Lets talk about Settlers AI

[Riskyenterprise]

Hi,

 

So I have googled and read and read and read about this, scoured for mods etc. Some mods promise to make settlers "Better" but they are just so fragile I almost always find them more broken than before especially if you use multiple mods for multiple fixes.

 

Regardless I wanted to talk about a few bugs that I encounter often,

 

Settlers won't assign to jobs

 

Settlers dont sandbox properly (stand still for ever) I have even placed navmesh squares from mods to test if the native navmesh got screwed up and then attacked them to make them hostile, they wont move to attack me even. Tried reseting AI and so on.

 

I am not looking for help fixing these bugs persay I have moved on from those saves and optimized my modlist to ATTEMPT to avoid this, also when this does happen sometimes its not global.

 

What I am looking to do is have a conversation about FO4's settlement and settler system to explore why it is the way it is and why NPC's in vanilla towns operate so much better, DC, good neighbor ext... Shouldn't there be a way to get settlement settlers to operate in the same way as vanilla NPC's? If my settlements could be half as lifelike as the vanilla city npc I would be happy.

 

I get that Beth screwed it all up, the script for settler AI is fragile garbage but this game has been out for over 5 years and there are so many amazing mods, how has noone fixed this? not complaining Just wondering if maybe its actually impossible to fix, I am not experienced with scripting or creating mods but I checked around in the creation kit and I could not find files associated with Settler memory or AI.

 

A few things I would like to try if I knew how was copy pasta the AI or parts of the AI from random DC NPC's over into the settler AI

OR giving the game more system memory allocated for AI (I assume beth has some stupid limit set on that for the benefit of consoles) I would think this would be helpful because it seems like both locally and even globally the more settlers their are the more problems you will have, I get locally but maybe there is a way to remove the global impact, I don't see why the game would need to use any memory for global settlers when you are X far away from that cell.

 

I know this is kind of a rant but I haven't been able to find very many indepth conversations about this in my search so I finally decided to just one.

[Zorkaz]

Sounds like your sandboxtrigger isn't set up properly.

[romalight]

What i do, start a new game and use only Sim Settlements for crops and never use what are the vanilla menu. if a settlement have too many space to build stuff, also try to use only Sim Settlements for houses and more. So if there a settlement attack and you don't want to go and help after that, there is no crops damage. Try also to use a new wireless generator so there is also any damage for generators.

[SKKmods]

> why NPC's in vanilla towns operate so much better, DC, good neighbor ext.

 

Unpicking the rant it seems your root frustration is settler path finding ?

 

If so, the reason actors can path better in static settlements is because the player cant mess item up by scrapping and building stuff which cuts and exposes navmesh as well as covering path markers and idles. Its not different "AI" its a different environment.