The Settlement / Settlers Fix Bethesda should've nailed themselves

[Corbaine]

Hey everyone,

 

I don't know if my issue with settlements is exactly the same as other people's because there are so many complaints and concerns out there about this central element of Fallout 4 gameplay. What bugs the hell out of me is that Bethesda has the Sole Survivor positioned as some idol of worship where the settlements fall apart in the absence of your presence.

 

The mechanism, from my understanding, is that if you are far enough away from a settlement the game simple stops processing anything that happens in those settlements and everything in them ceases to exists. Yet, at the same time, there is a running happy / unhappy meter doing calculations purely off of the numeric resources we see in our settlement overviews - water, food, security, etc (yes, I'm totally guessing here). I don't know what 'generates happiness' in settlements other than the obvious elements such as certain stores and whatnot, but if the happiness calculator ignores those elements because you are too far away and the engine doesn't load them, it's quite obvious that your happiness ratings will take a nose dive, because what created the happiness is no longer present in the game until you get close enough to those settlements for the elements to be loaded again. In my case it's not just the happiness of distant, unvisited settlements that drop, but the stores I have in those settlements also don't get their inventories restocked. I imagine it's caused by the same issue.

 

Now, I know nothing about modding, so I hope this isn't an absurd request... (dum dum dummmmm) ...but, is it possible to do the following:

 

1. Force reset settlement store inventories every 24 hours, irrespective of your proximity; and
2. Keeping distant settlement calculations running accurately, irrespective of proximity.
   • If the happiness algorithm is known, settlement assets should be loggable numerically and calculated against separately from whether or not the engine loads them. And the results generated from there should overwrite the vanilla generated values, and if possible the vanilla calculations should be halted as a whole to avoid any conflicts. I'm not a programmer but unless its run every second I can't imagine a script like this placing any real strain on the game with the small set of numeric values it calculates?

I'm a huge Fallout fan - been playing since Vault 13's waterchip broke back in 1997, so something like this isn't enough to make me abandon the franchise, but it sure as hell takes a whole lot of fun out of it.