Overcoming the Fallout 4 bed building bug

This is an important public service announcement.

Fallout 4 already has a day one patch, but still, gamers are going to run into issues in the game that haven’t been patched out. If Bethesda’s history is anything to go by, some things might not get patched at all; their games are just so vast, it’s hard to catch everything.

And sometimes, the bugs are hilarious: case in point, the Fallout 4 bed building bug.

How does the Fallout 4 bed building bug manifest?

Early on in the game, you’ll run into a group of settlers. One of your first quests is to help them escape raiders on their way to a new home, and from there you can either let them float away like a sycamore seed pod on the winds, or go and help them set up shop. There are numerous benefits to town building in Fallout 4, as we saw in the build-up through E3 2015 and beyond, including better supplies, merchants, and a place to upgrade your hardware or simply get a good night’s sleep.

By way of a tutorial, one of these settlers will ask you to set up a few basic essentials for their new community using Fallout 4’s new town building system; this list includes crops, a water supply and some rudimentary defences, but first on the list are beds. For the people to sleep in. So it feels like home.

But you may find you can’t place the beds anywhere, even if you have all the requisite materials, and if you do, you’ve stumbled across the Fallout 4 bed building bug. There are a few things you can try first, like clearing floor space to ensure you’ve got enough room to build the bed, but you’ll probably find the bed – in typical sandbox ‘red means no/green means yes’ placement style – is floating four feet in the air, and try as you might, you can’t make it touchdown to earth.

What can you do about it?

First of all, it’s a little frustrating but mostly hilarious.

You can try quitting the game – not just back to the menu screen, but physically closing the game and re-launching it – and that seems to do the trick for some people. But if like me you’re not so lucky, there’s a more avant garde way to solve this particular issue: put the beds on in the ceiling.

See? I told you it was hilarious.

You’ll need to walk around the interiors of buildings, looking up at the joints between the walls and the ceiling, to see if your bed placement icon turns green. You’ll not know if the space above the ceiling is flat enough/clear enough to receive the bed and the roofs are unfortunately too high to scale, so you’ll just have to go by trial and error on this one.

Keep wandering around the internal structure, hovering your bed at the apex of ceiling and floor – particularly on the internal walls, which seem wider and flatter – until you get a green nibble, then place the bed. Depending on your personal levels of patience you may approach this methodically, or it may see you running round like a mad thing, frantically hammering the button until a bed is born. Whatever works.

Once you’ve placed five beds, go and see the quest giver and collect your reward: some experience, and more things he wants you to build…

Funny side effects

There’s also an amusing side-effect of the Fallout 4 bed building bug, and it comes from having to use the ceiling placement method: you may just see one of the residents of the settlement getting out of the floating bed and tumbling through the ceiling at sunrise.

Thanks for listening, children!

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