Just make sure you're producing enough resources (food, water) and have enough beds and turrets and the settlement should grow nicely without much intervention on your part. And as I said, the only times I miss settlement battles is if I'm stuck in a long quest.īy the way, I have 14 settlements so far, all with 80+ happiness. I also never use fast travel as, in my opinion, I make many more discoveries and pick up tons more valuable loot when moving along the map myself. I was once stuck in the middle of a long quest when Sanctuary got attacked, I received the FAILED message (this was pre 1.4) approximately 1 hour after the attack began, so could this be the standard? I usually participate in all battles so I have yet to see a notification like this. You will now receive a notification showing the result of the attack if you decide not to participate in the battle.

Patch 1.4 has changed how defending settlements against attacks works (even if slightly). So - is it possible to create properly self-sufficient settlements which remain undamaged and happy - even if I never visit them after the original setup? Without fast travel I couldn't see how I'll be able to traverse across the map in time to 'save' the settlement from attack, and could see my entire gameplay involving trekking from settlement to settlement dealing with raiding parties. With my second character I never used fast travel and avoided settling up even one populated settlement. With fast travel I could easily 'warp' to the settlement and wipe out the attackers. My first Fallout 4 character had a large network of settlements and occasionally one would be attacked - even when the Defence rating was higher than Food + Water.

This got me thinking about whether it's possible to have a network of self-sufficient settlements without fast travel.

The upcoming overhauled Survival Mode in Fallout 4 is reported to disable fast travel (this report was linked to by Bethesda).

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