Less cyclic minutemen radiant quests

[mauvecloud]

I know some players prefer not to have the Minutemen radiant quests at all, but my main problem with them is that after a while they settle into a cycle, usually involving at most 4 settlements, even if I have "ownership" of many other settlements. It varies between playthroughs for me, this time the cycle seems to be: Oberland, Abernathy, Nordhagen, Zimonja.

 

I can understand provisioners, Automatrons, Preston's group from the Museum, and Greygarden robots being excluded from the spokesmen who can send me to clear out ghouls, raiders, super mutants, or whatever, and skipping dlc/mod-added settlements is reasonable, but when I have 22 allied settlements that should be valid and only 4 actually get used, there's obviously something wrong.

 

At the moment, I can think of two possible causes:

1. Bad pseudo-random number generation

2. Something going wrong with the conditions for determining which settlements are valid for radiant quests

 

If it's the first, setting up a timer to temporarily disqualify a settlement after doing a radiant quest there (for 3 in-game days? a week? not sure how long would be best - probably depends on how many populated allied settlements I have) might help. If it's the second, doing so would make things worse, but possibly strengthen that suspicion, though it wouldn't help much in figuring out why the other settlements are considered invalid.

[xzanderain]

I think there needs to be a defend quest for each base that once completed never procs the base defense again. it just gets in the way of game play. Do a quest boom in sanctuary prestons like oh jamica plains needs your help. But you got a laundry list over in the glowing sea to finish. No fast travel cause you play survival. its just a b&@*$ to deal with that sort of radiant flag showing up over and over again. Its twice as annoying when you fail it. Because it wrecks all you built in that town. I would rather the defense quests only happen one time. Then you dont deal with attacks on your settlement at all unless you want a settlement attack via the cc club content that lets that happen.

[mauvecloud]

Update: I might have figured something out. I used the console to check a few of the settlements that weren't getting quests for the "MinRecruitmentProhibitRandom_var" to see if that was somehow true for them, and it wasn't, but I did notice they had things like WorkshopSuperMutantAttack01 or WorkshopFeralGhoulAttack01 running (the misc "Help Defend" quests), only since I have "NSA No Settlement Attacks" installed, those quests are stalled (the mod removes the stages for them instead of setting impossible conditions, which IMO would be a better solution)

 

Edit: I looked at the scripts related to the settlement attacks and noticed that it would still resolve a raider attack in the background (no notice or misc quest) even if the misc quest failed to start. With the "Stop Settlement Attacks" mod, which sets a property on the workbenches to prevent them from even triggering, I ended up with a cycle involving Greentop, County Crossing, The Slog, and Finch Farm (though maybe not in that order), which led me to suspect that it wasn't exactly random, but looking for the "nearest" settlement to trigger a quest on, so I tried waiting at Somerville Place until a quest auto-completed or failed (note that I knew from experience with listening to Radio Freedom that a new quest could start after reporting to settlers, it wouldn't wait until I had talked to Preston - in fact, sometimes it doesn't even tell me to talk to Preston, though I haven't entirely figured out the conditions for when it does and when it doesn't). Once a quest failed, the very next quest was for Somerville. I've also confirmed in FO4Edit that the workshop aliases use the flag "Matching Ref - Closest", so I will see if a mod that removes that flag helps.