Locations

Fallout 4 draws a line through its map that no other Fallout game does. Some places you can move into, rebuild and staff. Some places hold the bench that lets you do that somewhere else. And some places are just places, worth one visit and a loot sweep and nothing after that.

Sorting the map by buildability rather than by region is the most practical way to plan a session, because the three groups reward completely different amounts of time. This guide works down that scale, from the places that become permanent projects to the ones you will never think about again.

Places that become yours

A settlement is any location whose workshop you have unlocked, and the unlocking is where the variety is. Some sites are held by a gang or by dangerous creatures, and you clear them. Some are already occupied by friendly people, and those you have to earn by doing their quests until the workshop is effectively handed over. And in a few cases there is nothing standing between you and the bench except walking up to it and pressing use.

That three-way split matters when you are picking where to invest, because a settlement you had to fight for and a settlement you were given cost you very different amounts up front and are worth the same afterwards. Our guide covers the unlocking rules, the full location list and a best-settlements section for anyone who would rather run two good sites than fifteen mediocre ones.

Far Harbor runs the same system on an island that was cut off from the mainland, and it attaches a concrete target to it: unlock three workshops there and you earn the Push Back the Fog achievement. The rules are identical to the Commonwealth's, including clearing hostile sites and winning over friendly ones, which makes it a short, self-contained version of the settlement game if you want the achievement without the fifty-hour commitment.

Vault 88 is the third and strangest of the buildable places, because it is a settlement that comes with its own toolset. The Vault-Tec Workshop add-on hands you an underground space plus the equipment to fill it, from vault suits and Pip-Boys to furniture that has not spent two centuries in the rain, and the build areas themselves have to be unlocked one at a time. Doing all of them earns Better Living Underground. The Vault-Tec Workshop questline is what opens the vault in the first place.

Places that hold the tools

There are 30 workstations in the game, and they are the mechanism behind everything in the section above. A workstation is what makes a location claimable, so the workstation list and the settlement list are two views of the same set of places, one written from the bench outward and the other from the map inward.

Reading them that way turns up things the settlement list does not emphasise. Abernathy Farm carries a Chemistry Station and a Cooking Station alongside its workshop and its two traders, which makes it a genuinely complete early base rather than just an early one. Boston Airport's workstation is at the Arrivals Terminal and comes with the game's only political condition attached to a bench: it is straightforward to claim unless you have decided to go against the Brotherhood of Steel.

If you are trying to work out where to set up next, the workstation list is the better one to read, because it tells you what crafting equipment is already on site before you commit to hauling anything there.

Places you visit once

The last group builds nothing and is worth a detour anyway. Our hidden locations guide collects the unmapped corners of the Commonwealth, and they range from genuinely dangerous to purely strange.

The two Walden Pond entries sit close enough together to be one trip, which is the sort of thing worth spotting before you plan two.

Vault 88's secret entrances belong in this group despite being attached to a buildable place, because our guide is honest that they give you nothing except extra fast travel points. They are a completionist's errand rather than a functional one. They also have a real prerequisite: all three Vault-Tec Workshops in each area have to be activated first, which you do anyway as part of the Explore Vault 88 optional quest.

Where to start

If you have never run a settlement, start at Abernathy Farm, because the workstation page shows it already has the benches you would otherwise have to build. If you want the achievements, Far Harbor's three workshops are the cheapest of the three targets. And before you pour hours into any single site, the settlement happiness guide names two locations to avoid for that purpose, which is much easier to act on before you have built there than after.

The people who make a settlement worth having are in the NPCs bucket, and what you actually put inside one is in the workshop items list.