Hi folks, hope you've been enjoying Charley's story so far. She just reached level 47 at the end of chapter 88, and we're a bit past due to make sure the settlements are all up to date. If you've played Fallout 4, you know that by the time you have this many settlements active, it can be easy to get out of whack with resources and start losing a lot of happiness - especially when Sim Settlements 2 is part of the equation.

 

Additionally, many of the settlements are ready to grow and need more infrastructure put in place. Walden Pond, for example, has really been neglected and reflects a state of development that hasn't changed in a long time. So before we move on to chapter 89, we're going to take a tour through the Commonwealth and update the settlements. 

 

Mass Turnpike West

Departing Diamond City, the first settlement we get to is the Vault 81 outpost on Mass Turnpike. 

 

 

Statistically speaking, things are mostly OK here. Food and water are both meeting requirements, and there's enough housing and jobs for everyone. However, happiness is stuck at 69, which is preventing plots from upgrading. The main unmet need is defense, and that'll be our focus today. First things first, our existing defense plot needs power, and so we'll put in some energy infrastructure in the form of a municipal power plot. After that, I put in some electrical wiring to get power to most of the plots and built a second defense plot. I also built a new multi-occupancy housing plot to support the settlers who will work these new positions.

 

While I was setting everything up, I noticed that cloth continues to be in short supply. This is a critical resource with many inputs, so I'll need to look at expanding organics production when I reach an appropriate location. Last but not least, I added a relaxation plot to help increase happiness. 

 

 

It'll probably be a little while before this settlement gets more upgrades, since it needs time to regenerate its happiness and I don't have time to manually add happiness items. The reason I don't have that time is...

 

Roadside Pines Motel

I'd originally planned to move north to refresh Chestnut Hillock and Vault 81 next, but while I was working on the turnpike I got an attack alert for Roadside Pines Motel. Looks like we'll be going there next, instead. The trip itself was a bit of an adventure, including a fairly serious battle with the Gunners at the Mass Pike interchange. Once we got to the motel, we mopped up the raiders who were attacking and then took stock of the situation. Well, at least that's what I did on the second attempt. The first time, I got ambushed by a raider with a rocket launcher and forced into surrender, ultimately leading to a bad end for Charley.

 

 

Though I have to wonder... where did these random raiders get one of the torture rails from?

 

In any event, things are mostly OK at the motel. Defense is a little low (probably part of why it got attacked) and it needs replacement personnel since they took some losses in the raider attack. Fortunately, I rescued some settlers on the way so the manpower issue is easily fixed. Happiness similarly needs to go up, so we'll see what we can do about that. Before I proceeded any further, it struck me that all this talk about happiness would be easier to address if I had some new artwork to post around the settlements, so I took a moment to add some more wall art to ACS.

 

Since Roadside Pines is Red Tourette's forward base, I tried to select options that reflected her tastes.

 

 

A nice side effect of this project was that I finally learned how to correctly make separate material mappings for the vertical art objects. It actually was really obvious once I walked through it step by step, but its still a good tool to add to my toolbox.

 

Another unresolved issue at Roadside Pines are the mutilated corpses from the raider camp. We'll clean these up by disabling them and then marking for deletion; unfortunately, there aren't scrap recipes for them so I can't just click them away in the Workshop screen.

 

 

Adding a second martial plot fixed the issue with inadequate defense points, but in doing so I discovered that part of why I'm getting blocked from upgrading the plots here is because they need electrical power. That means we need to build a power plot and run electrical lines. Between this and the defense plot, we'll also need to add two more beds. 

 

 

Fort Hagen

Next up we've got the Minutemen base at Fort Hagen. There's going to be a lot to do here - as it exists right now the fort is more or less unchanged from the way I built it for Kellogg's mercenaries. It has very little in terms of resource collection, and in fact it's not even connected to the trade network currently. The last two locations we've visited have been 'security' type settlements with fairly limited resource production. Notably, I don't build much (if any) food production at these type of sites. Fort Hagen will get some food production, and it also needs some industry - especially organics collection which continues to be a blocker on development.

 

 

Because the main fort area is so underdeveloped, we won't activate any of the peripheral areas yet (notably, I tried to activate the Red Rocket at one point but it seems to be bugged. If I can't solve that, it'll remain undeveloped permanently, which is a real shame). 

 

On an unrelated note, we met Fake Preston Garvey on the way there! I've actually never had this random encounter before, so I was delighted to see it worked right. Note that Fake Preston Garvey is a cis guy, as opposed to Real Preston Garvey who is trans. Also, Heather had custom dialogue for the encounter  

 

 

Fort Hagen is, by design, stable. If I ignored it indefinitely, it would just putter along without any issues, but it would never produce anything useful or otherwise contribute to the overall restoration of the Commonwealth. That'll start to change a bit with today, as we build a couple of key things, notably caravan services, organics collection, and food production (currently the fort just barely squeaks by foraging local wild-growing crops).

 

You can see the new work plots below; this had the added benefit of consuming the last of the rescued settlers who were following me around, so I no longer have a huge parade following me everywhere. 

 

 

I also added a recreational plot to make some hobbies available. I had been toying with doing some additional manual work, mostly placing +happiness items inside the barracks. However, I got an alert notice telling me the Slog was under attack, so I had to head up that way instead.

 

 

After fighting off a pretty nasty nighttime robot attack, I took stock of the Slog's situation. Unlike the last couple places, the Slog is a bit complicated. It's short on beds, short on defense, and the happiness is struggling to rise above 50. When we come back for more, we're going to need to address these issues one at a time. The good news is that there are several prisoners incarcerated here and their submission level should be high enough to put them to work by now. 

 

The tour will continue tomorrow as we continue to visit the settlements and get them up to date!