Finally Fixed Oberland Station

[dolmore]

In the dozen or so times I've played through this game I've never been able to get Oberland Station above 80% happiness no matter what I did for them. Same for my current game until I got a message to defend it and found four of my settlers dead all at the same time with synth components in them - including my provisioner.

I've had the occasional synth show up in other settlements before - but four at once is new. The happiness rating is now at 90%.

[Bored Peon]

Synths do not affect happiness. They function and idenify the same as normal settlers until the Workshop Infiltration event occurs.

With a -20 missing my guess would have be an unsheltered bed. Missing defense, missing food, missing water is fairly obvious.

My record for synths is 7 out of 28 settlers.

[dolmore]

None of the above. And synth infiltrators among settlers do indeed affect happiness. The happiness level of my settlements always go up after one is discovered and dispatched with no other changes taking place.

In this case it's set off a veritable invasion. They've now shown up among the settlers at Sanctuary Hills, Somerville Place and Tenpines Bluff so far, one right after the other.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by dolmore:

None of the above. And synth infiltrators among settlers do indeed affect happiness. The happiness level of my settlements always go up after one is discovered and dispatched with no other changes taking place.

In this case it's set off a veritable invasion. They've now shown up among the settlers at Sanctuary Hills, Somerville Place and Tenpines Bluff so far, one right after the other.

If you examine settlers with something like Better Console there is absolutely no difference in settlers with the synth flag except isasynth=true. Then when the infiltration even occurs all those settlers have their protection removed and change faction, causing them to be hostile to your settlers.

There is something else preventing your happiness from reaching the full potential.

As I said beds are usually the first thing to look at. There is a bug where any settlement like Oberland, Abernathy, etc fail to recognize the ownership change of the beds, which causes a penalty for sheltered beds. Sometimes reassigning them to their beds can resolve this, although most people scrap the beds and place new ones.

Another issue is if you are using the bunk beds from Creation Club their "footprint box" extends upwards far enough that it can be above a roof and that causes the no shelter flag.

Also keep in mind if you are not running the UOF4P or Workshop Framework then your settlements can suffer from partial loading. Which means you were close enough to load only a portion of the settlement cells instead of the full settlement, then the game updates your "new inventory count." This causes discrepancies in bed counts, food, water, defense, etc.

Every happiness buff and debuff can be found through the console, and there is nothing for infiltrated synths.

The last thing to keep in mind sometimes when the synth settlers are killed you get slapped with the dead settler penalty that is a decaying -20 target happiness, similar to the decaying bonus for completely a help request.

[dolmore]

Running a vanilla game.

The assigned beds glitch I figured out on my first playthrough by accident to try to keep settlers from using the bed I made for myself. I routinely check the beds status whenever I fast travel into a settlement.

The dead settler penalty usually goes away once replacement settlers arrive and I've already gotten through that on the settlements where a synth showed up.

During one session I came across settlers accusing another of being a synth and convinced them she wasn't using Charm. I noticed that settlement never got past 80%, so I just turn them over to the mob, now.

I strongly suspect that my game files got corrupted somehow since the last time I played this over a year ago based on other oddball things I've experienced on this playthrough. For instance, my PC gets welded to the minigun on the vertibird when I travel to the Prydwen and I can't get off the thing to actually do any of the BOS quests. The next time I decide to start a new game I'll just reinstall it first.

[wtiger27]

Originally posted by dolmore:

Running a vanilla game.

The assigned beds glitch I figured out on my first playthrough by accident to try to keep settlers from using the bed I made for myself. I routinely check the beds status whenever I fast travel into a settlement.

The dead settler penalty usually goes away once replacement settlers arrive and I've already gotten through that on the settlements where a synth showed up.

During one session I came across settlers accusing another of being a synth and convinced them she wasn't using Charm. I noticed that settlement never got past 80%, so I just turn them over to the mob, now.

I strongly suspect that my game files got corrupted somehow since the last time I played this over a year ago based on other oddball things I've experienced on this playthrough. For instance, my PC gets welded to the minigun on the vertibird when I travel to the Prydwen and I can't get off the thing to actually do any of the BOS quests. The next time I decide to start a new game I'll just reinstall it first.

The first thing I do at Oberland when I take it over, is delete the beds the two settlers are using in the tower and build new ones. Same thing for any settlement which has beds I can not scrap.

On many occasions, a bug or glitch can be corrected by ether fast traveling, reloading the game or a previous save.

[dolmore]

The fast travel and loading previous saves hasn't seemed to help this time through.

A few of the bugs that I've experienced this session seem to "fix" themselves over time. I couldn't talk to the guy at the wall in Diamond City (dialog wouldn't trigger) for a long time until I decided to do a quest log clean-up around level 110 and he suddenly got chatty.

I have a Cleansing the Commonwealth mission in Far Harbor where a ghoul is stuck underground and not even a couple of Nuka Nukes can reach him. I just go back there once in awhile to see if he finally comes out of hiding.

Any more I just play the game to pick up new achievements, mess around with different settlement configurations or to get away from the real world for a bit, so encountering "undocumented features" doesn't give me headaches.

[DouglasGrave]

If you had the same problem every time in a dozen playthroughs, it's definitely not due to synths, as there are only a couple of initial settlers at Oberland Station, and neither one of them is a synth.

For Oberland I tend to strip out and replace all the initial crops and beds (the crops to avoid a damaged crop bug), but the place can still have some oddities that for me are seemingly due to some preset animation effects for tending crops that can affect even settlers not assigned to farming.

With the synths dying changing things for you, my guess would be one of them was assigned to whatever caused the happiness penalty in your case, and their death freed the settlement from their unhappiness over it.

[wtiger27]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

For Oberland I tend to strip out and replace all the initial crops and beds (the crops to avoid a damaged crop bug), but the place can still have some oddities that for me are seemingly due to some preset animation effects for tending crops that can affect even settlers not assigned to farming.

Interesting. The only time I remove crops from a settlement is if they are ones I can not normally scrap or have the "unassigned" tag and can not be assigned to remove that. Such as the large group of Tomatoes at Abernathy.

Then again, I am fine with any settlement happiness that is above 70% or in some cases, as low as 50%. It is not something high on my list of things I am concerned with in a run as long as it is not effecting my chances of losing a settlement I do not want to lose..

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by wtiger27:

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

For Oberland I tend to strip out and replace all the initial crops and beds (the crops to avoid a damaged crop bug), but the place can still have some oddities that for me are seemingly due to some preset animation effects for tending crops that can affect even settlers not assigned to farming.

Interesting. The only time I remove crops from a settlement is if they are ones I can not normally scrap or have the "unassigned" tag and can not be assigned to remove that. Such as the large group of Tomatoes at Abernathy.

Then again, I am fine with any settlement happiness that is above 70% or in some cases, as low as 50%. It is not something high on my list of things I am concerned with in a run as long as it is not effecting my chances of losing a settlement I do not want to lose..

I've seen the same bug Abernathy Farm has at Oberland Station; one of the original tato plants gets broken and then can't be removed or repaired.

[dolmore]

I scrap everything possible at a settlement as soon as the workshop becomes active - including any items in the workshop itself, plant all new crops and assign people to tend them.

I've never had an origin settler (at Oberland, Abernathy, Finch, etc.) turn out to be a synth and just leave them to whatever their original assignment is upon arrival.

When an infiltrator is first killed happiness drops until a new settler arrives so that I can assign them to whatever task the synth had. But I've found that the mere presence of an infiltrator seems to "cap" the happiness level until they are discovered and dealt with. Once replaced with a new "real" settler the happiness level suddenly shoots up past the level where it started.

In my original case this time around the synths turned out to be provisioner, bartender, medic and security guard all at the same time. Before they were all uncovered and massacred by the other settlers in one fell swoop Oberland Station never went above 80%. Once they were replaced by new settlers the happiness rating jumped to 90%.

It's almost as if the settlers "suspect" they've been infiltrated and don't get over their paranoia until the event actually happens. I had almost the exact same scenario play out at Abernathy Farm.