I am thinking I am bugged and probably nothing I can do about it but you never know until you ask. So after jumping from one settlement to the next I finally decided to make Somerville Place my main camp. The main reason for this is the fact this one has 2 children and that really fit the grieving mother RP I was doing plus it rains a lot there and I see that is a sign of hope. Anyways all was well for quite a long time but now things are about as broken as they can get.

When I first started building here I threw down a bunch of beds and then kind of forgot about that part. Over time the camp grew and I thought I had turned off the beacon to recruit more settlers because I was chasing after the special merchants but I hadn't. Upon returning to the camp one day I found that no one was working any of the vendor booths, no one was working the garden. Really the only one who was doing what they were assigned was the front gate guard. At night they all made there way to the beds except for one settler who I found was sleeping in the boy's bed. There are 2 beds inside the house that before I could not assign anyone to or move and they were used by both kids. Now those beds are assignable (not sure if I can move them haven't tried) and both kids never sleep. Each morning when the others get up they again just stand around. Checking the booths and food no one is assigned. So not sure if the bed thing is what caused this camp to break but is there any way I can fix this?

Are your food/resource numbers now at 0?

Could be that the settlement got attacked and you failed to defend. I had something similar happen at the Co-Op and, after standing around in the base long enough, all of the resource items started to fall into the state they should have been after the attack. Was super annoying but after repairing everything, it all went back to normal pretty fast. Didn't even need to reassign the farmers, as they seemed to go back to their jobs as soon as their crops were repaired.

Alternatively, I've seen it happen where, after having someone switch jobs or "moving" a settler to another settlement, everyone just kind of drops what they were doing. No clue why, but I just reassigned them to their tasks and everything went back to normal.

Finally, it could just be badly bugged. Croup Manor was that way for me on my first play through. Settlers i sent from other settlements never actually showed up, but they were counted toward the settlement population still. Crops I planted couldn't be assigned. (They just wouldn't highlight when trying to assign a settler.) Settlers refused to go inside the house, even though that is where all the beds were. (At night, they'd just congregate in front of the door.) They'd spawn in weird places when I fast traveled there with no way to get back to where they were supposed to go. (Like on the roof overhang over the porch, or down by the water outside the buildable area.)

If it's this final case, you may be SOL. I'd recommend waiting around in the settlement to see if the post-attack destruction is just delayed and, if not, just reassign everyone. (You can even assign them to specific beds as well.)

I do still have a food value that is higher than the amount of people so I suppose ghost are working the garden. I did transfer a few settlers from other places but that was awhile ago. I also checked my scavenger building and all of those are not assigned. One thing I did do which I don't see why it would matter is I give each settler a unique look (bath robe, baseball uniform, courser armor..etc) and legendary weapons. I noticed that they are all standing around with the guns drawn so there might be something to that attack idea but nothing needs repair and I can not find anything in VATS. I suppose if all else fails I will get the non-essential mod and cleanse this camp and start over.

The settlement is bugged and unless you can reset the settlement, it's going to remain bugged.

This will be a bit long, but here's what happened with my game.

Preston sent me to Somerville to help out. When I got there, only one advlt and two kids were present. The man gave me a quest about ghouls, so I dashed off and completed the task. Afterward, I got his "we'll join the Minutemen" statement and stuck around to see if I could do anything with the area.

I didn't have anything to make turrets, so I put a few walls up and left.

A few days later, I got a message Somerville was under attack, so I FT'd to the area only to discover dad was lying on the ground and the two kids were cowering in the field. Whatever had attacked, they were gone and a few seconds later, I got the "Failed" message pop-up. Talk about a lose-lose situation, but since there was nothing I could do, I decided to at least help the kids.

I put a couple more beds in the house (all I could do), then I left.

Not two days later (in game, by the way, not real days), Preston sends me back to Somerville. I get there, and to my freaking surprise, dad was alive and well. WTF??!!! Not only that, he was holding out his weapon as though he was trying to kill something, as well as two other settlers.

But nothing was there.

That's when I put two-and-two together and realized the dad, who doesn't have a name, is a settler, but not essential to keep alive. The game, however, disagrees and brought him back in order to deliver the quest.

By this point, I had sent all my settlers from Hangman's to the outlier settlements, including Somerville. I entered build mode and started building outside the house, moved the beds I originally placed, and a crap ton of turrets for protection.

That evening, one setter went to his bed I moved out of the house, but the other two went to the kids' beds. Worse, the kids wouldn't move from the field.

I sat in a chair and waited for 6 hours to get the settlers up and about, then I assigned the two settlers to their proper beds. When night fell again, this correct the problem of bed assignments, but the kids wouldn't move from the field (dad did go to his bed both nights, though).

Figuring the game was broke, I took the past 4 hours of real-time game play and wiped clean to do a previous load. This time, I created supply lines first, went to Somerville and beefed it up, then went to talk to Preston for the assignment.

It's been fine since, though I still worry since this game has a tenacious flaw of alerting us to attacked settlements. So far, Somerville hasn't been attacked but if it is, I'm going to get there ASAP and hope it doesn't glitch again. If it does, well, that's a settlement I won't care about any more because far more than 4 hours has passed.

Ok so I think I had 2 problems and one is now fixed and the other I think is a permanent bug. There is a shed up the hill with a sentry bot which I found to be aggroed on something. Once I killed it everyone in the settlement went back to work which is great. However the kids still won't sleep they just sit in the corner of the house at night, looks pretty sad really. I am ok with this but I am not sure why everyone wanted a piece of that robot when it wasn't attacking my base or was even close to it.