This is a bit of a patchwork of things that I have discovered over back to back playthroughs of Sim Settlements 1 and then Sim Settlements 2 which I found unclear or poorly documented after extensive searching of both the wiki and the forums. I also have a few questions that I have been unable to solve even after creating a dedicated testing playthrough and conducting controlled experiments. I would also like to thank all of the mod authors and community members for this awesome experience that adds so much to a Fallout 4 playthrough. This content is on average of higher quality than the base game itself.
1.) Vanilla Resource objects (Turrets, Generators, Water) have daily upkeep.
This is kind of obvious to people who played SS1 but it took me over 100 hours to realize it in SS2, as all of the UI elements and reports that were in SS1 have not yet been implemented in SS2. The setting to disable this is still present thankfully, which I might actually recommend until some form of report is created to gain a sense of what your daily upkeeps are. For the longest time in my SS2 playthrough, I could not figure out why I was always out of oil, which was significantly impacting my game play as I was unable to upgrade weapons or build new settlements. I checked every upkeep report on every plot and could not figure out what was draining all my oil. It did not occur to me until last night that it might be my generators and I headed out to a new settlement to test it.
I tested turrets also but I was unable to nail down a Cost Per Turret as I tested with 5, 10, and 20 turrets and found inconsistent upkeep numbers. If anyone knows the actual turret upkeep, I would love to know.
2.) More Advanced Plots / Plot Types Can be Less Efficient than Simpler Versions
The critical one here is the multi-person home. From my testing, a multi-person home has double the needs cost on a per settler basis than a single person home. The efficiency levels out as the plots progress but in the early stages of a settlement, watch how many multi-bed homes are built. Dynamic needs can also make testing difficult as numbers tend to change without a great deal of transparency as to why.
3.) Fast Travel
Playing SS2 on survival, fast travel is a critical element. I love the immersive aspect of playing without fast travel but being able to visit settlements quickly is clearly assumed by the mod developers. It is just necessary; so I loved that a earnable fast travel system was integrated. Unfortunately it is not viable on survival (who I assume are likely the only ones using the caravan system) because the travel times are currently absurd (or bugged). I was unable to test a cross Commonwealth trip as I lacked the settlement network (settlements now have a limited caravan range so it has to be a complete network) but a caravan fast travel from Sanctuary to Abernathy Farms (a 30 sec run) took 4 days and 2 hours of game time. This means that all of your needs are bottomed out at the conclusion of each trip. I was unable to test longer trips so I am unsure if this is a static time value or if it increases by distance, but really?
This is a problem for 2 reasons; if your playing SS2 your going to need to do tours of your settlements, which means your spending ALOT of time just fixing your needs after every trip which just gets to be obnoxious. If there is a compelling reason for trips be to this long, you should arrive with full needs bars (We obviously rested a lot on this half mile trip after all). Second, I actually care about elapsed in game time in survival; I am out pacifying the Commonwealth which has an 80 day respawn time. Survival is dangerous, and I want downtown Boston to stay clear for at least a little while after spending thousands of bullets to clear it.
If anyone knows how I can edit a .ini or other file to change this please let me know, this is actually blocking me from starting a new playthrough until I can get it fixed. I love the idea of earning limited fast travel but this is non-viable in its current state.
4.) Salvage and Mark 1 Beacon Range
I saw a lot of complaints about these on the forums so I wanted to test them out. Their range is actually not to bad; a Com Station in sanctuary was able to reach Corvega with around 2 days to complete the trip. It was not able to reach Fraternal post 115 so the limit is somewhere between the two. This represents a little less than 25% of the span of the Commonwealth, so 4 Com Hubs in chosen settlements can make the Salvage Beacons very viable, which is a godsend in survival.
1.) Vanilla Resource objects (Turrets, Generators, Water) have daily upkeep.
This is kind of obvious to people who played SS1 but it took me over 100 hours to realize it in SS2, as all of the UI elements and reports that were in SS1 have not yet been implemented in SS2. The setting to disable this is still present thankfully, which I might actually recommend until some form of report is created to gain a sense of what your daily upkeeps are. For the longest time in my SS2 playthrough, I could not figure out why I was always out of oil, which was significantly impacting my game play as I was unable to upgrade weapons or build new settlements. I checked every upkeep report on every plot and could not figure out what was draining all my oil. It did not occur to me until last night that it might be my generators and I headed out to a new settlement to test it.
- Large Generators - Oil per day.
- Med Generators - 2 Oil per day
- Small Generators - 1 Oil per Day.
I tested turrets also but I was unable to nail down a Cost Per Turret as I tested with 5, 10, and 20 turrets and found inconsistent upkeep numbers. If anyone knows the actual turret upkeep, I would love to know.
2.) More Advanced Plots / Plot Types Can be Less Efficient than Simpler Versions
The critical one here is the multi-person home. From my testing, a multi-person home has double the needs cost on a per settler basis than a single person home. The efficiency levels out as the plots progress but in the early stages of a settlement, watch how many multi-bed homes are built. Dynamic needs can also make testing difficult as numbers tend to change without a great deal of transparency as to why.
3.) Fast Travel
Playing SS2 on survival, fast travel is a critical element. I love the immersive aspect of playing without fast travel but being able to visit settlements quickly is clearly assumed by the mod developers. It is just necessary; so I loved that a earnable fast travel system was integrated. Unfortunately it is not viable on survival (who I assume are likely the only ones using the caravan system) because the travel times are currently absurd (or bugged). I was unable to test a cross Commonwealth trip as I lacked the settlement network (settlements now have a limited caravan range so it has to be a complete network) but a caravan fast travel from Sanctuary to Abernathy Farms (a 30 sec run) took 4 days and 2 hours of game time. This means that all of your needs are bottomed out at the conclusion of each trip. I was unable to test longer trips so I am unsure if this is a static time value or if it increases by distance, but really?
This is a problem for 2 reasons; if your playing SS2 your going to need to do tours of your settlements, which means your spending ALOT of time just fixing your needs after every trip which just gets to be obnoxious. If there is a compelling reason for trips be to this long, you should arrive with full needs bars (We obviously rested a lot on this half mile trip after all). Second, I actually care about elapsed in game time in survival; I am out pacifying the Commonwealth which has an 80 day respawn time. Survival is dangerous, and I want downtown Boston to stay clear for at least a little while after spending thousands of bullets to clear it.
If anyone knows how I can edit a .ini or other file to change this please let me know, this is actually blocking me from starting a new playthrough until I can get it fixed. I love the idea of earning limited fast travel but this is non-viable in its current state.
4.) Salvage and Mark 1 Beacon Range
I saw a lot of complaints about these on the forums so I wanted to test them out. Their range is actually not to bad; a Com Station in sanctuary was able to reach Corvega with around 2 days to complete the trip. It was not able to reach Fraternal post 115 so the limit is somewhere between the two. This represents a little less than 25% of the span of the Commonwealth, so 4 Com Hubs in chosen settlements can make the Salvage Beacons very viable, which is a godsend in survival.
- The Mark 1 Beacon "searches" for resources but this does not mean it auto-loots the cleared location. It seems to draw whatever it picks up from a separate roll or table. Looting the location manually does not seem to effect the resources returned by the salvage team. I was a little disappointed by that as I was hoping they would actually clean sweep the location so I did not have to. Still a nice feature. However, the Beacon weighs 10lbs which is a serious issue for survival play throughs; this needs an option bad.
- Once a salvage team returns from a cleared location with their resources (So far I cant find any logical correlation between where they went and what they brought back, might be completely random), you can go back to the same location without waiting for it to reset and put down another beacon to send them again. This does not seem to effect the resources they return with so I don't think this is an intended feature.
- Salvage beacons require a level 2 Com Station, but the message simply says there is no Com Station in range, the same message as when you are actually outside of range. This can be confusing as the Mark 1 beacon will work while the Salvage will not without any differentiation of error message.