks.
What would have been amazing is giving your settlements more weight to the story. If you "claim" all settlements but don't build them up you get a prompt about having enough resources but not enough man power. If you build a few settlements extensively you get a prompt about being prepared but outnumbered for a final battle.
Ah Costal Cottage. I remember this one vividly
It was a fun challenge to conquer, and I'm happy with what I ended up making... But damn, I do *not* want to do that again
I love Hangmans Alley, it's an amazing spot for survival difficulty and I actually prefer the compact living
The issue I still have with the vault location is that you can't seem to build an upstairs area in the main chamber. If you put a stairwell in to go to a second floor, they absolutely will refuse to go up the stairs. Instead they'll just crowd around the base of the stairwell and just stare at the forbidden high ground.
Don't do it dwellers, I have the high ground
AI pathing is what ruins so many build locations. most are too stupid to go to work and jsut stand around.
@@theghostofthomasjenkins9643 100% true
Chances are you have some floor pieces that haven't snapped properly, I suggest you remove them and try snapping them again.
Airport is best used as a Gunner farm with the cages, you can fit up to 12 cages against the back walls and place a fence in front, rig up a switch, a turret and some cover and bam, you can farm all the high level equipment for yourself and your settlers with ease, making the Airport one of the most useful locations in the game. Hangman's alley is perfect for a 'main base' settlement due to it's location (especially in survival where there isn't any fast travel) don't unlock the side door or the back door though, just the alley, this makes it super easy to defend, and keeping your population low, lets you recruit new settlers really fast, outfit with the gear from the Airport farm and then send them to the settlement where they will live. It always amazes me that people take issue with some of these settlements instead of turning it into an advantage.
I have Gunner- and Raider cages is most of my settlements, enclosed in concrete with turret towers near them. When a gunner or raider is trapped it seems to trigger rescue attempts from his comrades. Always piles of bodies to loot and no need to reset the traps.
And indeed, there are no bad spots for settlements. Only challenging spots.
Dude, I've been getting back into fallout 4 (currently over 2k hours) and wanted to master building settlements in every area I can and your videos are straight up golden, and I greatly appreciate your work effort, and time, easily gained a subscriber with masterful writing in this review, hooked me with the Vault 88 review as to me it seems like nobody's really talks about that settlement.
I give them the essentials to be happy and to defend themselves (including arming the settlers with the best armor and weapons I can acquire over time). I went crazy with the design initially when it was all new to me but now given it obviously has no real bearing on the game, I don't bother much with it.
@@synergygaming65 I guess the real bearing is the adventure we've had along the way
@@moboatz lmao also... how tf did you clock over 2k hours? I'm on 700 now and that's mostly because of mods, usually building something, decorating or just trying to make my character look as good as possible.
@@pbluma it's just me coming back every year playing for like another 200-500 hours lmao. I swear I'm always finding something new and that's what makes it so special to me
@@moboatz As long as you're still entertained by FO 4 after so much time is all that really matters. There's always a settlement to build and improve. I'd play it more if my gametime wasn't monopolized by Neverwinter. Damn dragons....
I love Hangmans Alley! As a recruitment area. I build a concrete block house to block the street/sidewalk entrance with about 10 beds and stop in occasionally to send everyone not involved in the 12 food production to actual settlements.
I actually love hangmans alley it's fun to build in and the challenge for space is really amazing when you've played the game for a long time
Murkwater construction site. With a mirelurk queen that constantly respawns _inside the settlement._ I didn't realise she would respawn, and I put my main building directly over her spawn point. Result: Whenever I arrive, there's a mirelurk queen clipping through the floor of my settlement.
Vault 88 is actually one of the easiest settlements to defend. If you don't scrap the barricades that create the other entrances, the only place enemies spawn is at the vault door. Just fill the welcome area with turrets and you're done. That said, I absolutely hate building there so that's pretty much where I stop. 😅
I'm perpetually frustrated by Covenent, because it looks like it should be a great location, but you have to contend with owned items, unscrappable turret remains, and just overall inexcusable bugginess.
I gotta disagree with your main point on Vault 88. I always connect several of the large rooms without needing to leave the vault at all. There are stairs in the vault tileset and the different levels are designed to be at the perfect height to build on after you go down the tunnel with a staircase. Scrap the wall behind the water purifier pond and you can go around the other way to build a non broken vault all the way from the entrance to the water purifier room, I like to make a little maintenance catwalk around it. Another fun spot is you can build above the ceiling I-beams in the main area if you use an elevator to get up there. Settlers can't use an elevator, but it's a great spot to build your private suite.
Where it seriously fails without mods is the settler sandbox area. By default the settler AI sandbox area only covers the main central chamber so any builds that you make in the other chambers will be fully ignored by settlers. Nothing like arriving there to find all your settlers standing around in the middle of your atrium unable to find their jobs. If you want settlers to use what you have built you have to use a mod to expand the sandbox size or be limited to only the main chamber.
EDIT: Oh yea, and the light range is terrible by default. I would never be happy in my vault without a mod that gives all the light fixtures a larger radius. Without that mod the place is more a dungeon than a vault.
U r the goat for putting a whole essay
I agree. Figuring out how to snap the Vault 88 pieces together made me want to tear my hair out, but that was the hardest part about building in that space, to me.
@@micahsimon94Late answer,but that was literally easy for me. Even for the first try. Also you have power by default. Water if you connect generators to the purifier.
You don't need to connect that purifier/generator the your vault directly. If its running,then the water problem is solved.
Problem is with Vault 88 (i want achievements on Xbox so mods out of the question) is the settler Ai. They do something or they stand in the middle of the atrium.
My other problem is the building size. Thankfully i'm not a fan of building in Fo4 so the entrance area is more than enough for me even tho i could increase the settlement size with the weapon glitch.
Food also can be solved with gardening pots. Its one of the safest settlements in game. If you don't destroy the 2 barricades then they don't attack from multiple direction. If you close the door that solves the siege problem completely in my experience(Vault 88 only got attacked after i destroyed one of the barricades)
I built it and in most of my playthroughs Vault 88 is my homebase. Because most of the time i deal with Barstov and go on without its quest 😂
However one of the downsides (if you want it) building Vault 88 will be a horror game if you have a fast robot companion
I actually love hangman's ally. It's so fun stacking buildings and scaffolding on top of each other to make a towering alley town. Its challenging to work with in all the ways I personally like, and its SUPER dependable. On top of all, its it's aesthetically pleasing to me and great for survival playthroughs, since it's pretty much at the center of everything if you need a place to stop doing your travels. Seeing settlers all huddled up in darkness around fire barrels while armed to the teeth at night just makes me feel so cozy
There's so many amazing areas that you can't have that I'd much rather for settlements but they really dropped the ball on this one
As someone who does no hit runs, hangman’s alley is my absolute favorite as it’s easy to stay low profile, easy to defend, near diamond city and vault 81 for safe trading, and near the river for stealthy travel. However I totally get that it sucks for big/resourceful settlement building.
I love Hangman's Alley and Coastal Cottage! The odd terrain and surrounding dangers make for a fun challenge to make the base "work" - which is why I didn't bother with the Diamond City site or those two other bland ones that are underground. Spectacle Island, with all its mirelurks and sprawling territory, is another fun one to develop so I'm guessing it was considered for this video too :}
About Hangman's Alley - it's actually quite useful, more as a base of operations more than an actual settlement. As you said, it has an amazing location from which to access Diamond City and the rest of the Boston Ruins, making it perfect for an early game survival base.
These are the type of settlements that I simply build just for myself so I have a place to put my stuff while I'm traveling between places. I like to play on survival so no fast travel makes it a little bit more useful.
I use the lair to build bots that I use as my provisioners, as you pointed out with the lack of food/water it is pretty much all you can use it for.
As a Survival mode player, far-flung settlements are my least favorite. Somerville, Coastal Cottage, Murkwater, Ozinga, even Sanctuary! I grew to dislike putting in lots of time and resources into a place you rarely see. Even Starlight Drive In starts to feel out of the way.
I’m more focused on building up settlements that I visit often. For me, County Crossing is #1. What puts it over the top is being located at the shore, near the waterway crossroads. Swimming everywhere is a cinch, and fast . (And a brief respite from encounters) (remember to get the 25% faster swimming magazine). After that, Hangman’s #2 (DC’s Home Plate can’t be linked with provisioners). And #3 Jamaica Plain.
funny my go to settlements are Sunshine Tidings because I found it the easiest to wall off in vanilla (Auto-Fencing is a such a time save I swear), Abernathy Farm for the same reason and Home Plate because I find it useful to have a central location as a push off point
Nice choice!
Never considerred swimming much as I'm an over-user of Power Armor. Might be worth give it a try more often!
(My drugs imperium payinf fore the cores needed lol)
@@hotdognl70 Hi. Yes! Swimming! It’s the #1 reason I don’t play using power armor anymore.
My first playthrough, I dedicated myself to a power armor build. I was playing on survival, and ever since Concord, where you get the full T-45, it just seemed so cool. No regrets.
But I knew swimming was fast. I forget when it finally dawned on me. I just knew that on my second playthrough, I would try Survival without power armor, so i could swim. It’s so powerful.
Swimming gets me places, often in half the time or less. Especially since there’s no fighting. Which is great for a couple reasons. One, fights take time, and resources. It makes planning what to take easier, if I don’t have random encounters. Two, I can get more use from the bonuses given by Well Rested and Lover’s Embrace. And three, after completing a quest, or after getting a particularly strong legendary, there’s nothing I want to do more than save my game. And swimming is safe.
Overall, the time saved swimming is too good to pass up. Some of the benefits i listed, you can do walking in Power Armor, on the floor of the sea. It just takes too long for me. Survival is already a lot of travel time.
Cheers.
@@christophercollins3632 Thanks, definatly keep this in mind when I'm goin for a new game. Survival swimmig!
Red Rocket was the hardest for me, but it was mostly due to how I'd set things up. I used it as a hub for followers by completely abandoning the ground level and building a big industrial shelter on the roof, complete with indoor plots for food and stored water.
I then put a reactor genny on top, next to the shelter, ran walls all the way around the perimeter, put two different entrances in different locations and made a giant maze for invaders. Instead of traps, I loaded the place with bottlecap mines and shotgun turrets. Plus, there were parts of the maze that had no ceiling, letting my allies rain hell down from above. It was a bitch to set up and replacing the mines was a hassle (until I peppered the adjacent woods with additional assorted ones), but it was the most easily defensible location I'd made in a while.
If we're doing things without cheats, mods, or exploits, then my least favorite is Homeplate. Not being able to connect it to the other settlements and having to physically carry all my building materials over there has always been enough to kill the location for me. On the other hand, Hangman's is one of my favorites, the shape of it inspires me for some reason. Plus I always make Marcy the provisioner so that she's always under attack. 😂
Vault 88 needs a correction. As long as you DO NOT EVER DISMANTLE THE BARRICADES, all the enemies will come from the main entrance which is easily fortified. Again, if you find your way to the surface through a back route, reload a save. It is never ever a good idea to open v88's back doors.
4:25 I’ve been using “scrap that settlement” and “place anywhere” for so long I forgot how much junk is unscrappable!
I’ve gotta say the best one to me has gotta be Spectacle Island. They literally give you an entire island to build whatever on! You could build an actual town in it if you could have more than a handful of settlers.
Spectacle Island is to big for the engine. It uses more World Chunks than the System can handle, what can lead to the engine not registering things like beds, crops, stores ect on the other coast when you´re standing on one side of the Island. Keeping Happiness maintained is a pain there. And don´t send Robots there on their own. Pretty good chance they bugg out on the floor of the ocean.
@@Ugramosch good thing I only ever made a house there.
I use the Mechanist base as a supply/trade node, where every robot is assigned to provide trade routes to other settlements. Just really only need the capacity to build robots there, plus I'll build a small place to sleep and do workshop tasks. I check on the robots regularly to make sure they haven't been damaged.
I really enjoyed this video. So glad you make these!
Grey Gaming: "Hangman's Alley is the worst place to build!"
Me: "May I introduce you to Covenant?" 😜
I actually use Jamaica planes as a central hub for that side of the map on every playthrough. The parking lot I use for trade, I fix the collapsed floor of the house and use it as a defensive balcony and block off all but one door, the area of the house under that new floor I use as a workshop, then the open street I fill with small housing units for settlers and I block the whole place with walls. It has some odd geometry but with some patience it ends up working pretty well.
Usualy I do almost the same, except for doing the housing on top of the workshop and defensive turrest on roofs and balcony. Initialy I only allowed myself to rug glitch the generator into the porch of the inaccesible building behind the parking lot, looks pretty good actualy.
And the thing body said is it’s just a nice looking area to build, it’s small but not too small and the way things are shaped just make it so much fun to work with
Grey Gaming: describes the 5 worst build locations
Me: *who has made all 5 work. "I don't see the problem here."
Just found myself coming back to this video after almost a year and remembered: "Oh yeah... That video that trashtalks all the locations that made me proud of my mod free settlement builds!"
Sanctuary is the best imo, I only use a few mods for building like place anywhere, spring cleaning and homemaker (i think) which only lets me use more objects from the game. I restore the player's house to pre war state like every playthrough, spend hours decorating it and eventually I planted trees all over the settlement, it looks more like a park now. It's the only place that looks pre war and untouched, had to do all Codsworth's work for him smh
spectacle
island
@@Chuked spectacle island is great if you love building freely
I prefer restoring or expanding on what's there like croup manor, red rocket or kings port lighthouse
@@michael6880 Red rocket is my second favorite place, I just don't like water locations so I've never even been to spectacle island even with 700 hours
There is actually a *very* tiny patch of dirt in the Mechanist’s layer for a water pump but it requires patience to build onto because the area that will allow construction is so ridiculously tiny.
Hangman’s Alley is good for making an artillery array. The central location means you’ll be able to hit a lot of the downtown area if you need to.
i wonder what you're assessment of Spectacle Island would be, as it's my personal favourite settlement area considering how massive it is.
Spectacle Island is too big for the game. It loses track of people at one end when they move to the other. Power has a similar problem.
I usually build two small independent settlements at either end of there.
I always hated how some junk and overgrown shrubs can never be modified or removed. The ultimate settlement would have manicured lawns, crack free paths and no liter. Small complaint but it would be nice
The only reason I actually build in some of these places is when I have my nuclear winter and survival mode mods on. I disable fast travel as well. The settlements serve as a sort of camp site where I can warm up, eat, drink, and rest as well as stock up on ammo and other supplies for more traveling.
Unless you already done it a video on which mods help fix settlements would be nice
A top whatever amount, or a necessities list
I can provide a couple that I personally love, Total Snapgasm is good cuz it adds snap points to a lot of the settlement pieces that really needed them and Auto-Fencing to save the headache on trying to wall settlements off when used with a mod that makes Settlement Attacks spawn outside the build zone, Homemaker for some of the items that aren't normally able to be crafted, as for actually fixing landscapes I got nothing as the settlement mods I use are just to make placement of stuff easier
The Mechanist Lair is quite possibly the best location for a personal base (not a settlement!), especially for those planning to ally themselves with the Brotherhood of Steel.
Here's my 9+ reasons why:
1) It's never attacked, there's very little enemies / encounters nearby, and the elevator access prevents unwanted figures following you in. No need for defenses at all.
Even so, the various entrances into the factory can be blocked easily, turning it into an inpenetrable bunker.
2) Since it's unsuitable to house settlers, you won't have to worry about settler's stealing your stored equipment to defend themselves, as they often do in other settlements. You can finally leave your Fusion Cores in your Power Armor!
3) The industrial, subterrannean location gives it a great secret vault/-bunker/supervillian-vibe.
4) It's one of the very few places where the concrete build pieces actually blend in perfectly with the surroundings.
5) Unlike some other locations, it has a flat floor, straight walls, and all current measurements match the standard build piece sizes, making it easy to seamlessly fit in new construction.
6) The main chamber is high enough to build up to 4 full-height floors in. Added to that various antechambers, and you've got plenty of storage and exhibition space for your favorite equipment and throphies, even far into the late game.
7) Compared to the other 'player base' locations, it offers far more physical build space than Home Plate, and a higher build limit than Boston Airport.
8) If you play your cards right during the accompanying quest, it comes with it's own in-house junk trader that can supply you with some rare and useful components for crafting weapons and robots, as well as buy your leftovers.
9) Its location offers a short and safe trip to both the Brotherhood at Boston Airport and the traders at Bunker Hill, and gives pretty good access to the eastern side of downtown Boston. Location-wise, the Lair can be considered a mirror to Hangman's Alley, which is prized by Survival players for it's central location near Diamond City and downtown.
What's funny is that I'm only on day 3 of playing fallout 4 and I've already acquired a total of 9 power armor suits and 2 were stolen from the BOS bay without them even noticing because if your sneaky enough you can stay crouched right behind the armor and when it says hidden,enter into it and you can leave and drop it off at another safehouse and return for the other armor and repeat the process, something else I'm doing for lots of armors is to collect them from all the respawn locations before I'm lvl 28 then the X-01 armor will spawn at multiple locations and then ill get those as well
Like many others have said, I think Hangman's Alley is pretty solid. I used it for the first part of my Survival playthrough before relocating to Bunker Hill, and it was quite useful due to it's central location. The space restrictions made it difficult to make it look good, but it was serviceable. I took the built in hut as my house, kept some of the small shacks and built an awkward floating room above it all for the settlers to sleep in. The biggest issue I had with it was the noise. The settlers, companions and occasional brahmin would not stop talking.
Bunker Hill was an upgrade though. To bad I never finished the playthrough due to the Brotherhood questline glitching out on me.
I haven’t done much with hangman’s alley, besides scrap all the useless junk or stuff that’s cluttering the place (like I do with all settlements), put beds in the existing raider structures, put a couple turrets and a couple crops. But it’s very a very unique settlement that is very close to major points of interest, so that’s pretty cool. It’s not exactly my cup of tea for a main or even secondary base (I prefer country living) but I can see the appeal of the place. It’s not a bad little spot, and quite fun if you’re the creative type I imagine.
Every time i play through the game i always make Hangman's Alley my first main settlement. The idea is to have no workers here and make this my personal area where i store all the junk and everything else from my adventuring. 1 turret on each entrance is all that is needed to keep me safe while i work there. 0% random attacks. I of course choose another location as a trade only center and connect to it for access to all my junk. Not all settlements are for giant towns full of people lol, would be boring if that was the case.
Hangman's Alley is my main base of operations while roaming Boston. I was able to block off the entrances with sentry guns and gates, construct a three-level living quarters, and make it fully sustainable with crops and water, in addition to housing an artillery gun, all in the vanilla game. If you can't make Hangman's Alley work, then it's not the location's fault.
For Vault 88, I don't even bother removing the debris blocking the other sections. With careful planning you can get your 20 settlers, shops, crafting, stores, and food/water into that first area. And then I just leave it at that. The resources needed to build all the hallways and door to other sections isnt worth it and makes defending a huge pain. But if you keep it to just the first area, the raids always come from the main entrance and you can just fill the security area with 40 turrets and just pop in to see 5 super mutants get wiped out in 5sec. You do get stuck with the quest to explore and unlock the rest of the vault but it's a small price to pay.
Hangman’s alley is actually one of my favorite places to build, primarily because after a while I started playing mostly survival mode and in regards to that hangman’s is in a great location and while it doesn’t have the most open spaces it’s both easily defensible and encourages more vertical expansion rather than horizontal
Vault 88: In addition, the AI can't handle all that space. You have no choice but to build only in the railyard because the settlers will never leave that area.
Coastal Cottage: in addition to that, there's a respawning Mirelurk Queen nearby that can cause trouble.
Jamaica Plain: You have to get pretty creative to make it work. It would've been nice if more of the town was within the buildable area.
Mechanist's Lair: What was the point of making this a settlement location?
Hangman's Alley: I have to agree. It's not easy making a good home here.
Coastal cottage takes the cake for me. The only place that's not buried in unscrappable debris or trees is the side of a rocky hill. I have never even attempted building here without mods that allow me to scrap all the crap
As valid as every critique of Hangman's Alley is, I can't help but love it. I made a dog fighting, gas mask, a brutal forge coded settlement that screams "No weaklings here, you gotta be tough".
Vault 88 logic- let's build a giant Vault protected by a giant door *adds 2 other entrances*
I always used the Coastal Cottage as a non-settlement player home. To be fair, I've used mods like Scrap Everything for so long, I actually didn't even know most of the stuff there was unscrappable in vanilla FO4. But yeah, I always make a small mansion with a ground foyer and kitchen, a second floor with guest bedrooms, a third floor with the master bedroom and party balcony ( grill, picnic tables, and one hell of a view), and a basement bunker with a powered door, first aid supplies, ammo, weapons, food rations, a fridge full of purified water, a clean bed, and a radio tuned to Diamond City Radio. Outside, there's a party porch with multiple grills, tables, and patio furniture, surrounded by turrets. Turrets also line the sides and rear of the house, just in case, and the only dedicated path up to the main house is just turret alley. As the only resident, if something follows me up the path, I just make a dead sprint for the bunker, and flip the switch to seal the door, locking myself inside, and the enemies having no choice but to face the turrets.
Settlement expander and scrap everything mods are a must-have. Once those are installed, Hangman's Alley and Jamaica Plain actually become really fun settlements. The alley gets expanded to the surrounding streets with water access in the tunnel below and on the river. Jamaica Plain gets expanded to the entire town, giving you all that space to work with. I do wish you could delete more of the buildings and houses there, though.
Came here to say this. With Settlements Extended and Scrap Everything, all these settlements become much more worthwhile locations. Hangman's Alley goes all the way down to the Charles(?) River. You can even set up some elevated turrets to take out the Raiders that occupy the USS Riptide.
Preston: there is potential to this place
The place: actual shit hole
Certainly, major challenges for all these sites. But there are always ways, especially if you aren't trying to completely max out, but instead go for something that is simply basic and aesthetically pleasing. Mods help, natch - those that scrap chunks of landscaping are what I consider essential.
For Hangman's Alley, my approach is to think of it as a volume of space rather than a patch of ground. Imagine a space that you're putting one large 2-3 storey building in, with crops being grown in planers on the roof. I've found that this arrangement works admirably well for me.
For Murkwater, buildings raised on stilts and foundation blocks, with lots of catwalks
Mechanist's lair and Hangman's Alley are actually both pretty good settlements. Mechanist's lair ends up being a good hub to base your supply chains out of as well as making a good location to set up as a supply depot with manufacturing and basic T3 traders, it is also ridiculously easy to defend. Hangman's alley isn't good for large settlements, but it is quite defensible and makes a good supply chain hub as well as serving quite well as an artillery battery, allowing for most of the map to be covered from that location, and similarly to Mechanist's Lair it can also be populated with traders to act as a central resupply location in survival mode.
I remember Vault 88. Instead of sealing it off like the other vaults, I kept the train in place and cleaned up the rest, transforming it into a futuristic train station with vault technology.
"Coastal Cottage" was designed that way on purpose. It's only function was for the "Far Harbor" DLC. So people could save their game before heading out to harbor, which is getting attacked upon arrival. My guess would be: save point before dlc, save point after, survival difficulty, plus if you needed someplace to store things for the dlc, or the settlement in the dlc, plus bring back loot, so that's why I think it makes sense.
"Just a transit for a transient"