Fallout 4 is barren. No, not just from a story or gameplay perspective. Quite literally. To combat this, I've personally always fallen back on settlement building, because if Bethesda won't do it, I guess I'll have to do it myself, and this community is blessed with an abundance of great settlement mods.

It just so happens to also be blessed with Horizon.

Having played Horizon since 0.9 I literally can't go back. I've tried. Without the gentle but firm touch of daddy Zawinul the gameplay of Fallout 4 lacks challenge, progression and most importantly fun. Seeing as I can't stop playing Horizon, I decided to try and patch some of my favourite settlement mods. I'm far from adept at FO4Edit, but I'm pretty sure I haven't borked too many things up. All of the below mods are excellent additions to the game in order to increase settlement building without breaking your immersion!

The following settlement mods are currently patched:

• Workshop Rearranged (Horizon 1.8)
• cVc Dead Wasteland (Horizon 1.8)
• Woody's Wasteland Stuff (Horizon 1.8)
• Farming Resources (Horizon 1.8)
• Thematic and Practical (Horizon 1.8)
• The Cozy Settler (Horizon 1.8)
  

Workshop Rearranged
By d81

Workshop Rearranged is an ambitious mod, without a doubt, and definitely my go-to mod for a settlement overhaul. The issue with these grand overhauls is that they often collide with projects of similar scope. As for Horizon, it conflicts with some menu edits, changes vital constructible recipes and values (such as water pumps or generators) and changes more than a few scrapping recipes and activators which severely unbalances the in-game economy. As such, my patch does the following:

• Resets all changes made in Workshop Rearranged to scrapping recipes, and adjusts them according to Horizon's recipes
• Adjusts activators which allow the player to drink clean water (from player-built kitchen sinks, for example)
• Adjusts all generator and water resource values according to Horizon's values
• Readjusts all settlement construction recipes according to Horizon. The vendors now require all the items a normal Horizon vendor would require, as does all generators, water pumps, crafting stations and the like. 
• In addition a lot of the normal constructible objects such as furniture or building components now have recipes which include Horizon-specific junk items (such as packing material) and have production costs more in line with similar items in Horizon. Beds, for example, won't cost you 20 cloth any more.
• Removes from the settlement construction menu such items which could be considered unbalanced, such as craftable flora (hubflowers and siltbeans for example), or were superfluous such as car battery generators (which are included in Horizon as of 1.7)
• Because I like the fish cleaning station (don't @ me), I've restricted them to 1 per settlement and increased their cost a bit. An additional 3 food per settlement isn't a huge deal in my eyes, and if you think so, don't build the damned thing
  

Notes

This patch will only work with a new save file, unfortunately. I'm not familiar with the sort of black magic actual mod-makers are, so I'm not entirely sure why, but I reckon it has to do with settlement menu generation. If anyone can elucidate this, let me know.

cVc Dead Wasteland
By cVcNEX

Just like Workshop Rearranged, cVc Dead Wasteland is an ambitious and creative mod, but where WR is exhaustive and channels the vanilla game's aesthetic, cVcNEX goes above and beyond by giving their own twist on this. Interesting and impressive centerpieces, new unique variants of commonplace objects like generators and water pumps, landscape details like bluffs and trees, you name it. Just as with WR, CVC heavily unbalances Horizon's native balance of resources, which is why a patch is required.

Note that I have not currently patched the cVc DLC addons, so don't expect anything in those plugins to be balanced to Horizon's standards. I might get on that in the future, those cancer causing climate-conscious wind turbines look nice.

• Generators and water silos/purifiers are hugely unbalanced compared to Horizon's own resources, and as such they've been rebalanced. The crafting recipes have gotten reworked, and many now require proper Horizon perks and crafting components
• Likewise, a bunch of crops and farmable chemistry ingredients were simply not compatible with Horizon's settlement system, and were disabled
• cVc has its own set of crafting workbenches where you could craft ammo, chems, etc. These have been disabled, for obvious reasons.
• A few items, like a wooden water tower and guard post chairs, were identical to Horizon variants, and were thus disabled.
• A bunch of objects required cloth where Horizon would use packing material. This patch fixes this, so you'll have plenty of cloth to make bandages and wrap yourself into a cute little wasteland mummy
  

Notes

This patch works like most of the others, make sure to load it after both Horizon and cVc. There is a lot of overlap between the building categories of this mod and WR, but they do complement each other beautifully.

Farming Resources
By ceano

This cute little mod adds all sorts of cattle to the Commonwealth, which is a welcome addition! Abernathy farm looks so much more lively as a cattle farm, and animal husbandry is a time-honoured tradition amongst us humans. The issue here is game balance when using this mod alongside Horizon, which is why I've made the following changes:

• Disabled the guard dog, as Horizon already includes canine defence capabilities, as well as gazelles. Not really sure why, though. I guess I hate gazelles
• Increased the price of livestock across the board. They no longer simply cost a small amount of caps, but instead some additional resources alongside a substantially increased cap price
• Locked each animal behind a Leadership level, as well as certain perk magazines (get back to me on the Leadership levels, they may be too low, lol)
• Finally, since NPCs are idiots, I've set their status to protected instead of respawnable. This stops the player from simply killing them for meat over and over again, as well as protects the livestock from themselves,  the complete idiots little angels
  

Notes

There are two patches for this mod, one for Horizon only and one for Horizon alongside Workshop Rearranged. Only use one of these, and remember that the Workshop Rearranged patch requires a new save file and the main patch for Workshop Rearranged. As this seems to have caused confusion, let me reiterate: this patch is not a combined patch for WR and FR, this is simply a patch for FR which is compatible with WR. You still need to use both patches. As for the perk magazines I've purposely not included them in the patch description (I don't want you bee-lining to get them from the get-go) but they're included in this spoiler:

Spoiler:  

Show

In order to raise most cattle, you're going to need the first issue of the Wasteland Survival Guide Farming the Wastes, and in order to breed rabbits you'll need the third issue of Islander's Almanac from Far Harbour, Far Harbor Sightseer's Guide 

Woody's Wasteland Stuff
By woodylicious

Woody's Wasteland Stuff is a mod full of personality and is great for building anything from cozy cabins to an entire community of settler homesteads. This patch is relatively small and makes the following changes:

• Adjusts all generator and water pump recipes in line with Horizon's values, and restricts the windmill to one per settlement
• Edits a few recipes for household decorations
• Removes clean water from the mods faucets, which now instead emit irradiated water
  

Notes

Woody's is a great mod, and should work with any modlist since the menu is scripted in and doesn't touch anything else. The kitchen and plumbing sets in particular are fantastic! Have fun!

Thematic and Practical - Workshop Settlements - Structures and Furnitures
By 5like 

Thematic and Practical is a great mod for constructing buildings, large and small, which retain the vanilla-aesthetic but go far beyond what you can do with just the basic build set. It's a must have for city building, and contains a nice selection of improvised settler furniture (hooray for bunk and queen beds!). The following balance changes were made:

• Furniture recipes were adjusted to use Horizon materials (such as packing material) and adhere more closely to Horizon's construction recipes
• Building construction recipes were adjusted to adhere to Horizon values
• Thematic and Practical vendors were disabled. Simply use Horizon's vendor mat alongside the mod's many vendor counters
  

Notes

Just like with Woody's mod, TAP's settlement menu is injected via script and as such doesn't touch anything else and should work with any load order! As with any patch, load it below the original mod.

The Cozy Settler - A Settlement Workshop Kit
By NaiRae

A new addition to my load order, The Cozy Settler is great for reestablishing a sense of normalcy and comfort to the wasteland in a believable and lore-friendly way. Where Woody's wasteland stuff has an air of Home on the Range and Thematic and Practical stays faithful to the vanilla aesthetic, The Cozy Settler is a look into what our poor hapless settlers could hope to achieve in a few years of rebuilding the Commonwealth. 

• All furniture and fixtures are adjusted to use Horizon components (such as packing material) and construction costs
• The cooking workbench wagon now costs the same to build as the regular cooking workbench
• The compost heap and farming workbench are both increased in construction cost and limited to one per settlement. If their balance still feels way off, feel free to harass me online. 
  

Notes

As aforementioned mods, this should work in any load order, just make sure to load the patch below the main mod. 
Finishing thoughts, mod links and credits

All the mods above are absolutely amazing, and they all deserve a download and an endorsement. I'll do my best to stay on top of any updates to the mods (Horizon in particular), and you'll always find me through the Horizon discord server if you have any questions or requests. Huge credits to:

• Zawinul, for the masterpiece that is Horizon
• d81, for the inspired overhaul that is Workshop Rearranged
• cVcNEX, for the excellent and creative cVc Dead Wasteland
• woodylicious, Woody's Wasteland Stuff is a truly great mod full of character and charm
• 5like, Thematic and Practical has been of fantastic use in almost all of my settlement builds
• ceano, Farming Resources adds some much needed life into my settlements
• NaiRae, for instilling my settlements with a sense of comfort and homeliness with The Cozy Settler
• pra, for their excellent auto-patching scripts and many Horizon-friendly mods. Check out their modpage!
• Starguardace, for keeping the mod up to date and helping me make the patch as good as possible!