Weird New....... Bug?

[MarkusTay]

So here I am in Sanctuary, just chillin' and buildin'. Same ol' same ol'. Its anew play-through and there are a bunch of new settlers, so I am working on equipping them all (they had just barely survived a big Institute attack, which was why I was back there). Dead synths all over the place, including my 'bartender' (I knew she was synth, because I have a mod that outlines synths in a different color). Anyway, it took me a LONG time to find her body, so I could give her stuff to someone else.

 

That's where it gets weird - her 'replacement' (a new settler) showed up a little while later, while I was crafting armor/weapons. Another female, so I made her the new bartender (after all, I needed one, right?). Funny thing is, when I clicked on her to give her new gear, she said, "the Institute and their synths will learn not to mess with us again", which I found funny, because SHE wasn't even there for the attack (just the generic speech all settlers give after such an attack, so I didn't think much of it). HOWEVER, after I gave her the new outfit (the outfit the old bartender synth was wearing, because it had ballistic weave in it), SHE DIED!!! She just went, "ahh!" and keeled over dead, and none of the other settlers even reacted to it (because usually when you accidentally kill one, they all get mad).

 

And on her I found a synth component. o_O

 

Unfortunately, I had turned my 'highlighting' off, so I don't know if she showed up as a synth before I changed her clothes, but I've never seen anyone die just from me dressing them before. I tried several times, because I thought it was just a one-time glitch, but every single time I changed her outfit she died. Has anyone ever encountered this phenomena before?

 

Is that an automatic thing? If a synth infiltrator dies in your settlement, the very next settler to come is a new synth infiltrator? Just weird. And regardless, why does changing her clothes kill her?

[MarkusTay]

Okay, it turns out she was a synth all along, and NOT the new settler (I got her mixed up with another). She had equipment I put on her, so she must have already been there. Strange thing is, she didn't turn on me/the settlement when the Institute attacked, like the other one did. In fact, she even bad-mouthed the institute LOL.

 

But that wasn't the problem, because i was able to replicate it two more times without those settlers being synths - that was just a coincidence. The first one was 'unassigned' to a settlement (an old bug that crops-up from time to time - settlers become 'unassigned' for some reason). Thus, I had thought that trying to change the inventory on a settler that wasn't assigned to any settlement somehow confused the game and killed the settler. Nice theory... but WRONG.

 

Because i tried it on another (male this time) settler who was one of the originals to show up, and he was definitely assigned to the settlement (and a job), and he also died. it doesn't happen with everyone, but it did happen with three so far (the synth I left dead - the other two I resurrected with CC and they work fine now).

 

I think it happens because of Tina's Cookie Apocalypse. I installed that because there was some stuff in it I wanted (its an 'all or nothing' compilation), but now something in there is causing my settlers to die if I try to change their gear. It could also be my fault, because some of the features of that mod I don't understand at all, and since the original mods they were from were all removed, there is no way of finding out how to make them function correctly. I can't be positive, but the moment I made a change to that last one, a cookie (YES, you read that right) appeared in the settlers inventory, which means THAT MOD considered THAT PERSON dead, because that spawn is from that mod - it added the cookie to the inventory, even though the NPC was still standing there trading with me (presumably because 'time is frozen' while trading).

 

Resurrecting the settlers resets them, and fixes the problem, so I can live with it, but if anyone has any ideas about what is happening here I'd love to hear it.