Can't Recruit Settlers

[Wererommel]

I played F4 with the Mitchell Street Settlement on the PC awhile back. It worked great. Then, just a month ago, I started a new game, also with Mitchell Street. Everything went fine UNTIL I switched on the recruitment beacon. Nobody showed. I had lots of food and water, beds, energy, security, everything they needed, but the number of settlers remained zero. OK, I thought, it just takes awhile, Returning a week in game time later, after many adventures, the settler count was still zero. Settlers assigned from other settlements wouldn't go to Mitchell Street. New settlers spawned with the console didn't change the settler count and couldn't be assigned to anything. Well, I thought, it IS an old mod, so maybe it's out of date or conflicts with something. I deleted it.

 

Now, I have the same identical problem with West Everett. All the other vanilla settlements -- Red Rocket, Starlight, etc. -- are working fine, but the settlements created by mod authors no longer function. This may be because of some update, and if so, I am not the only one experiencing it. Has anyone else had this problem?

 

[AeonsLegend]

I haven't heard of it, but there's been game update that may require mods to be updated.

[SKKmods]

Removing a workshop that was registered with WorkshopParentScript is likely to have corrupted it.

 

Install Workshop Ownership Utilities and run the [Detect WorkshopParent Issues] function which may be able to recover your mess.

[Wererommel]

Thanks for the tip, but that didn't do anything. No one responds to the recruiting beacon. (Yes, I did try turning it off and then on again.) I can summon settlers with the utility, but they just stand around. They can't be assigned to anything. Claiming the workbench gets the response that no unowned workbenches have been detected. I can't make any sense of the script logs i was instructed to make. They bear no resemblance to the examples given.

[pra]

Sounds like these custom settlements aren't working for you.

 

You might have a load order issue. Settlement mods must be loaded last, because if there is a conflict, they must win.

 

Otherwise, the mods might be just broken. Settlement mods are harder than it seems like, there are a lot of them which seem ok superficially, but have all sorts of issues...

 

 

Something you can test: open console, click a workbench, type "sv workshopID". If the workshopID is -1, then it hasn't registered, and isn't actually a settlement.

[Wererommel]

Yeah, it's -1. Kinda surprising, since I can use the workbench normally. There was also some other stuff:

 

--- Papyrus - Alias CurrentWorkshop on Quest DLC03WorkshopParentVault118 (B20988AE)

--- Papyrus - Alias CurrentWorkshop on Quest WorkshopParent (0302061E)

--- Papyrus - Alias CurrentWorkshop on Quest WorkshopParent (0002058E)

--- Papyrus - Alias Workshops on Quest SettlementWestEverettEstates (210472B4)

No matches found

--- Papyrus - Alias CurrentWorkshop on Quest llamaF00 (E4052049)

No matches found

 

Have any idea what that means? I don't.

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2020 by Wererommel

[Wererommel]

Getting pretty deep in the weeds here. "Vault118" may mean that it is looking for a mod I removed because of reported bugs. If there is some open quest associated with it, that could really mess things up, but so far as I can tell, the quest doesn't exist. Reinstalling Vault 118 probably won't fix this problem and could cause additional ones.

 

"SettlementWestEverettEstates" suggests that it is looking for W. Everett but can't find it. Because it isn't on the workshop parent list? If I could edit the workshop parent list, that might fix this problem, but I am a total noob at modding. Maybe witth workshop framework mod? I guess I should look into it, though I fear I may create more problems than I am solving.

Edited January 22, 2020 by Wererommel

[Wererommel]

The Workshop Framework is exactly what I need to fix this problem, BUT there are numerous reports of bugs and crashes since the latest updates.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/35004?tab=posts

 

So what's left, the Creation Kit? This is starting to look like a career.

 

Why can't the idiots who keep making updates to this five year old game at least keep things backwardly compatible?

[pra]

Your save is broken. No way to fix it. You can never ever remove a settlement mod once it initialized.

 

Neither the CK nor WSFW will fix this.

 

 

 

WorkshopID = -1 means it hasn't initialized with workshopparent. You still can build, Home Plate has that, too. But it's not a settlement.

[Wererommel]

I recall from a previous game that I was able to uninstall settlement mods without any disasters. Perhaps I got lucky, or perhaps the recent updates have aggravated the problem.

 

My game cannot be salvaged. I wish someone had warned me about this problem. It is astonishing that Vortex allows the removal of settlement mods without any warning.

 

I still don't know whether these settlement mods were made obsolete by the recent updates, and there is no way to find out without destroying my next game. If I install ANY settlement mods, I may find them fatally defective, and there will be no way to remove them. It doesn't matter if they were working fine last year, and even if they are perfect right now, they could become hideously flawed after the next update.

Edited January 24, 2020 by Wererommel