mrudat

Hmm... in theory, it should be straight forward enough to achieve this; create a miscellaneous item generated over time by settlers, that can't be transferred between settlements (or perhaps it can, there's arguments for and against), add an appropriate number of build points to each object that you can build. It doesn't match exactly with your current method, as repairing an object would only cost one build point, because repairing appears to consume one of each kind of resource used to build the object in the first place. An argument can be made for having two kinds of build points, one that is movable and one that is not; you would use the movable build points for the majority of the effort for building generators and turrets (small complex objects that can be built elsewhere and shipped for installation), but not for actual buildings, which can't be usefully shipped via pack animal. You can also substitute local build points for movable build points, in which case the small complex objects were build and assembled on-site. This would have the effect that on a newly established settlement, you can deploy a full set of turrets and generators that arrived via pack animal (but had to have some local effort for installation), but only put up rudimentary walls and buildings.

As for the order to repair objects, I believe that the following should be close to optimal, presuming that it is not possible to repair everything immediately. Pick the least resource intensive broken thing (if any). Pick the most damaged (but still operational) thing that requires at least one resource to fix (if any). Pick the least resource intensive broken food or water item (if any). If repairing a water or food item would have exceeded available defence (or food + water total already exceeds defence): * pick the least resource intensive broken power using defence item (if any) * pick the least resource intensive broken un-powered defence item (if any) If repairing a powered item would exceed available power (or power usage already exceeds available power): * pick the least resource intensive broken generator (if any) if the object is broken: * repair the object if there is enough available effort, if not, stop. else: * restore 1/n of the health of the object, consuming one resource or rarity aligned with which part of the HP bar you're restoring. repeat until out of repair effort, or no more things to be fixed.

There's the "Tidy Settlers" mod which has a rubbish bin to which you can assign settlers to scrap random debris over time. As far as I understand it, work is accrued over time, and applied when you zone in, and an idle marker near the rubbish bin for the assigned settler, rather than an idle marker for each object. I'd be inclined to use a tool box as the work station to assign a maintenance person to; that, or have a tool shed to which an unlimited number of settlers can be assigned (as having multiple tools sheds, rather than just sharing one doesn't make sense to me). Perhaps a tool shed, into which multiple tools boxes can be snapped, with one to begin with, to which you can assign the first settler? Or perhaps one of the crafting stations? Perhaps have 24 units of work accrue each day, which can be used to consume up to 24 resources to repair damaged objects (and power armour) in a settlement; it appears to cost 1 resource of each kind used to construct the object to restore an object that has been damaged beyond usefulness; perhaps have a proportional cost for a resource which is only partially damaged, starting with the less rare components. For example, if you keep repairing gun turrets, you should only ever need steel to replace damaged armour, rather than needing to replace more rare components. I think it would be reasonable to have the assigned farmer repair damaged food resources at a rate of 1 food production per day (a maximum of 6 days to bring food production back online), as otherwise they just stand around idle when they would have been working on the resources in question. It won't have any long term impact, as food is shared across all networked settlements, and so long as you run at a modest surplus, you can afford to wear the decreased production until all the damaged resources are repaired. For sandboxing, the repair person should use the various 'repair/crafting' idle markers all day long (more-or-less what Sturges does); I'd suggest using "Invisible Furniture" or including similar idle markers in the mod to place "repair" sandbox markers next to repairable resources. I think that the wall hammering animation and the power armour station animations would be the most appropriate vanilla animations that might work for repair animations for the non-food resources.

Given the minutemen are described as citizen soldiers, though I'm not sure the modern incarnation matches that, I'd like it if instead of randomly generated NPCs being summoned/created as minutemen you instead get your own settlers from the nearest settlements; they would be armed and armoured by you, and if there is available power armour, should arrive wearing it (and return it to a power armour station when they return home). Given the historical definition of minutemen, there shouldn't really be patrols of minutemen, instead we should have minutemen appear similarly to the mysterious stranger; random exterior battles (where there are friendly NPCs that could have called for help) should have minutemen appear with a fairly low chance. As far as I am aware the "Defence" value counts as a relative strength modifier; turret attack power and guard posts don't really align well with how much damage each is capable of delivering to an enemy NPC, and doesn't take into account static fortifications, ie. a wall around the settlement, sniper nests, turret placement, buildings protecting vulnerable resources, etc. I'd like to have summoned minutemen automatically appear for a "defend the settlement" quest. Ideally they would spawn from the direction of their home settlement (or more properly the direction from which a provisioner would have arrived from said settlement), with more minutemen turning up over time as the attack continues, in order of distance from the settlement under attack. I'd suggest that a percentage of the settlers should appear, so a larger settlement can provide more fighters. A defensive value could be calculated from the size of the other aligned settlements, decreasing with distance as they will take longer to respond, and thus provide less of an deterrent to attack. Perhaps up to (population * happiness) / 4 settlers being available at a minute's notice? Perhaps assign each available minuteman a base defence value of 6 (equivalent of three guard posts, which can be manned by one settler). Modify that rating by 1/r^2 where r is the number of in-game minutes it will take for each detachment of minutemen to arrive at the given settlement? I'd include the local settlement in that calculation, so you get a defence boost of (population * happiness / 4) * 6 just based on the number of settlers. Artillery should count as extra defence for any aligned settlement within range; ideally artillery strikes would be called during settlement defence, though that might be tricky to arrange for intelligently, as it seems that NPCs don't seem to understand collateral damage. I like the idea of a larger attack being built up to attack a settlement being the reason why the time between attacks is longer; I'd prefer to have a sliding scale, rather than a threshold for the size of the attack; perhaps have some way of calculating an appropriate attack power to challenge the available defences, spawn the maximum number of possible enemy NPCs (there's an engine limitation on the maximum number of active combatants), and then keep spawning slightly more powerful NPCs as the earlier ones die until the total attack power is expended? If feasible this would be somewhat multi-stage, in the sense that there are waves of increasingly tough enemies, but should allow for a continuum of attack size, without needing to script out multiple different attack sizes. Perhaps the sum of the levels of all of the attacking NPCs being (10 * defence) + player level? Pick the most dangerous enemy from the level list, then roll repeatedly for the remaining enemies until the sum of enemy NPC levels exceeds the target, sort the list in order of increasing level, and spawn NPCs until you hit the cap on active combatants, then spawn more from the list until done. As for a reward, perhaps each successfully thwarted raid earns a (fractional?) boost to charisma, as this is what sets the population cap; or it could just be done by spawning a new settler in the settlement that was just attacked. I don't believe that there is a mechanism for losing settlers off the top of my head, apart from possibly having them die. As for levelling the minutemen, a large part of that is the quality of arms and armor that the NPCs spawn with, and if you've been outfitting your settlers they should have gear that's close to level-appropriate to the player, even if they themselves are under-levelled. Ideally your settlers would earn XP from their kills, slowly increasing in level over time; as far as I understand things you only get called upon for those raids which are capable of threatening the settlement, and logically (or actually, I'm not quite sure) your settlement fights off smaller raids on a semi-regular basis that you never hear about. This would be another source of XP for levelling your settlers. In theory a more strongly defended settlement regularly fights off stronger opponents, thus increasing the amount of XP the settlers earn. Perhaps be able to build a gun range for earning XP towards the perk for their current equipped weapon? Or perhaps be able to set up training at the castle for passing on your own skills.

When the GECK is available... it would be nifty if we could assign settlers to repair/upgrade the settlement over time (probably by assignment to a saw-horse, or a 'blueprint' painting?), given that they already sandbox repairing and working on the various workbenches. For example, we seem to have multiple tiers for the appearance of certain constructible items, it would be nifty if the settlers would, over time, upgrade the items to their more polished look. Ideally, we'd have new 'under construction' tiers of items as well. For repair, if there are any damaged objects, your maintenance crew would perform repairs first, before moving on to upgrading items. I'd like to have tier-0 'blueprint' items that cost no resources, and only have any effect once they're upgraded to tier-1 (the lowest grade of constructible object). For some items, there are multiple replacement objects that could count as being of a higher tier, ideally, for those that like to plan everything out, a blueprint could be constructed for the specific item, nominating a specific upgrade path, or instead a generic blueprint, where a random item would be chosen as the final form. Extending on that, if an object is destroyed completely, instead of removing it from the settlement and requiring manual action to replace, it would be nifty to have it replaced with a blueprint, to eventually be rebuilt automatically when time and resources permit. In terms of implementation, I'd want to attach a certain number of man-hours to each upgrade (perhaps one per resource item consumed?), and accrue man-hours based on elapsed time, and have the accrued time applied when the cell is loaded, upgrading whatever is possible with the available time and resources. Doing it this way hopefully means that you never see an object transitioning between tiers, but only notice that your workers upgraded the settlement while you were away. Edit: re-order to make more sense.

A thought crossed my mind, and I don't know how technically feasible it would be, but... It would be nice to be able to have the various prefab sections, (optionally?) instead of remaining as a single unit, break down into their individual components, so that you can build quickly with prefab sections, and then change that one thing that doesn't quite fit, without having to re-create the prefab section out of individual components. If we had that sort of functionality, in theory, it could be used to place doors, or other small fiddly things that currently don't snap into position. As an advanced feature which will pretty much have to have scripting support, it would be awesome to be able to designate a set of placed components as a new prefab structure. ---- Thinking about things a little more, currently various settlers in Sanctuary bang on the walls of the houses as an idle; it would be awesome if the structures in a settlement were upgraded over time, given that we already have settlers (apparently) doing so already. Ideally we would want an idle marker for each upgradeable object, and have something that randomly picks one to upgrade over time; probably have something that tracks elapsed man-hours spent on doing so (based on the expected frequency of the idle executing), and repeatedly consumes an amount of effort for a randomly picked object, until expending all accrued effort when the player next enters the settlement. ---- Given I'm lazy, that we're brining civilisation to the area, and we have a wide network of various communities working together to defend each other, I think it would make sense to be able to designate a settler somewhere on the network of settlements to craft armour, weapons, ammo, clothing, advanced components, etc. from the basic salvage that gets scrounged up. Possibly would want a radiant quest to retrieve an appropriate kind of undamaged machine from a random factory as a requirement before doing so, or have one such a machine exist at each of the settlements that you can claim.

There are now two modders resources for custom turrets, a pipe-gun turret, and a telsa something turret; it may well take scripting capability to be able to have a generic turret capable of using any ranged weapon the player is capable of wielding. For max creepiness (especially if you've picked the anti-synth path), a turret base made of synth components (eye, arm) that will hold whatever weapon you give it... =) For the pro-synth path, the pipe-gun turret looks like a pretty good start, though for maximum flexibility, you would want something along the lines of the various kit-bashed turrets that people have assembled, which use a regular hand-gun, and a mechanism to work the trigger...

There's a mod with a set of batch scripts to apply job-appropriate armour/clothes to settlers; given that this would almost certainly require a certain amount of scripting (or at least I think it would), I'd rather like to have something that passes out job-appropriate outfits, should they be available. I'd go a step further an suggest that the container used to distribute items to the settlers should be the workshop (or another network-connected container), so all of the connected settlements would be automatically well armed and supplied, and have a per-settlement (or per-network) container for those items collected from the dead