Sanctuary Hills is the first settlement you need to build early on in Fallout 4 with the survivors of Quincy and some of the Minutemen. You’ll need to ensure that Sanctuary Hills is strong and productive while you explore the rest of the Commonwealth, and here’s a guide to help you down that path.
Central to Fallout 4's tale, Sanctuary Hills, is where you first meet your character before the bombs drop in 2077. 200 years later, it will also be your first permanent home after you wake up and leave Vault 111.
After rescuing Preston Garvey and the survivors of the Quincy Massacre, you have enough settlers to rebuild the gutted subdivision with your loyal Mr. Handy assistant, Codsworth.
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For a beginner who came to Fallout 4 because of Jonathan Nolan’s live-action series, getting to this point may have already been daunting, and yet you are slapped with another Herculean task. Don’t worry; we have prepared this guide to help you resurrect your old home.
Salvage All the Available Materials in Sanctuary Hills
Before you can build, you will need to gather some materials. The Commonwealth is full of junk that can be converted into raw materials, but you can find most of the materials that you need early, such as Steel, Rubber, Ceramic, and others, lying around in Sanctuary itself.
All you need to do is activate Workshop Mode and approach any junk spread out within Sanctuary. Once the junk is highlighted, you only need to select Scrap, and they’ll be converted into raw materials.
You’ll be surprised at how abundant Sanctuary is when it comes to scrap, thanks to the nuclear bombs that decimated the immediate area.
Drop Them All Into the Workbench
You can find a red Workbench near the door of your main house in Sanctuary, where Mama Murphy and the rest of your settlers come in to sleep and work if you didn’t assign them to tend to the plants. Make sure to deposit all the junk you’ve collected from the immediate surroundings and the Commonwealth as soon as possible.
This is important for various reasons. One, depositing all that junk into the Workshop will free you of any encumbered weight and leave you able to pick up more on your next foray into the Commonwealth. Second, the Workshop will automatically scrape that junk into materials whenever needed.
The Workbench has infinite storage, so you don’t need to worry about having too much. Todd Howard may say being over-encumbered is a personal choice, but you need those junk items.
Pick Up As Much Junk As You Can From the Commonwealth
Again, Todd tells us that carrying too much is a personal choice, but loading up on as much junk as possible is essential while trying to get your first settlement off the ground. You need the materials, so using up to 85% of your weight allowance makes sense so you can still run away if you encounter opponents or fast-travel back to Sanctuary.
Don’t mind if your companions criticize you for picking seemingly random stuff off the ground or off tables and containers. We don’t know why Bethesda has given them dialogues like that.
Get Some Beds In Those Houses!
You need to focus early on populating Sanctuary Hills with settlers. There are various ways to do that, but all your efforts will be for nought if there are no beds for them to rest in when they arrive.
Right from the start, you will need to build up to 5 beds and start from there. You’ll know if they’re insufficient because people like Marcy Long will approach you and ask you to build more when needed.
Put Up Resource Production As Soon As You Can
Your settlement cannot survive without these two important features—resource production and defense. Resource production ensures that your settlement has enough food and water to sustain its inhabitants, who are vital to the Happiness rating of your village or homeowners’ association.
You can start by foraging the areas around Sanctuary Hills for seedlings to plant Tomatoes, Mutfruit, Melons, Tato, and many others. You only need one of each to start. Once each seedling can be harvested, you can use the produce to plant more. It’s like compounding interest because each harvested seedling will grow back indefinitely.
Those are just the basic resources. You need to increase your production to a level where you can produce items like Purified Water. This resource is a commodity in the Wasteland and can earn you bottlecaps in addition to being an effective alternative medicine to Stimpacks.
Arm Your Settlers Up
Dropped weapons and ammunition are more common than weapon caches when you’re exploring in Fallout 4. Be sure to pick up as many dropped guns and bullets as you can, as you’ll need them to arm your settlers and defend them against incursions by Raiders and Gunners.
Like your companions, your settlers can carry items for you that you can take later on if you’d like, except for merchants like Trashcan Carla. You can use those spaces to give them bullets and at least two types of guns.
Build Those Turrets and Locate Them Strategically
Automated turrets are perfect for your early settlement defense. They only require a power source, and they’ll attack any intruders on their own. You only need to come back and repair them after an attack—you’ll be warned via Pip-Boy.
However, for them to be effective, you’ll need to place them strategically. The best place is to place two turrets on the bridge and then on the roofs of the nearby houses. You can also place turrets on the outer perimeters and on top of any nearby houses because opponents can spawn inside your base.
In any case, this arrangement should create a funnel that will decimate many intruders before they can reach your inner sanctum, defended by your settlers.
You can also use mines to supplement your turrets. They can be hooked up to the same generators your turrets will be connected to for power.
That’s it for the basics of settlement production and defense in Sanctuary Hills, the first safe area you’ll have access to in Fallout 4. As you progress and join the Minutemen, you’ll find more settlements willing to join your “Army” in exchange for a little favor.
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