the Sim Settlements forums!

Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Things you've learned that might help others?

Moonracer3000

New Member
City Planner (S3)
Messages
15
I spent about 100 hours in Fo4 the last two weeks learning how to make a decent city plan for the contest. This was due to a lot of factors on my own end and constantly redoing a lot of work. I'll share what I've learned that isn't in the tutorial videos and I'm interested in hearing what tips others have.

  1. Use Place Everywhere and learn/use it's hotkeys. Precision movement of objects and interior plots is a huge help.
  2. The City Plan Assistant tool "Upgrade All Plots" seems to be the biggest time sink as far as waiting (about 15 minutes average for me). It's good to have a book or side project while using this.
  3. The console command "cf forcePlotLevel x -1" (where X is plot level) is very handy for adding plots at later levels. I had a problem figuring out how to use this because the invisible wall you select is much harder to select on interior plots than exterior plots. You may need to move a floor or wall block (but not the plot) to select it.
  4. Plots seem to eat up the biggest chunk of your build limit. I suggest building your pathing, all plots upgraded to level 3, then working on decorations.
  5. Use a batch file mod that gives you all of the magazines for extra vanilla building options.
  6. Write down a full breakdown of your settlement for when you downgrade your final settlement plan for exporting levels. I had to redo the whole deal multiple times at the start because I missed something stupid. Find a system that works for you.
Here's an example of my breakdown planning:
-2* X** PlotName [3]***
*number of levels less than 3 at stage 3 city plan (so at city stage 3 the plot is level 1. At city stage 2 it is removed).
** "X" for residential, "O" for job plot, "R" for recreation. Useful for quickly checking that you have equal or higher number of beds to jobs at any city stage.
*** The city stage a plot first appears. Double check this with * to prevent mistakes.

It might look something like this:
XXX Residential (Interior) [0]
O Industrial (bld mat) [1]
OO Defense [0]
O Farm [0]

I've even started making lists of which decorative items to scrap at which level so I don't forget, but my memory is terrible.
 
Last edited:
Great thread idea! I 'only' have about 57 hours city building in the last 2 weeks, but it's been pretty much all my play time so I feel your pain a lot. :) Here's some of my tips.

The console command "cf forcePlotLevel x -1" (where X is plot level) is very handy for adding plots at later levels. I had a problem figuring out how to use this because the invisible wall you select is much harder to select on interior plots than exterior plots. You may need to move a floor or wall block (but not the plot) to select it.
If you're having problems selecting a particular item, use the mouse wheel to select from the different objects. (You might need the 'Better Console' mod for this to work, not sure, but you definitely want that anyways to be sure you've selected the right object.) I just learned this yesterday by accident and thought I'd share. It's been a lifesaver for me!

I end up upgrading/downgrading plots individually often because I tend to be too impatient to sit there and do nothing while the City Contest Assistant does it... and I find that when I'm going around scrapping things at the same time as it's doing all that plot stuff, my game crashes to desktop a whole lot more often. Whereas if I go around to each area and manually set the plot to the right level and scrap the stuff around it a bit at a time, my game is more stable.

Here's a list of console commands I use often:
  • tgm - god mode - useful to stop bad guys from killing you
  • kah - kill all hostiles - kills all bad guys near you
  • cqf ss2_npc_recruitmentmanager settlers <X> - recruits X (number) of settlers to your settlement (useful if you want to get more than 5 at once)
  • if you have R2K's Gameplay Mods, use cpg to check the power grid of your settlement for errors, and cpg 1 to auto-fix any errors found. Very super useful! Get that mod, OMG.
  • tcl - turn off collision, letting you fly and go through things/underground. Useful if your plots get too sunk into the ground and you can't grab them anymore.
  • tm then ~ to turn off the UI for taking screenshots (the ~ exits the console you can move normally). To turn the UI back on, hit ~ then type tm again.
  • save <Filename> - saves your game with the specified name, so you can actually find it again. Absolutely required!
  • player.additem f 65535 - gives yourself tons of caps so you can buy clothing to dress up all your settlers cough I mean, build certain objects that require caps and for some reason Workshop Plus's free build mode won't override
  • modpos <Axis> <Value> - with an object highlighted in the console, use this to nudge it in any direction (axis x/y/z and values are positive or negative numbers). This is useful when the positioning of said object makes it hard to get the right place to use the Place Everywhere 'nudge' functions (which are still easier most of the time).
  • disable then markfordelete - delete certain objects you placed that can't be selected after placement, ie. some of the Wasteland Construction Kit objects (I'm looking at you, String Lights!). MAKE SURE you're selected on the right item, and you don't markfordelete something you don't intend to! And don't delete terrain/etc. If you do disable first, you'll see the object disappear, and markfordelete gets rid of it permanently.
Go here to get a PDF file that has all the hotkeys for Place Everywhere and a suggested scheme for Workshop Plus. (Thanks, Viral Gamer!) I printed this out and it saves me so much time.

I'm working on a python script to take a WSFW export and give a summary of how many plots of each type there are, their levels, and which addons you need for Designer's Choice. (This isn't fancy or complicated, but I've done a manual count too many times!) If I can figure out where to pull multi-bed residential info from, I'll add that too. If any of this is useful to anyone, or someone has anything similar, I'll be happy to share/collab once I'm done! Won't be this week though. (And when I have time to secure it, I'll try to throw it up on a website at some point.)

That's all for me for now, gotta go downgrade Croup for about the 5th time.:oops: Hopefully this time everything stays stable. At least I've pretty much memorized everything I need to scrap for each level now, haha. :explode:
 
So here's some of what I've learned recently:
  • If you're using Place Everywhere, there's a hotkey to enable extra scrapping/editing (in my keyboard it's Insert), which is also great for scrapping corpses. I recommend not having it on at all times though, that way you don't risk messing with vanilla items accidentally.
  • Sometimes settlers with certain jobs, like "trader" or "doctor", will default to barter rather than giving you the option to trade. You can force that with the command openActorContainer 1, you'll need to select the NPC first of course, or call the command with the ref id (refid.openActorContainer 1)
  • Crashes are common when scrapping a lot of wired stuff or subcomponents of plots you want to get rid of without waiting for the plot to finish destroying of its own accord. So, just save before doing such things ;)
  • Workshop Plus already helps with keeping weather in check, but I also keep a bat file with some nice settings like:
set gamehour to 11
fw 2B52A
  • If for some reason you aren't getting more settlers or can't move them to your settlement, maybe you don't have enough Charisma for that, fix it with:
player.setav charisma 99
  • You can play with how fast time passes in game, default is 20. Setting it to 1 makes time pass at the same speed as IRL:
set timescale 200
  • Quickload is evil when you're building, if you hit it by accident you could wipe some of your unsaved work. I map it to some out of the way key.
  • setpos and setangle work on the player too, so you can put those in a bat file together with other commands to set your posish to take screenshots from the exact same position and angle on multiple levels
 
  • if you have R2K's Gameplay Mods, use cpg to check the power grid of your settlement for errors, and cpg 1 to auto-fix any errors found. Very super useful! Get that mod, OMG. Yes, its good and you can also use showpowergrid # (put in a number in place of the # for the particular power grid) when you want to see a list of all items in that power grid - It gives the item name and its ID
  • tcl - turn off collision, letting you fly and go through things/underground. Useful if your plots get too sunk into the ground and you can't grab them anymore. This is also useful if something objects are overlapping and you can't seem to grab the item you want, turn on tcl pick up the interfering object then drop(just press TAB, and hey presto it can't be grabbed again until you toggle tcl again leacing you free to pick up or use place Everywhere nudges on, (well most things, there are a few WRK objects that just persist)
  • tm then ~ to turn off the UI for taking screenshots (the ~ exits the console you can move normally). To turn the UI back on, hit ~ then type tm again.
  • modpos <Axis> <Value> - with an object highlighted in the console, use this to nudge it in any direction (axis x/y/z and values are positive or negative numbers). This is useful when the positioning of said object makes it hard to get the right place to use the Place Everywhere 'nudge' functions (which are still easier most of the time).
I have been using setpos <Axis> <Value> to get things in exact location positions too, and setangle <Axis> <Value> to set rotation.
I have used it to introduce objects across several level so it is in exactly in the same place.
To help find positions I recommend Kassent's Better Console - F2SE When you an object selected in the console, hit CTRL to bring up the extended data, one of which is position, slight problem is with the rotation values as it is in a format of smaller numbers unlike setangle which is in degrees. it also has a heap of other information available too.
  • disable then markfordelete - delete certain objects you placed that can't be selected after placement, ie. some of the Wasteland Construction Kit objects (I'm looking at you, String Lights!). MAKE SURE you're selected on the right item, and you don't markfordelete something you don't intend to! And don't delete terrain/etc. If you do disable first, you'll see the object disappear, and markfordelete gets rid of it permanently. I found out the hard way that some WRK items that you cant pick up (but can still be moved with commands or place everywhere that you move outside the build zone will be resurrected in your city plans lower levels if you markfordelete them where they are, then downgraded to do you lower levels. Might be fine if you bring them back into the build zone prior to markfordelete.

Another function to use is Workshop Plus layers, but remember to start them at the very beginning! great as you can toggle layers on and off to hide everything on that layer - combined with blueprints, you could transfer a layer to other levels - although you might need to go to a blank settlement and use transfer settlement if just objects, or export layout if it has plots (as from my limited understanding transfer settlements is not fully compatible with SS2)
 
Last edited:
Top