Hi folks, as I mentioned in the comments for Chapter 69, today is going to be an in-service day where my gaming time gets used to work on some aspects of the Fallout campaign that are happening off camera: notably, building up several sites on the Vault 81 side of the Charles River so they not only look right in the story but also behave properly in terms of game mechanics. 

 

Before we head down that way, let's take a quick look at our current settlements and how they're doing. I'll focus on the ones that have undergone significant changes. 

 

In Concord, the roof garden has taken on rather monumental proportions. At ground level, you can see where one of the punishment-suited raider captives is inventorying and distributing the contents of a supply truck. The ramshackle guard post that Jake helped us erect some time ago has also given way to a more permanent structure, visible down the street from the truck.

 

 

Old Paul's original jury-rigged system for pumping water out of the flooded service tunnels has given way to a more resilient and permanent extraction pump, with no need for long hoses snaking through the tunnels. Purification services are on site, and the treated water is moved to a warehouse just down the street. Since completing these municipal buildings, the only remaining impediment to uninterrupted food production at the roof garden are ongoing shortages of organic materials. We'll talk about that more when we visit Ridge.

 

 

In many of the more mature settlements, building material and junk collection facilities are starting to become surplus to requirements; the same for excess farm plots. In Concord and Ridge, we've started the process of converting these to commercial and municipal plots. Here you can see how one of these junk collecting buildings has been repurposed into a clinic to serve the residents of Concord. The facilities are quite rustic, but they're doing a better job meeting the public's needs.

 

 

Because of the importance of aluminum for high-grade farm operations, Abernathy Farm bucked the trend on phasing out some of its building materials collection; instead, they doubled down and upgraded their main collection point into a dedicated aluminum facility. The other, smaller plots have been changed over to collecting organics in order to meet the game's voracious demand for cloth (a key component for both residential and agriculture operating costs at higher levels).

 

 

As the main food production site for the Concord area, Abernathy Farm didn't remove any of its farm plots. In fact, there's one more area that's practically begging for a farm plot (the vanilla Brahmin pen), though that'll have to wait until either Charley's charisma increases or I decide to assign more convict labor to this location, since the Farm is currently at its population cap. In the second picture, which shows the north side of the farm, you can see the water treatment equipment in the foreground. This allowed the farm to reduce its reliance on manually-built pumps, providing a better resources-to-power ratio as the housing plots get thirstier for electricity.

 

 

The homestead still needs a lot of work - including a new roof - but the upper story is usable now. For the time being, what was supposed to be bedrooms has been turned into a field hospital to help support the Minutemen in the war. Eventually, this upper area will have more housing instead. Downstairs, you can see the transition that's currently in progress. Over time, all of these elements will transition to more modern versions.

 

Lucy Abernathy, after much discussion and argument with her parents, joined the Minutemen and is now part of the Farm's garrison. In the background, you can see one of the custom paintings I imported into ACS. This is a test article, and its final implementation in the game may be a little different.

 

 

Other than some scrap cleanup that happened very early in this campaign, Red Rocket is untouched. Eventually I want to put in a small outpost here focused on scrap collection now that I've unlocked machine part collecting. However, since I don't yet have an immediate need for those, we'll leave this site fallow to focus on other priorities.

 

 

No recent changes at Sanctuary, other than moving the robotics workshop to Graygarden and using its foundation to install a logistics shed. I wanted to have the logistics facility the trading post's warehouse, but there were some technical issues with placement that forced me to go with a separate building.

 

 

At Ridge, the inhabitants have fairly agressively divested themselves of their older junk gathering plots. Ridge was the first settlement to really use ASAMs heavily, and at the time there were very limited building options. While one junk plot and one building materials plot remain, the rest have either been converted to organics or city services. The upper part of Ridge now has a clinic and a turbine power plant, the latter of which allowed us to electrify all the homes in that part of town.

 

 

The convict farm still relies on a separate generator, but it's undergone some upgrades to the main plot. With the small 1x1 farm plot in the back no longer needed, I've converted that to a recreational plot where the workers can enjoy a drink after a hard day of work.

 

 

The other settlements didn't really undergo any changes other than receiving logistics centers. I deliberately used IDEK's logistics shacks to ensure these settlements won't connect with the caravan services plots that Vault 81 will use (and indeed, that we'll be installing some of today). While it's premature to visit it and show off, Thicket Excavations is on the cusp of moving from an outpost to a proper settlement, and soon it'll need some work to fine-tune its look and feel. Below you can see the Vault 111 supply network, not yet covering Red Tourette's settlement or Forest Grove.

 

 

Now, here's our targets for today: Oberland Station, the Vault 81 exterior, Mass Pike West (military outpost/caravanserai), and Wade Street. The one that will need the most prep work is Oberland, since as a vanilla Minutemen settlement it requires a quest to unlock its Workshop. We also have to avoid interacting with certain NPCs to ensure we don't trigger quests that I want to encounter in the story.

 

 

To avoid any drama, I'll disable AI detection for the walk to Oberland. This will let us walk through encounter zones and enemy spawns without having to have a ton of big fights. Below you can see me casually jogging past a bunch of mongrels who pay me no heed.

 

 

Unfortunately, when I got to Oberland Station, I was unable to start it's quest. This is probably because I have an active Preston Garvey quest. Since I don't want to drop that quest, I'll have to leave Oberland unaligned for now. That actually works a bit with that quest I'm trying to dodge, but in either event, we'll be heading to points south and east for the rest of our work today. 

 

We'll start with the Vault 81 entrance zone. This area has already been partially built up, so the main thing we need to do is install caravan services and make sure the resource situation is OK. We might need to spawn a couple more settlers as well. In fact, we'll need at least one to go with the Caravan Services plot. Unlike the other two sites I'm visiting, the Vault 81 exterior settles will have Vault 81 jumpsuits, so I edited his gear once he appeared.

 

 

This guy won't do anything until I set up another station at Wade Street, but let's make sure the Vault 81 exterior is otherwise OK. Right away we can see that there's a food shortage now. Defense level is also suboptimal, but it still meets our current needs. In the future, we'll be tearing down everything here to replace with better quality materials, but for now what we have is sufficient. After some deliberation, I decided not to install more food sources at this site, either. Instead I'll build some agricultural production at Wade Street and connect it by caravan.

 

 

With the caravan post built and some furniture moved to more convenient locations, Vault 81 is all set for now. Not exactly the greatest settlement ever, but it'll serve its purpose as a hub for the other two sites.

 

 

Wade Street is just down the road from Vault 81 and it'll be the next one we set up. This settlement will be primarily a food production site, supplying food and water to the other two settlements. To compress time a little (and account for off camera activity) we'll be spawning settlers instead of using a recruiting beacon. Guards (or more likely, "the guard") will have Vault Tec themed protective gear, but otherwise the inhabitants will use their vanilla costumes.

 

After clearing out the hostiles and activating the Wade Street workshop, I took stock of the situation on the ground. This area was literally knee deep in trash, so a little cleanup should provide more than enough resources to get started with. That was a little deceptive because many of the trash piles were actually landscape items and weren't scrapable, but we still managed to get a good starting supply.

 

 

Mindful of the hostile spawns I encountered on the side closer to Boston, I set up the initial settlement here very close to Vault 81. This seemed to work out pretty well and should hold things in a good position until the plot allows for and demands further development.

 

 

Oddly enough, it seems that I was out of date on a key piece of information about Sim Settlements 2 logistics. IDEK plots will now connect to "vanilla" plots (though they may not have full functionality - need to explore). This makes the game mechanics easier to manage, but it introduced some (momentary) dissonance between the world as I portrayed it and what was actually happening in the game. As you can see below, the IDEK station at Graygarden connected to Vault 81 automatically. Though to be fair, if any of my current settlements was going to do this, it would be Graygarden, considering their good relations with Vault 81.

 

 

I ended up building 3 more farms on Wade Street, then moved on to the Mass Pike site. An interesting detail I discovered was that the network as a whole has a food deficit, to creating some surplus production here will help with the overall picture.

 

Mass Turnpike West is a little tricky to not turn into a resource hog. For both story and game mechanical reasons, it needs a caravan stop and a guardpost, which means a first level it will consume 30 caps per day. Taxes for level one houses are 6 caps per day, so I need 5 houses. The first three were easy: caravaneer, guard, and a scavenger to run the newly unlocked machine parts plot. The other two need a little thought. One of them will be a commercial plot of some sort. The other one will probably be another industrial plot. I'll need to look at the catalog of options to decide. This settlement has some natural restrictions on it as there are no unobstructed places to build a 3x3 plot, making those difficult-to-impossible to use. Fortunately, most plots are 2x2 and those will fit (barely). Because of the large amount of landscape-record trash mounts that I can't easily remove, we'll be using a lot of type 20 foundations, which are basically just leveled-off heaps of trash. This settlement will not have any native food production - it relies on the caravans to keep it supplied and healthy.

 

 

On further consideration, I went with two commercial plots. The second one, nestled beside a flipped truck and under the railroad bridge, is an interior commercial plot (a pub in this case). The purple beer is unintended. This is a SPID issue that I've been halfheartedly trying to track down for a while.

 

 

And there you have it - Vault 81's late to the game, but better late than never effort to secure its territory against the Rust Devil incursions. And with the Mass Pike controlled, they've removed the main 'easy' avenue for a move against Boston proper. We'll see more about what's going on with Vault 81 when we return for Chapter 70.