Consequences not aiding settlements?

[CoolLew]

What happens if you’re not able to help a settlement, when you get a notice that it’s being attacked?

[John Marston]

Well, if you will not help the settlers, they can:
1. Succesfully defend the settlement without your help
2.They will lose which will cause the hapiness to drop down

[bunny de fluff]

if you fail the quest food items will be stolen

[ronr42]

The consequences of the settlers failing to defend themselves due to you not showing up or not having enough defences built, is that your settlement will take some amount of damage. Crops, turrets and even exercise equipment will need to be repaired.

The one thing you want to avoid is having a settlement get lower than 15% happiness. Once it gets that low you will get a popup warning you that you may lose control of that settlement. Long ago I ignored Nordhagen Beach when it dropped to 15% happiness. When it got down to 5 or 10% happiness I lost the settlement.

*I'm not 100% sure but, I don't think the above applies to the Far Harbor settlements and possibly not the Mechanists Lair either. In FH Echo Lake lumber has 2 or 3 Very unhappy settlers in my game. Happiness has been at 10% for a long time and does not get any lower and I have not lost the settlement. So, it may be that DLC settlements can't be lost. NOT sure though.

[Littlepip™]

If a settlement fails to defend itself, then you'll lose a % of the items in the workbench. The amount lost depends on how tough the attackers were. Note that this is THAT settlement's "local" workbench, not all of them (if you've connected your settlements via the Local Leader perk). Things like turrets and crops will be damaged or destroyed and will need to be repaired as well. If you don't return, the settlers themselves will very slowly repair these things themselves, but Happiness will drop quite a bit, and some settlers might get unassigned from their jobs if EVERYTHING they were working at was busted up.

As for the above comment about losing settlements, it's based on the settlement itself. Some of them, like Sanctuary, can never be lost even if you purposely made it a living hellscape. If the quest to obtain it was a generic radiant from Preston or such, then you can definitely lose it. If the quest was something else, or you took it over without a quest at all.. "it depends".

Finally, keep in mind that various things can PROVOKE settlement attacks. Having a low population, a defense rating that is lower than food + water totals, having a lot of things in the local workbench, and keeping most types of beasts (and all types of humanoids) caged without freeing or killing them.

There's a 7 day minimum cooldown on how often a settlement can be attacked, btw. If one particular town of yours keeps getting hit every week (or several are getting hit at the same time), look at the above factors and see what you can change.

[CoolLew]

Good info, thanks

[ronr42]

You're welcome.

[=EGC= kansasterry]

Originally posted by bunny de fluff:

if you fail the quest food items will be stolen

Actually more than that can be taken I had one instance where I left the core in a suit of power armor that suit disappeared when I was unable to assist the settlement.

A while later it was found during one of the kidnapping missions at a raider site the paint job identified it clearly as the one taken from the settelment not a normally spawned one we would find.

As for the unowned by happiness that is something set at each workshop I think it is based on how you obtain the settlement the workshop actually has this changable variable.

bool Property AllowUnownedFromLowHappiness = false Auto
{ 	TRUE = workshop can become unowned due to low happiness (<=minHappinessThreshold)
	FALSE (default) = workshop can never become unowned, no matter how low the happiness (for special cases like the Castle)
	} 

[CoolLew]

Thanks for the info guys

[pike]

none really , you may have to repair a few turrets and some plants , but there really is no negative ,