Gunner Brigadier stole my power armor and legendary weapon

[Hds46]

Enemies never stole anything from me before. Until that mofo just appeared in the center of my settlement and attacked everyone with my Two-Shot Laser Rifle. I'm glad he was alone, we tore him apart. But I'm confused, I was never attacked by high level enemies in my settlement and usually they always attack my settlements from outside. I just fast traveled and immediately saw this sneaky roach in my power armor and with my weapon. Do I have to grab all power cores from my power armors and what about weapons? He stole my weapon from chest.

[DouglasGrave]

It's a standard bit of NPC behaviour to grab available weapons and get into power armour if combat begins and they think they need it. It's not unique to enemies, either; your own settlers will arm themselves at times, or get into power armour if the cores are available.

As for containers, yes, they can generally loot all of those as well, if they can get near them, including the main red workbench in your settlements. The most notable exception is the mannequin-style Armour Rack from the Contraptions Workshop DLC (which is more like an immobile NPC than a regular container).

You can also use crafting workbenches as a safe storage, but only the ones out in the wasteland. Inside your settlements, NPCs will be able to loot them by accessing the main settlement workbench.

[therussmeister]

To store weapons, I put a chest on a rooftop then remove the stairs going to the roof so it's inaccessible. A bit of a pain, but it seems to work.

[The Inept European]

Store weapons and ammo separately and this is far less likely.

Two Shot is a specially bad case, because the game interprets that as double DMG, and NPCs like to grab things based on DMG. Other legendary effects would probably get ignored by an NPC most of the time.

[The Inept European]

Some interesting edge cases -

-If the Gunner had spawned with a ballistic weapon equipped, even a pipe pistol, he would not have stolen your laser rifle. NPCs prefer ballistic damage over energy damage. The fact that he took your laser pretty much proves he spawned with a laser weapon, just one with a lower DMG than your Two Shot laser.

-Even if you store weapons and ammo separately (which you should), if the NPC is already carrying the right ammo, they will steal the weapon. So in your case the NPC would have stolen the Two Shot laser even if you had no fusion cells in the container with the weapon, because the NPC already has some fusion cells (they only need 1 ammo, unless it's an auto weapon).

[ƎϽ∀ƎԀ]

Originally posted by therussmeister:

To store weapons, I put a chest on a rooftop then remove the stairs going to the roof so it's inaccessible. A bit of a pain, but it seems to work.

This is useless. You can make scaffolding 3 floors high, put a chest there, delete the scaffolding leaving the chest floating, (with no access) 3 floors high, and they will still steal weapons from it.

[Grendalcat]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

It's a standard bit of NPC behaviour to grab available weapons and get into power armour if combat begins and they think they need it. It's not unique to enemies, either; your own settlers will arm themselves at times, or get into power armour if the cores are available.

As for containers, yes, they can generally loot all of those as well, if they can get near them, including the main red workbench in your settlements. The most notable exception is the mannequin-style Armour Rack from the Contraptions Workshop DLC (which is more like an immobile NPC than a regular container).

You can also use crafting workbenches as a safe storage, but only the ones out in the wasteland. Inside your settlements, NPCs will be able to loot them by accessing the main settlement workbench.

Those mannequin Armor Racks are a really good option. You could also try storing stuff in the root cellar in Sanctuary, I am unsure if it ever resets or not. And Home Plate of course.

Wiki says the containers in the root cellar never respawn, and NPCs can't get in.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Root_cellar

[Flippy]

I had this happen to. He stole my power armor and had 1 ally with him and it was nearly the end of that play through, have not left the power core in my armor since. :)

It went something like this, "wtf" then i hid until allies took him and his trooper down. :) The power armor frame was a write off.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Gamcull:

You can make scaffolding 3 floors high, put a chest there, delete the scaffolding leaving the chest floating, (with no access) 3 floors high, and they will still steal weapons from it.

It can happen, but it's more the result of the game placing them close enough when that cell of the world updates; they do still need to be within reach to access the container.

For contrast, NPCs accessing a Nuka World tribute chest crashes the game. My solution is to stick them up on a single scaffolding square where there's no reasonable way for an NPC to stand nearby and this is effective at protecting them. It may not be literally 100% (it's theoretically possible an NPC could somehow end up there), but the effectiveness is high enough that I've never had a tribute chest crash the game since doing it.

But for perfect safety when you can choose what you're storing, nothing beats Armour Racks.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Grendalcat:

Those mannequin Armor Racks are a really good option. You could also try storing stuff in the root cellar in Sanctuary, I am unsure if it ever resets or not. And Home Plate of course.

Wiki says the containers in the root cellar never respawn, and NPCs can't get in.

I'm not sure if they're actually unable to enter the root cellar at all (unlike Home Plate where even actively hostile NPCs can't get in), but they generally have no reason to path into there, as their AI doesn't know what's inside it when considering how well they're armed.

I'm not sure if a fleeing settler could run away into the root cellar and have something happen that way.

[spared_life]

I lined power armor up at the Atom Cats garage with cores in them. It's a great spawn point for mobs. I went away to reset the spawns and went back. Through the course of several trips everybody got some armor: the Raiders, The Gunners, the Scavengers, even the Atom Cats.

I tried dragging some children of the Atom back from that warehouse down the road but they never lived long enough to get the armor. So I think I will put some by the warehouse. Not confident about the ghouls and super mutants that spawn there though :)

[DouglasGrave]

Kind of funny with the Atom Cats that although they talk about power armour, Duke is the only one who normally uses it on his own.

[The Inept European]

Great experiment, spared_life!