Yagisan
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Introduction
As I have been churning out City Plans faster than Preston can say "Another settlement needs your help", I've been asked a few times about tips for building a City Plan. I've decided that the best thing to do would be to collect all my tips and advice on how to make great city plans here.Advice will be primarily distributed between Technical and Design advice. Technical being designed to make it much less likely to make mistakes, while design is all about catering to player and settler needs.
Technical
- Use Vortex or Mod Organizer to manage your mods. You will need a minimum of two profiles. A Development profile, and a Test profiles. NMM can do this, but it is very slow to switch between profiles, so I can't recommend it for that reason.
- Make absolutely certain that there are no scrapping mods in your Development profile.
- Define your target audience. PC or Console. Consoles are restricted in what they can use, but City Plans targeted at Consoles will work on PC. The reverse is not always true.
- Ensure that Fallout 4 will continue running if you Alt-Tab away. To do this go to Documents\My Games\Fallout4 and open (or create if not found) Fallout4Custom.ini
- Under [General] add the following.
- bAlwaysActive=1
- Using the MCM, change the Transfer Settlements preset to "Stable". You can Alt-Tab away and read the forums here, browse YouTube, or pretend to be working hard on reports for the office. The export will continue in the background.
- Make a named save of your settlement at Levels 3, 2, 1 and 0. Keep them in a safe place. You will need them if you have to reexport the City Plan.
- Only make City Plans in ESL format. Modern Mod Managers all support this, and you are not wasting limited ESP slots on a single city.
- Use Project Blueprint as much as possible to help build and decorate your City Plan. These items are built into Sim Settlements and Fallout 4, so console users won't need extra mods.
- I recommend adding Sim Settlements Mega Pack - Year One, even if targeting consoles. It will greatly expand the amount and styles of plots you can use.
- IDEK's Logistics Station is extremely popular for a reason. I recommend adding it even if targeting consoles.
- Read Kingath's Tutorials. They contain important commands to correctly develop and test your City Plans.
- Test your plans before release! Make sure it can upgrade all 4 stages, and that each stage looks like your reference save.
Design
- Every Settlement needs a theme. It helps to focus your design efforts, and motivate you. E.g. Molerat Ranch, Fishery, Brewery, Mines, Faction Outpost, Drug Lab etc etc
Browsing the available plots in the addons and expansion packs is a great source of ideas. - Next define how many people will make up this city. The rule of thumb I use is:
- 8 Settlers - Tiny
- 12 Settlers - Small
- 15 Settlers - Medium
- 20 Settlers - Large
- 21+ Settlers - Huge.
- 8 Settlers - Tiny
- Only include a maximum of Settlers minus one jobs or work plots. E.g. If you plan on having 20 settlers, only build 19 jobs or work objects. When you build the City Plan, the City Leader will get the final "job" and the City Planners Workbench.
- Always include a "Player Only" bed in each settlement. You can get these from Project Blueprint. Survival mode players will thank you.
- Always include at least one water pump. Again survival mode players will thank you.
- Settlements do not need to be self-sufficient. It is OK to import Food and Water.
- Always include some water in your settlement. No one would live in a place that imports all of its water.
- Build your fully detailed Level 3 design first. It is much easier to subtract from this design to make lower levels.
- Never move plots between levels. This is not supported by Sim Settlements.
- You can change decorations and workshop objects between levels - provided that you do not change the position of plots. E.g. you can change strut types, walls and roofs. You can totally redecorate outdoor and indoor areas.
Avoid using plots with built in bases. Build your own wood/concrete/other 2x2 bases. If set to "Random Choice" (the Sim Settlements default) you may get plots that include solid concrete bases appearing on top of wooden supports.These plots are no longer available to build in Sim Settlements.- Internal Plots work perfectly fine externally, but you may need to build roofing for them.
- Use Place Anywhere and Console Commands for complete control of what goes where.
- As a rule of thumb, 1 fully upgraded farm supports 4 fully upgraded homes.
- Grow your cities organically. E.g. for a 20 settler city plan I would build:
- Level 0. 6 Settlers. 5 Work Objects.
- Level 1. 6 Settlers. 6 Work Objects.
- Level 2. 4 Settlers. 4 Work Objects.
- Level 3. 4 Settlers. 4 Work Objects.
- Cities need scrap to grow. Industrial plots are best placed in Levels 0, 1, and 2.
- Cities need happiness to grow. Recreational plots are best placed in Levels 0, 1, and 2.
- Commercial plots depend on population. You'll need 11 or more settlers for them to build automatically. They are best placed in Levels 1, 2, and 3.
- A good rule of thumb is at least 1 martial plot at each level. Martial plots don't cost taxes. Turrets do.
- Level 3 must always have surplus taxes. Having settlements constantly spamming "an item has malfunctioned because we couldn't pay for upkeep" makes city plans non-fun money sinks.
- Ensure that your city plan is easy to wire up power cables. Magic powered buildings are not immersive, and power producing plots don't actually produce power until you attach a power cable.
- Hand scrap only as much as you need to scrap. Sometimes that junk is hiding graphical glitches in the settlement, that you'll have to cover over again anyway.
- Use the minimum amount of decorating mods to build and decorate your city plan. My Github link includes a curated list of known good workshop mods.
- Advanced Industrial Plots only build the base plot in City Plans. If you want an Tier 2 or Tier 3 plot - indicate to the player what they should build. I use a signboard that the player can scrap.
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