Sim Settlements 2 – Xbox / Cloud survival guide!

[RandomWanderer]

I have crashed for dozens of hours so that you dont have to :D I play on cloud, and here is my Sim Settlements 2 – Xbox / Cloud survival guide!

Sim Settlements Chapters 1-3 are playable on Xbox / Cloud! But you have to be very strict with your mod loadout and also your settlement builds.

I want to share my experience in getting this beast to work.



MOD LOADOUT:

You have less than 2GB for mods. And apparently the last 60mb cannot be used. So beside the 5 mandatory mods, I recommend using the remaining few MB for performance improvements:



Mandatory

Workshop Framework: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

Sim Settlements 2: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

Sim Settlement 2 Chapter 2: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

Sim Settlement 2 Chapter 3

HUD Framework: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...



Performance improvement

Blur Killer Complete: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

EyeSoreBegone: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

Insignificant Object Remover: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

Boston Less Enemies: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

Fast Corpse Despawn: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

Shadow Resolution 2048 to 512: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...

OctoberJemini Tweaks and Enhancements: https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4...



There are a few Mb left

I used these for the Danse Dilemma mod + the no brotherhood hostility.

The cheat terminal, for infinite carry capacity (my game runs better after 100s of hours if I just loot everything that drops so it doesn’t have to remember where stuff is in the world).

Jetpack.

And the ‘better companions’ mod.

But you decide your priorities.

There isn’t room for the official fallout patch or any texture/green mods. You can run Clarity, to improve visuals. Clarity is 2-3mb.



SETTLEMENT RULES!

You can have 20 settlers. But you CANNOT have 20 SS2 plots.

My advice, do not build more than max 10 SS2 plots (of any kind) in any settlement. It’s a shame, I know, but if you are on the cloud/xbox, you just can’t do it. The game will crash often and you will miss out on the amazing story. So keep it to less than 10 (and spread them out, don’t put them in a pile!). You can play with different plots on different settlements, so you get to enjoy them all. Just not one mega-settlement, ok? You will need to delete/replace plots throughout your play too.

I, for example, have 1 industrial, 1 municipal, 1 agricultural, 1 caravan connection, and just 2 residential plots per settlement. Then in different settlements I will add either recreation or shops.

I use regular turrets for defense. And I always build a barn full of beds for the rest of the settlers. 20 settlers is fine. They don’t all need their own houses.

Your settlement should use the "faux power" (click Y at the workbench to find this menu)

If fast travel to a settlement causes a crash (probably), you have to fast travel nearby and run in.



SAVING

Disable autosaves. If your game tries to autosave while loading a settlement, it can crash.

Make a hard save every hour. Do not rely on quick saves. Do not exit save in the middle of a busy settlement and expect it to load up again. (you might get lucky if you spend all night reloading, but don’t put yourself in that situation). Delete older saves often. SS2 saves are ENORMOUS and you don’t want to get locked out of your save space.



And enjoy! The team clearly made an enormous effort to shrink SS2 to fit the memory and capabilities of the older xbox. For which I am so grateful. Thank you.

Feel free to copy this anywhere and expand on it so that other players can find this information.

 

[RandomWanderer]

Update.
I got as far as the Resurgance aircraft fight (hopefully vague enough not to be a spoiler).
Then it was the black screen of eternity. Again and again.
Whatever the game was trying to load after that moment, it was too much for the old xbox on cloud gaming.

The only way past this (and I'm so glad that it worked) was to DISABLE EVERY MOD that wasn't the essential 5. It still stuck on the black screen a few times. But eventually it let me through to the very sweet cutscene.

I will add more as I encounter problems and solutions.

 

[RandomWanderer]

HQ population. HQ really chokes and crashes a lot at the moment. It's really a roll of the dice as to whether I can get through to the NPCs or the elevator without freezing.
I'm slowly dismissing people, which is improving the situation. If I can get it down to 20ish again it will be stable. Unfortunately I'm stuck with some unimpressive NPCs that cannot be sent away (Jun Long for example).
Advice, dont recruit any characters that cannot usually be moved around in vanilla (except Mama Murphey. She has 19 strength! Recruit her!)

 

[RandomWanderer]

HQ crashes.
If HQ crashes a lot when you walk in further from the main entrance, (this certainly became impossible for me) I suggest going outside and up to the roof. There is an elevator at the highest point of the building. Take it down to the basement. Then you can walk to the other elevator in the basement and take the elevator to either the main lobby level (for the com array room) or the upper lobby for the meeting room. It's the best way to avoid crashing, and still not 100% guaranteed. So save before entering HQ.

Also for HQ, turn off all calamities in the holotape settings (turn off infestations and fires and everything like that). The less going on in HQ, the better.


My only advice for the final battle is to learn to snipe. There are a LOT of npcs on both sides. If you run in there, the xbox will have a meltdown.
Stand back and snipe in those big battles.
You will still crash occasionally, so quick save every 10min and hard save every hour.

TO THE AWESOME TEAM WHO CREATED THOS MOD
I would suggest in the xbox version of chapter 3 to halve the npcs on both sides. In every situation. Maybe make more of them elites to keep the difficulty. THANKS!

 

[RandomWanderer]

Mass Bay Medical Centre (Nightinghales quest).

There's a quest where you have to get into the Mass Bay Medical Center.
It's really hard to load the inside of the building. Every attempt to enter the main entrance (with quest marker) resulted in a crash.

I found that it was possible to enter the building through another door - it's in the garage area with the word Emergency outside it. There's a door that loads into an empty part of the building (basement) which loads fine. From there you can't actually get to the NPCs (you can see them but the way is blocked). But having successfully loaded the inside of the building, you can exit, go to the main door and enter again.

I know it's convoluted. Welcome to making things work on xbox.

 

[RandomWanderer]

Post air battle black screen of DEATH!

I figured out what was crashing me after the air-battle (infinite black screen when loading infirmary). I had 1000s of items in my inventory (im a loot monster with infinite bagspace who clicks on everything), and the game tries to move them out into a footlocker when loading the inventory. Im not 100% sure this is the cause (or just a contributor) but dumping all my junk in a locker before the air battle made the HQ infirmary load without issue.

 

[RandomWanderer]

No man left behind:
Is Jake unresponsive? Did you just fight through an army of gunners, and climb up onto that damn high highway, just to find that you can't interact with him? (This is especially an issue if you crashed and reloaded after he spawned there)

Don't worry. Just shoot him! I've found that knocking Jake out of that chair makes it possible to start the dialogue and release him.