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Fallout 4: How to Get More Settlers and Grow Your Settlement

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fallout 4 settlers

Building and managing settlements is a brand new mechanic that appeared in Fallout 4. You can put the survivors of the Wasteland to good use but you also have to take care of them. When you have your own settlement you may need extra hands to help out with work. This is why in this guide we will talk about how to get more settlers in Fallout 4.

Getting Started with Settlements

There are more than 30 settlements in Fallout 4. Starting off with Sanctuary Hills and Red Rocket that you will encounter in the first 30 minutes of your gameplay. You can identify the settlement by the stats under the icons on the map. The settlements will have population and happiness counters.

map with settlement identificators
PipBoy Map

Every settlement has a workshop which is a starting point to building and growing. It is a storage for your resources and a building menu for all the structures you might want to build.

Here are a few key things to know before starting to manage a settlement:

  • Every settlement is individual. Their inventories and stats are not shared. Unless you are creating a supply route.
  • Sanctuary Hills (protagonist’s home) will grow slower than other settlements for some reason.
  • Your Charisma (CHR) stat is very important as it includes perks like “Local Leader” (Learn more in our stat and perk guide).

Essential Resources

In order for your settlement to grow you need to make sure that existing settlers have everything they need. In a building menu, there are stats on the top of the screen. You don’t need to maintain all of them but there are a few key ones: Beds, Food, Water, Defense. Your job is to provide enough for the existing and possible new settlers in the area.

resources that are needed to maintain settlers
Settlement Building Menu

Beds

Every settler needs a bed to sleep in. Build enough beds for your current settlers and make a few extras for the future ones. It doesn’t matter what kind of bed you build. A sleeping bag or an actual bed will both count. Whatever you can afford and will fit your settlement best.

Food

Food comes from crops that you can plant in your settlement. Every crop requires a settler to watch over it to grow or you can collect the food yourself and deposit it to the workshop. Food requirement is 1:1 to the number of settlers. So for 6 people, you will need a food supply of 6.

You can plant crops from the “Resources” tab in the building menu although you will need some initial fruits/veggies. There are a bunch of them across the Sanctuary Hills or you can jump to different farms to friendly take their crops and grow more of your own out of them.

Water

Same as with food you need water. You can build them from the “Resources” tab as well. But unlike crops, water pumps do not require a villager assigned to them. They just exist and produce water.

Defense

Defense is not really that mandatory as all the previous ones but is beneficial to improve. The game will highlight when your defense is low but it won’t affect the rate at which settlers will arrive. What it will affect is happiness and how long will you last under the attack of raiders or super mutants. So we do recommend you work on defense as well.

Hapiness Penalty

If the requirements of those resources are not met, the happiness of the settlement will fall. Happiness is calculated including all of the essential needs. And if the settlers are not happy, they will be less productive. Thus producing/scavenging fewer resources. This is the concept of the happiness productivity penalty.

Recruitment Beacon

radio beacon that is needed to get more settlers in fallout 4
Building Recruitment Radio Beacon

When you have enough beds, a farm, guns, and water it is time to actually get new settlers to your settlement. You can get settlers from quests and use companions as settlers. But the primary way is to set up the Recruitment Beacon.

To build it go to the “Miscellaneous” in the “Power” section in the building menu. From the materials, you will need Circuitry (2), Crystal (2), Copper (6), Steel (10), Ceramic (3), and Rubber (1).

A recruitment beacon requires power. The cheapest way is to build a small generator nearby if nothing else requires power in your settlement. Do not forget to connect the two with wires and flip the switch on the beacon itself. When the switch is lit green there will be a new radio frequency in your PipBoy. If you tune in to it there will be quiet but that is the way it should be.

Now you will get more settlers that will be arriving from time to time. But there is a limit though. The maximum amount of settlers you can have per settlement is 10 + the amount of CHR points you have. Which is another reason why you should invest in that skill when focusing on settlements.

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AUTHOR

Based in the UK, Edward is a Guides Editor at Gamezo. He's all about esports and gaming and plays a little bit of everything. But his favorite game of all time is Destiny 2.