One of the most time-consuming but amazing projects you can undertake in a Fallout 4 settlement (aside from building a sky-scraping palace or repairing the walls of The Castle) is building a huge animated billboard. Redditor /u/RFarmer has inspired a revolution with their guide to big, immersion-breaking billboards like this one . Here’s how to do it:
Step 1
Set up an 18x8 grid of Light Boxes just to start off with. Each light box requires 1 Power, which is annoying, but there you have it. You’ll want at least 50 Power, which requires 5 large generators.
Step 2
On top of the billboard, place more generators as needed. You can wire all of your power sources together so that they form one big power bank, though you won’t want to wire everything together willy-nilly.
Step 3
Plan out the animation you want, in three parts: which parts will always be on, which parts are only on during the first frame, and which parts are only on during the second frame? (Any more than two frames may be much more complex. If you don’t want to animate it at all, it’s a lot simpler.)
Step 4
The parts that are always on can be powered by one power source (create your own power bank for this part). That generator bank will link to a terminal, which will link to the lightboxes that will always be on.
Step 5
The difficult part is setting up the parts that turn on and off with each frame. For the first frame, set up a new generator bank, then link it to a different terminal, which will link to the time interval switches, which will link to the light boxes that will be on for that frame.
For the second frame, do this process but only for the boxes that will remain on for that second frame.
As you can see, all three types of light boxes will have their own power sources. Set the interval time to On for 1s and Off for 1s for each of the 2 frames.
Because there’s no way to tell the lights “turn on when the other lights turn off,” you’ll need to cut the power on one frame, then reattach it and check the animation. If the animation’s off, cut the power then reattach again and see if the animation looks right. Rinse and repeat.
Video Tutorial For Creating Animated Billboards
Here’s a link to a video that explains the whole concept in more depth:
Why separate generator banks for the three different animation stages? So that the terminals don’t consolidate the input data as they would otherwise do, creating frames that simply sync up rather than animating properly.
Examples Of Awesome Billboards
Here’s some of the really cool billboards players have managed to construct using this trick (along with some other cheats, like giving themselves unlimited materials, etc):
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149 power and 49 delay switches later...
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Got any more awesome billboards to share? Let us know and we'll add to the post. Til then, happy building!
