One of the coolest features added to Fallout 4 was the settlement system, which allowed players to construct a living, breathing community against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic video game. The modding community took it a few steps farther with a series of excellent add-on mods that overhaul and enhance the building process, offering greater levels of freedom and creativity.
Adding a few key mods to the load order can significantly improve the settlement experience in Fallout 4. Tying these mods in with others that enhance the visual splendor of the game can help transform the vanilla base game into something truly immersive and extraordinary, limited only by a player's own imagination.
Wall Pass-Through Power Conduits
Power management is one of the most grueling and irritating aspects of the vanilla Fallout 4 settlement experience, but it doesn't have to be. This mod helps overhaul how power lines can be laid out and distributed in inside builds, rather than strewn about messily and without purpose.
In essence, the mod simulates drilling holes through the walls of a settlement building to feed a power cable through. It's a far sight better than the base game experience, allowing for cleaner, more robust, and logical settlement builds.
Scrap Everything
Obsessive-compulsive control freaks will greatly appreciate the sheer freedom awarded by installing Scrap Everything, a mod that does exactly as its title suggests. With a few clicks, nearly everything can be scrapped for raw materials, whether it's debris and trash, sidewalks, houses, or trees.
Players should be mindful to save their game often while scrapping their settlements, as it's quite easy to accidentally click and delete the wrong thing. With a bit of practice, however, Scrap Everything becomes a surefire way to clean up and customize settlement builds to a player's precise specifications.
Snappy Housekit
What makes Fallout 4 one of the best post-apocalyptic video games is its uncanny wordbuilding, which allows players to construct their own homes and settlements. Yet the game's house creation mechanism leaves a lot to be desired, mostly due to a less-than-stellar implementation of snap points. This makes it quite difficult to build the dream settlement of choice, be it a house, a fortress, or some other creation. Snappy Housekit aims to fix all that.
The mod overhauls Bethesda's built-in building kits with snap points to allow for greater ease of use during construction. Gamers will spend less time trying to navigate the clunky interface, and more time experimenting with their inner architect.
Settlement Supplies Expanded
Building a new life in Fallout 4 should consist of more than just surviving. Settlement Supplies Expanded helps by introducing over 400 new objects that can be placed in settlements to flesh out their creativity, uniqueness, and style. With a few clicks, settlements come alive with more flair.
The mod includes snappable doors and fences, decorative objects including cars, trees, and rocks, and furniture items such as beds and chairs. There's a lot to choose from, and the mod goes a long way towards sprucing up a settlement and making it feel like a little piece of home.
Alternate Settlements
Another mod that enhances the available décor for Fallout 4's settlements is this one, featuring an astonishing 700+ standalone items to choose from. Players can decorate settlements with windows, rails, pillars, flooring, carpets, and wallpaper, and that's just for a start.
Each item is snappable for greater ease of use, meaning players will spend most of their time trying to decide which of the hundreds of items to craft. This adds the potential to transform settlements from rudimentary survival hubs to full-fledged homes.
Conquest - Build New Settlements And Camping
Conquest is a mod that takes inspiration from the settlement building mechanic of Fallout 4 and broadens it across the entire Commonwealth. It was created by mod author Chesko, best known for the extremely popular Skyrim immersion mods Campfire & Frostfall.
The mod includes a camping mechanic for greater immersion in the game world, as well as the ability to build up to ten new settlements out of each campsite. This leaves creativity and imagination solely in the hands of the player, giving them a greater amount of freedom when it comes to building.
Modular Housing
This mod offers a ground-up approach to building settlement houses, with a highly modular and customizable approach. It's designed for hardcore building enthusiasts who want to design a house from scratch and build it up to full completion, as opposed to dropping down prefabs.
Modular Housing begins literally with a foundation in mind, before moving onto floor joists, pillars, ceilings, and even a player's choice of insulation. This is a highly detailed alternative to some of the more simplistic build mods for the game and works well with other mods that enhance the texture work of Fallout 4.
Homemaker - Expanded Settlements
This mod is yet another expansion to the settlement mechanic in Fallout 4, adding an eye-watering 1000+ new craftable objects into the game. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for would-be builders, providing them with the tools and items they need to customize settlements precisely according to vision.
The latest version of the mod offers prefab buildings, hundreds of decorative items like cars, trees, coffee machines, toilets, showers, and much more. It also overhauls the vanilla game's settlement menu category system for easier browsing. In short, it's a one-stop shop for gamers who want a lot of choice in how they build.
Better Settlers
No settlement would be complete without a community to share it with, but the vanilla Fallout 4 settlers leave a lot to be desired. This mod seeks to overhaul the settler system by adding more than 240 new NPC types into the game, with full customization options to tailor the mod specifically to taste.
Better Settlers makes lore-friendly changes to equipment, stats, mortality, and gender ratios to guarantee a healthy balance of characters. It varies up the individual NPCs so that they feel more dynamic and unique, as opposed to cookie-cutter copies inhabiting the same basic spaces. Fallout 4 may be one of Bethesda's highest-rated games, but these mods help make it even better.
Place Objects Anywhere
One of the biggest constraints and irritations in Fallout 4 is the inability to place objects precisely where players might want them, regardless of collision or clipping with other objects. It's a problem shared by other games with a building mechanic, such as Ark, even if that particular title has a workaround setting.
This mod performs a similar feat. It lifts many of the building restrictions for settlement building, allowing players to plunk down items wherever they'd like, be it water, rocks, or other clashing terrain. This makes the building process far less tedious and prone to error, ensuring that players spend more time building, and less time tearing down.