Holotape Gameplay Options Difficulty
Change the way certain systems work to make the gameplay more or less challenging
Contents
Citizen Needs Requirement
By default “ON”, your settlers will not upgrade their structures (residential, agricultural, industrial, commercial, etc.) unless the Food, Water, Defense, and Happiness levels (citizen needs) of your settlement are high enough. It doesn’t matter if you have upgrades set to happen automatically or manually - in either case structures won’t upgrade inside your settlement until citizen needs are met.
Available Settings:
- Options: ON or OFF
- Default: ON
What These Settings Mean:
- ON: Your citizen's needs must be met for upgrade calculations. The needs required are determined by the plot type. This includes: food, water, defense, and happiness.
- Difficulty Change: Normal
- OFF: Your citizen's will now invest and upgrade their buildings even when their basic needs aren't met. This includes: food, water, defense, and happiness.
- Difficulty Change: Easier
Additional Information:
Upgrade levels are also affected by this setting in that your “citizen needs” need to be met at/for each upgrade level, mainly happiness level. By default (citizens needs requirement set to ON) most structures will have lower happiness requirements for triggering an upgrade to level 2 but higher happiness requirement to allow for level 3 upgrades.
If you choose to change this setting to “OFF”, your citizen’s needs will no longer be considered when checking for upgrade eligibility. So not having adequate food, water, defense, and happiness won’t keep your buildings from upgrading. It is important to note, even if “citizen needs” are removed (turn off) from the upgrade eligibility calculations, there will still be other aspects that affect your structures eligibility for upgrade(s) such as connectivity to power, residential job requirements, dynamic needs, etc..
City Supply Costs
Note: This option only impact settlements that are being built with a City Plan.
City Supply Costs are the requirement that a city run by one of your assigned "leaders" must collect a certain amount of scrap/junk to use in upgrading the city.
Available Settings:
- Options: ON or OFF
- Default: ON
What These Settings Mean:
- ON: Cities will need to collect a certain amount of scrap/junk to upgrade. The amount depends on the size and complexity of the city.
- OFF: Cities will no longer require or consume scrape/junk to upgrade.
Dynamic Needs
Dynamic needs is an advanced “civilization building” system that Sim Settlements uses to make the settlements you are “founding” all over the Commonwealth more “realistic” in terms of building a functioning communities that have changing needs and desires over time.
The general idea of dynamic needs is that as your settlements grow and your “civilization” progresses your settlers are going to start expecting more from you (as opposed to the vanilla 1 food, 1 water, 1 covered bed, more defense than food + water basic survival mechanic). With dynamic needs, over time as buildings & structures upgrade and the population of a settlement increases, your settlers will start to expect (demand) more benefits, resources, specific plot types, specific structures to at certain upgrade levels, more building materials, and many other things so that you have to build more “infrastructure” as the game goes on - thus to better simulate how an actual town/civilization evolves.
The dynamic needs system runs completely in the background so it is nothing you have to micro-manage or know specifically about how it works. However, if you don't like or simply don't want to have to provide extra resources, utilities, specific plots types, etc., you can turn dynamic needs off.
It is very important to note that turning off dynamic needs will effect, reduce, or eliminate the many positive benefits your factories, farms, stores, and any other job buildings provide to your settlers. The new plot types and building plans introduced in the “Industrial Revolution” expansion pack will be especially affected by turning off dynamic needs as there are a lot of benefits and new positive modifiers for your settlements built in that require dynamic needs to be ON (in order to be activated or for your settlers to take advantage of/benefit from).
For more information on Dynamic Needs click here
Options: ON or OFF
Default: ON
Initial Plot Costs
Reduces the cost of all plots is to only a single ASAM sensor when set to OFF. It is ON by default and plots require various resources to build correctly. This can be helpful if you would like to pre-plot out settlements before any additional citizens arrive. New citizens will then automatically take a plot and start building a home and/or business, so long as Auto Assignment is also ON.
Maintenance Costs
Maintenance Costs are designed to fix a balance problem in the vanilla Fallout 4 settlement system and in doing so, answer the question "Where are all of the fuel and ammo coming from for generators and turrets?".
This is an advanced feature, meant for people who enjoy complex systems.
When on, turrets and all non-wind powered generators have a daily cost of 1 cap per day for each point of power or defense they provide. These costs are subtracted from the daily taxes, any additional cost is added to the city's deficit.
While a city is in deficit, there is a chance that generators or turrets will fail and require repairs. The deficit can be paid down by depositing caps into the City Planner's Desk.
This system is designed to ensure that traps, wind generators, guard posts, and Martial/Power generating plots are not completely invalidated by simply creating large quantities of automated turrets and power generators. Instead, settlements will need to be designed with more simplistic forms of power and defense in it's early stages, and only moving to fully automated systems in the later part of it's life when collected taxes are high or you can afford to invest caps to keeping them running.
Available Settings:
- Options: ON or OFF
- Default: ON
What These Settings Mean:
- ON: Defense turrets and all non-wind powered generators will have a daily cost of 1 cap per day for each point of power or defense they provide and there is a chance that they will fail and require repairs if a settlement is in deficit.
- OFF: Non-wind power Generators and defense turrets will no longer have a daily cost to run and will not fail or go into disrepair (except through being damaged in combat).
