Surefire way to get NPCs navigating on top of Red Rocket Truck Stop?

[CalibanX]

I put lawn furniture on top of the Red Rocket and my settlers seem to really like it. Try putting some comfy furniture up there.

[zanity]

Face it- the AI system for NPC movement is utterly hopeless- and moreso in FO4 than in Skyrim. The navmesh concept leads to characters spawning on inaccessible locations- as some have noted here.

 

The problem is the conceptual connection between spawning, navmeshing, and pathing- which Beth have never ever solved. Followers work by CHEATING- using your movements as known valid ways of moving thru the geometry- but ordinary NPCs can't use this trick.

 

For an engine this awful, hard-coding pathing hints is the way to go- but that can't work for the (very late) settler system Beth built into the game as an after-thought when they finally realised the PS3 version was going to be cancelled. Dynamic, on-the-fly pathing in an arbitarily complex settlement was always going to crash-and-burn.

 

Really, the best hope is the MAGIC 'teleport' system- where followers and NPCs suddenly appear at defined destinations when the gamer isn't looking.

 

What Beth should have done is allowed for a META-DATA layer of information that could be imposed on an existing settlement to STRONGLY hint the settler AI (like defined eating and resting areas that would draw in settlers at specific times). Instead there is an attempt at using locality to get a settler to a chair, for instance, if the visible settler is already very close to said chair according to navmesh data. But Beth's HARD CODED settler AI behaviours visibly break-down all too often.

 

I'd like to think modders could over-haul the entire settler AI system, but sadly I think Beth has hard-coded far too much settler behaviour for this to be possible. To get the behaviour you desire will probably always mean experimenting with settlement layout to find the geometric path forms that best work with Beth's nasty hacks.