Recently our Editor in Chief, Ian, sent me an imgur link with a single brief but awed comment: “omg”. On the page were pictures of a massive Fallout 4 settlement building at Starlight Drive-In, fashioned as a market and bazaar. My first thought? “Challenge accepted”. And with that, I set out to reverse engineer the original posters’ work, customizing and altering the design as I saw fit.
With nary a set of plans or instructions to work from, I eyeballed my way into creating a fair replica, incorporating my own decor embellishments along the way. Here’s what I came up with.
Starlight Drive-In has an enormous open expanse of pavement to build on and I’d always wanted to create a market area for the settlers, but I wasn’t nearly ambitious enough to conceive of making a compound of this magnitude. As you can see, things were looking pretty bleak: I wasn’t thinking big enough. There were vast amounts of space not being used for anything, and what structures I had built were just sad and pathetic. Surely I could do better.
Someone who did do better was the imgur user SeraphinFoad, whose design was challenging and also something of a mystery. No plans or instructions had been provided with the image set. I began with the foundation and used the pictures to count the number of units at the bottom of the bazaar. Start by placing the concrete foundation units a few feet out from the Starlight Drive-In screen. As you can see from the side view below, the concrete foundation is six units long on each side, with two additional wings of 2 x 3 units on the front. The foundation is 14 units wide, leaving a gap in the middle that is eight units wide. You can see the effect from the front of the building.
6 by 14 units, with two 2 x 3 units attached to the entrance.
Once you have built the entire foundation, making sure there is a gap left between the drive-in screen and the invisible back wall of the building, place three metal walls on the front of each wing, specifically the unit with a slanted roof. Use these walls as support for six metal roof units covering the wing, establishing a base to build the rest of the floors from.
One problem you’ll encounter in building multi-floor buildings is that you can’t build on top of metal roofing; other units will not click into place. You can place a wood unit on top of the metal roofing, but lining it up can be very tricky, and placing a floor unit even a centimeter off can cause problems when you line up others down the road. One trick to keep the units straight is to use the floor/stairs prefab unit. When assembled, it has a small lip on the top that sticks out a few inches, allowing you to click other units, like slabs of flooring, into place. Once you’re done aligning, you can remove the floor/stairs unit and replace it with something else. With this method, you can create several floors of uniform rows as seen in the pictures above and below.
Creating the three tiers of slanted roof alcoves on either side will be the most difficult part of the process. Place three wood floor units on the roofs of each wing, and one on the inner back corner, forming an L shape. Two slats of metal roofing will be left behind.
In that empty space, place four of the smaller wood floor units, side by side (width-wise). These will anchor your wall units. Use the ones with the slanted roofs, as seen above. From those slanted wall units, you will build the floors of the rest of the building, using the roof/floor prefab unit (no! walls!) Build backwards and over until both sides meet in the middle, and continue to use the floor/stairs prefab unit as needed to keep the other units aligned. You should try to keep in at least one flight of stairs on every floor on the left and right sides of the building, so you do not have to waste space outside the building on stairs instead of walls or security. Continue this process until you have four floors.
My frame ended up one unit wider than the original poster’s, but that’s okay. It means there’s a lot of space to work with. At this point you can begin to improvise as you see fit. As you can see, I put an extra wing on top. The roof was planned as the center of all my energy sources, so I left room for both generators and pylons. With those necessities secured, work on the giant lightbox screen could begin.
Lightboxes, which are located in the miscellaneous section of the Lighting tab of the Workshop, can be stacked to create giant screens, as seen in the image above. However, they must be built on a flat surface or platform. To achieve that, I created a small balcony, using the small wood floor units, along the middle six units between the first and second floors. From there I built upward with the lightboxes, which snap into place to form a grid. I then removed the small wood floor units, leaving just the screen. The lightboxes will remain in place despite no longer having a base.
Creating a pixel image was a little trickier, since the lighting and wiring has to be set up from behind each panel by connecting wires to the conduit’s pylon. I suggest using a symmetrical image, as it makes the process much easier. It’s very difficult to count pixels but even more so when you’re accounting for a different perpective. You may wish to set up lighting before you start, as it can get very dim on the floors of the building, despite the lack of walls. Wires are very hard to see in the dark.
For my pixel board image I chose a large skull and cross bones. A bit of trial and error was necessary to get it fully working. If needed, build a walkway with the small floor units so you can quickly walk out in front of the screen in mid-air and check the lighting. You can always remove them once you’re finished and use them later.
Once each section was wired, I attached the wires to a conduit, then stretched a connecting wire up to a pylon attached to my generators. It keeps the wiring organized and out of the way.
At this point in the design process I got a bit antsy for some flair, so I started putting in lighting and plants. With the conduits it becomes very easy to light the entire structure without sacrificing space. I used a grid system along each side, then worked inward. The first three floors are open, with well lit railings. The top floor has metal walls, with a metal doorway units acting as windows. These same units were used as windows on the wings on the bottom floor. Lamps were put in all of them. The entire building has a very warm glow.
The bottom floor also received doorways in the middle of each wing, with added stairs for the settlers. Leading up to the main floor of the bazaar is a boardwalk flanked by lion statues on concrete foundations, with four sets of stairs at the entrance. A fountain area was given wings for the smokers to have a place to sit.
Instead of overhauling or building around the old airplane-cafe left behind, I decided to revitalize it, putting in picket fencing, new lighting, and seating areas. The garden area was also cleaned up, the rows straightened and new crops planted.
The back of the building is also undergoing renovation, with new lighting and two guard towers, attached to the bazaar with walkways and stairs. The top of the old drive-in screen and the edge of its roof on the lower wing are both lined with lightboxes that link back up to the generators.
On the side you can see I did resort to some outside stairs, which I may remove at a later date.
As for the bazaar itself, you’ll find that it’s hard to place the emporium-size trade shops in a room, as the sign clips into the ceiling above. But along the back, where a gap remains between the drive-in screen and the back “wall” of the building, they will fit fine. I set up mine to look like a cafeteria, with a little bar near the food and drink shop.
I’ve yet to renovate the upper floors, as there’s almost too much room to work with, but so far the settlers have taken well to the open bed situation, sleeping in long rows. The top floor has all the crafting benches and tables but I might make separate workshops and laboratories for those later. The floor beneath will be home to several sitting areas with shelves of decorative items I’ve pilfered from the Commonwealth and paintings.
The pool in the middle of the concrete is still my primary source of water. Be sure to remove the radioactive barrels if you choose to use it. I put some mutfruit, corn, and carrots around the perimeter to soften its look a bit, though I don’t know how effective that really was.
In the process of building Starlight Bazaar, you will hit your settlement’s size limit many times, especially if you build elaborate lighting systems, like the lightbox screen. Use the gun scrapping exploit to make more room. Not only does it artificially reduce your settlement’s Size meter, but scrapping guns also has the added benefit of providing tons of building materials, especially steel. The most effective way to get a stockpile of guns while building the Starlight Bazaar is to do the Minutemen and Brotherhood of Steel repeating missions, which will task you with clearing locations that have been overcome by Raiders, Gunners, or Super Mutants. Combined with the Strongback perk (invest in all tiers of the subrank and you can walk and fast travel while overburdened), you can collect hundreds of guns and get both the materials necessary to build your settlement and the added space to use them. You should also routinely make the rounds at enemy hotspots, like Quincy Police Station, Gunners Plaza, Dunwich Borers, the outside of Vault 95, and inner Boston locations like the outside of Fenueil Hall.
I will continue to design, upgrade, and polish my Starlight Bazaar and add decor until I have much of the land put to use in some way. I plan to keep the file vanilla and avoid mods until my next game file. Have any questions about how this was constructed? I’ll answer them in the comments.
