Fallout 4: Settlement crafting explained

Now that gamers ’round the world can jump into Fallout 4, we thought we’d give you some handy tips to keep busy in the Wasteland.

These tips are all about crafting. Confusing as all hell when you’re first thrown into it, crafting does start to make sense the more you try it. Honest.

Here are our best tips to get you going:

• As tempting as it is, don’t start crafting for your settlement until you meet Preston Garvey and his merry band or survivors. Once you’ve established that group in Sanctuary, you’ll start getting quests from a man named Sturges. He’ll basically help you through the basics: building beds and other structures, getting clean water, food and establishing defenses.
• Once you’ve got that down, take a step back. Re-enter the Workshop menu and take note of that bar along the top. If things are green, you’re right. If they’re red — like food and water is below — you’d best fix that.

• In the menu, you can construct whatever you’d like. Things are sectioned off into like-minded things, like food & water, buildings and furniture. The problem I have in the image below is that I can’t build a water pump simply because I don’t have the required resources. Missing a couple gears, the easiest thing to do at this stage is hit the “Tag for search” button (the Menu button on Xbox One) to remind yourself you need that item. If you come across one, either in your Workshop bench or in the Wasteland itself, it’ll be tagged with a magnifying glass to remind you to pick it up.

• If you’re lacking resources, don’t forget that you can scrap any items in the settlement to grab what you need. Do it. It’s fun.

• Whenever you secure a new place that could serve as an settlement, head straight to the Workshop bench. Hitting the button to Transfer items back and forth should offer up a bunch of stored items waiting for you in that bench. They’re also great places to store excess materials from your adventures in the Wasteland itself.

• Playing with power is tricky. You’ll need to not only build a generator that provides enough power, but connect the sucker to whatever you’d like. I’m not ashamed to admit it took me WAY too long to figure this out. In the image below, I constructed a radio tower and then slapped a generator beside it. Eventually, I realised I needed to use the Y button to actually connect the two together with a wire to start the tower up. Oops.

• As your settlement grows in resources, so too will it in actual inhabitants. The trick here is to think of settlers just like resources — they need to be commanded to go and man guard posts and artillery cannons that you build. Go into the Workshop menu, pick a Settler and then command them to Go to whatever you need. Voila.

There’s tons to do when it comes to crafting, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. Stay tuned for more Fallout 4 tips — and use the comments to below to let us in on some of your best ones too!

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• All Bobblehead locations and associated perks guide
• Aliens have (crash) landed in Fallout 4: How to get the Alien Blaster
• Where to get Power Armor (and how to use it!)
• Get Power Armor and a Fat Man within the game’s first hour
• Use this infinite caps glitch before its patched
• Settlement crafting explained
• Crafting material common locations guide
• Cosplay as Han Solo and the Silver Shroud
• Get a room and make friends in Vault 81
• How to find Vault 75 (and get one more Bobblehead!)
• Here are a bunch of cheat codes for Windows PC!
• Turn off the frame rate cap on Windows PC using an Nvidia card
• Can’t find Dogmeat in Sanctuary? Build him a home!
• Here are the 924 names Codsworth can call you
• Here are all the default male and female main character faces