Upgrade settlement that does NOT use city plan.

[bud_viking]

On a new playthrough I decided to manually run Sanctuary without a city plan, at least until I have finished the Chapter missions. My question is are city upgrades only for settlements on a city plan, or can an unplanned settlement be upgraded also and how would I do that?
My other settlements are on city plans and fully automatic option. I am seeing plots in all settlements upgrading but it is a bit early for settlements to be upgraded (PIP Boy shows 15 game days elapsed and my character is lv 15). I am just wondering if I will be able to upgrade my main settlement that I am managing myself?

 

[Mahasona]

Plots that you make will automatically upgrade after the appropriate number of days assuming their needs are met. Upgrade requirements can be found in the wiki. On the easiest settings there's little to do. You are given the chance to set global difficulty settings very early on when you meet Jake, but if you want to change them you can do so in the holotape.

 

[bud_viking]

Plots that you make will automatically upgrade after the appropriate number of days assuming their needs are met. Upgrade requirements can be found in the wiki. On the easiest settings there's little to do. You are given the chance to set global difficulty settings very early on when you meet Jake, but if you want to change them you can do so in the holotape.

I am seeing plots upgrade as expected. My question was whether the overall settlement can level if I am not using a city plan. Also, am I correct in thinking that if I go with the basic plans, they are locked at L1?

I have been thinking about the fact that my PC, while not top of the line by current standards, I wouldn't consider it low end. Before coming back the FA 4 this time I played Cyberpunk 2.0 and Baldur's Gate 3 at fairly high, but not Ultra settings with decent performance.

I have been putting all my settlements, aside from Sanctuary, on RoTC plans, with a leader on automatic. I am beginning to wonder if that is unrealistic from a processing point of view? While the game and graphics are pretty old by today's standards, I am guessing that SS2 adds a whole ton of processing demand that the game was not originally designed for.

Would it be more realistic to perhaps chose a couple maps for the full RoTC, auto pilot option, maybe a few secondary maps on a basic plan and then run the rest manually?

 

[Eichkater]

I am seeing plots upgrade as expected. My question was whether the overall settlement can level if I am not using a city plan. Also, am I correct in thinking that if I go with the basic plans, they are locked at L1?

Your settlement does not level without a city plan. The basic plans don't advance further than Lv.1 (as far as I have tried them!).

I have been putting all my settlements, aside from Sanctuary, on RoTC plans, with a leader on automatic. I am beginning to wonder if that is unrealistic from a processing point of view?

Sounds like trouble.

Would it be more realistic to perhaps chose a couple maps for the full RoTC, auto pilot option, maybe a few secondary maps on a basic plan and then run the rest manually?

I've been playing SS2 for maybe 80-100ish hours and therefore by no means expert. From what I've seen it is better to not build everything at all. Like, when you have Sanctuary, Red Rocket and Abernathy just build one yourself, one settlement plan and leave one blank completely. I for example build Sanctuary, use a 3-tier cp in abernathy and leave RR alone.
Same in other areas that are prone to crashing like Finch Farm, The Slog, Greentop. I made the mistake in my current playthrough to build the Slog and Greentop myself AND use a rather heavy CP on Finch... Yeah, issues arise.

So, less is more I'd say.

 

[LeapinL]

Running everything on city plans, especially large ones can slow things down and create issues.
You can always create your own and keep them small. I try to not have more than one large settlement in anyone area. I build up Sancturary and Abernathy pretty good and keep RR to less than 15 plots.
You can keep your plot counts down by using some of the vanilla options. For instance, instead of having 5 residential plots, build a structure and place 10 beds or more. Use generators and water pumps and even stores, therefore freeing up space for industry, municipal, etc.
Pick maybe 5-6 settlements to build up major settlements and keep the others small.

 

[bud_viking]

Well I think I completely bricked Sanctuary. After my previous post and reconsidering the complexity I had with too many city plans I switched all but a couple to the basic plans . Sanctuary I had built with no plan but using the ASAMS to complete the the SS2 quests up to the end of chapter 1. Once I had completed the Chapter 1 quests I decided to try out the basic city plan for Sanctuary. The scrap and re-plot seemed to go as expected and I hung out there until I saw that people had been assigned to rebuild the plots.

I went on my way and quested away on Chapter 2 and did not come back to Sanctuary for quite a while. I only came back to Sanctuary very rarely only to sleep and didn't play enough attention to notice any problems at first. Any new settlement I took I used the basic plan only and eventually got as far as wiping the Gunners and setting up the HQ.

Anyway, fast forward about 10 hours of play time and going from level 25 to lv 33. I returned to Sanctuary as part of the process of recruiting people for trade routes and personnel. I discover that while all of the plots were set, and they show that a settler is assigned for construction NOTHING had been build. Every single plot is still in the state from when it was originally spawned. The town meeting gavel shows that there are no unemployed settlers, and all the plots show an icon that a settler has been assigned, but everyone is just standing around and nothing has been built. There is no food or beds and happiness has plummeted.

I have tried eveything to get them moving. I tried refreshing with scrapping and without. I have tried manually refreshing each ASAM. I have tried changing to a different city plan. After one refresh I noticed that the building supply menu showed zero resources. I transfered resources via the desk and was told they are full. I went into the settings and dumbed them all down so no resources are required, and the building supplies quantity changed to the infinity symbol. Still they do nothing but stand around doing nothing, while mousing over them shows them as employed.

I did make a manual save back before I went from a manual build to the basic plan and tried again, but it made no difference, same outcome. Also that's 10 hours of play and backtracking 8 levels and nearly an entire chapter of SS2 I am reluctant to do.

So as I see it my options are just play on with a completely bricked Sanctuary. That makes me a bit sad as I did like the idea of my main sleeping spot being my old pre-war bedroom for role play purposes. I even kept Shawn's bedroom untouched. Or the other option is to back track way too far and play from when the manual settlement was humming along fine. It wasn't idea as I was still learning SS2 while doing the quests, but I guess I could tweek it by changing the plots manually.

Is there any way to force the settlers to actually start building?