I prefer to think of it as a surprise renovation project

By avoiding the Minutemen in Concord I won't get those settlers coming to Sanctuary, which is a good thing because 3 of those 5 people are the most annoying characters in the game and can't be...disposed of...once they move in. New Sanctuary will be exactly how Alice and I want it.

The most annoying part of starting again is having to re-capture all of the other settlements. Alice had cleared and populated every settlement on the map, and linked them together with trade routes - even the settlement located on an island! It'll take some time to redo all that stuff.

Oh, these are good tips! That is amazing that you got all the settlements and trade routes set up before! Did all your settlements look as good as that one you showed us screens of? Are there any other things you might do differently in your renovation?

I would love it if you made a VLog of your re-establishing these settlements; yours looked awesome!

There is one settlement someone made a video of called "The Castle" - and from the comments it must have been spectacular, but the vid was removed for some reason, so I never got to see it.

The Castle is Fort Independence. You take it as part of the Minutemen questline, but you can settle there without having to join them if you want. If you join the Minutemen at a later date then they just move right in since it's already clear. It's got tall walls and is already wired up with electricity (just needs some generators) but there's not actually much room for expansion due to a big radio tower in the middle of the courtyard.

There are very few settlements that are as big as Sanctuary. Most settlements just had a shelter, some crops, and some turrets - most didn't even have walls! There are 2 main ones that I'll focus on - Starlight Drive-In and Spectacle Island. Those 2 are all large enough for a good sized settlement.

The Drive-in has a huge area of flat land which is perfect for building structures. I use that as a staging area for the whole operation - putting a recruitment beacon there and sending settlers to other locations as they arrive.
Spectacle Island is huge, so I plan on building a large community there. The only problem would be the large number of Mirelurks on the island. Turrets and walls should keep them at bay.

Not sure about a VLog, but I might make a thread and throw everything in there.

Oh, that would be Awesome!

I saw Spectacle Island in a vid once, but the guy was just setting it on his map and searching for a boss to fight that he thought should be there, like a tougher mirelurk or something. (which he didn't find, but did find plenty of the regular ones). How do you set up access to it for NPC's? Do you put a dock all the way to it? (or a boat trip?)

I'll have to look up that drive-in one in vids and see what kind of settlements people have been putting up there, it sounds like a great place to build if it is like I'm picturing = that drive-in from Fallout 3 that had raiders and vicious dogs that was near Andale.

I found this map of all the FO4 Bobblehead locations.