Happiness confuses me.

I achieved the 100% happiness Xbox achievement,

simply by sending a settler to an undeveloped Graygarden.

No food, defence or beds, yet there it is: 100%.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/87106516/happiness.png

Go figure...

Make sure you have a good supply of Salisbury Steak for your settlers, this will boost morale

Being NAKED in a settlement may also lower happiness, although I don't have definite proof. Some settlers may even comment, "I'm not sure that's how you want to represent the Minutemen."

The glitch you mentioned does seem to be caused by the presence of TVs. Besides traveling back to the settlement, I may also have to enter workshop build mode. There have been countless times that when I enter build mode, I immediately see a red arrow next to happiness (indicating that it has been falling all along), and then immediately a green arrow appears (perhaps indicating that entering build mode makes it rise again). But then again, it may be due to your presence at the settlement, since being at a settlement supposedly raises its happiness too.

Sometimes in addition to entering build mode, I also have to open Pip-Boy > Data > Workshops and check the settlement's stats just to make sure they "stick". If I don't open Pip-Boy > Data > Workshops and leave the settlement, those stats may remain in their erroneous state.

They need to be powered before they cause droppage in happy happy. At least they did for me...

Ontarah, on 12 Jan 2016 - 12:50 PM, said:

I'm completely convinced this is inaccurate. I have seen 0 evidence that TVs and radios change anything.

Of course you are wrong, as it's happened to me, so it's completely accurate. Seeing no evidence yourself means absolutely nothing if it's a weird bug, that may not happen to everyone, depending on the situation...

I'm just going by how I got the benevolent leader achievement, which involved building tons of stores, making sure all settlers were finding their way into their beds correctly, and physically hanging out in the settlement for several days.


Just those things increased happiness from 85 or so to top in an in-game week and RL 2 hours or so.


The only glitch I observed was the fast travel one, and this one happened even in settlements with no TVs or radios.

If you give Arlen a particular something he disappears from the settlement.

As far as beds go , yes those settlements with unscrappable beds cause a bed situation.

I just make extra beds until they stop complaining.

Then i wait in a chair until after midnight and watch them go to bed.

Anyone who doesn't go to bed I assign them one.

I then assign the guards their beds.

That makes them happier but I never get over 87%

My TV are also powered, showing the "Please stand by" screen. Again, these conflicting reports are puzzling. You and many others have experienced this, yet the other poster and I have not. I don't doubt anyone, of course. Maybe there are certain game mechanics that some have triggered but others haven't.


The one type of settlements that often seem to glitch, for me anyway, are those with pre-existing settlers and beds, as detailed in my earlier posts. I haven't seen any corroboration from anyone yet.

This was Sanctuary for me. I got constant complaints about beds, and just kept adding them until the complaints went away. Have about 25 beds for 15 settlers / companions, and the complaints went away, but happiness remained at about 20% until I stored the 2 powered TVs. The others that were not powered didn't seem to make a difference.

Maybe putting beds up against walls breaks access? They only get in on one side of the bed? Crappy design if so. Or a bug....

The problem with that workaround is that sometimes a settler may sleep on an unassigned bed, without actually having a bed assigned to him or her. In workshop mode, when you highlight the settler, the bed he is sleeping on isn't highlighted. In that case, you don't get happiness for it. You have to wake him up and manually assign him that bed. This doesn't happen often, but I have seen it happen. So the only way is to highlight every settler and see that a bed is highlighted, which can be a pain for a large population.

https://youtu.be/2auJ5qT0bso I made showing a definite link between a "bed situation" and the rise and fall of happiness. There are 15 beds cramped into two rooms in Spectacle Island. Even though all the beds are accessible and sleepable by myself, they are not by the settlers. Note that some settlers are even standing outside the room, not being able to get to bed. So I move almost all of the beds to a more open space, and the settlers immediately make a beeline to them. After a few settlers get to bed, happiness rises again.

what is the benefits to make them happy?

Higher output. Food for sure, not sure about water and scavanging.

When it comes to settlements I just build them for the purified water exploit the caps and the merchants.

Settlers are [censored]s, I plan to do atrocious things to them on my "not so nice" character. If only I could build a caged arena where they would be forced to fight my Deathclaws, that would be swell.

I would exile them, then grab new people in. lol

Not ~exactly~ dealing with settler happiness, but I was considering sending all the male settlers off to some distant settlement in the hopes that they would die, so that I could, over time, build an Amazonian settlement. Aside from personal preference, there's a pragmatic reason: I have a mod that lets me craft miniskirts that identify the wearer as a farmer, guard, clinic-vendor (nurse) and so on. They're useless on male settlers.

Thanks for the video. I think that may be the problem in one of my settlements but not all of them. I have four different characters and have tried all of the suggestions that I have found and still can't get 100% happiness. So far the highest I've gotten is 84%. In addition to the usual plenty of food, water, beds, I've tried:

• Rearranging the beds (although some settlements you cannot assign the existing beds?)


• Decorating with paintings, rugs, etc.


• Removing the TV's


• Adding Food & Drink Bars and Medical stations


• Adding pool tables and basketball hoops


• Giving each Brahmin a feed tub, incase the Brahmin have feelings, too.

Spoiler (possible)

I am quite sure, that pathfinding is the issue for most settlement builders.

The other things mentioned here may be also true, but pathfinding is (and ever was) a major issue in this engine. I remember things Beth said with the Oblivion builder set, and with FO3 too, as far as I remember. If you built inside cells (interiors), it was not a big issue. But everything outside had to integrate into the worlds pathways, or it would make troubles. There was an extra function in the editor, but very hard to use without experience. Essentially they had overlayed the normal ground with walkways (invisible in game of course) so that the NPCs could travel along.

I think the settlement objects have all this ways integrated, but only if you let them snap together. If you place them manually it can lead to an impassable or hard to pass place. Sometimes you see it, sometimes it will not be obvious. I had a guard station badly build - the stairs were too high above the actual ground. The assigned settler was assigned to the station and it highlighted when I selected the settler. But he kept standing around. When I corrected the problem he immediately started to walk to the station and guards it since then.

But being unable to find a bed, or unable to walk their normal routines, whatever they are is not so clear. Settlers who are unassigned walk around too, they go to the bar (if any) in daytime, and so on. Theoretically should every settler without a job automatically collect scrap, i.e. also have a job. This should happen even without a scrap bench. So settlers who are standing around too long in one place are suspicious - something happened to their path. There seem to be several path finding algorithms in the game, good ones, which have strategies to go around obstacles and others which are less strict and cost less CPU cycles. All the settlers and most other NPCs, if not moving during quests seem to be unable to go around obstacles. Often you see settlers walk into a wall and hanging. If a cell is not loaded, this is much easier, there is a relaxed mode who always works, but there is no NPC in an unloaded cell, it is only his location which is moved around. And schedules (which move NPCs, make them go to bed, and so on) do not run in an unloaded cell at all. If you have many settlers and fast travel directly into the settlement, you see all the NPCs spawned in the center. They begin to start their schedules, but they also hinder themselves and the path walking seems to be suspended, if mo easy path can be found. Maybe this leads to wrong assumptions by the settlement scripts, and to falling happiness.

I understand the problems with path finding, since I know how it works. To find paths for say 20 settlers is not simple, and will become a load on the engine, if you have added a lot of additional walkways by building a lot of things. The path finder must check every walk path around the settler to his target, and this can become quite big, even for todays engines.

I hope Beth is able to correct a bit of this by modifying the scripts. I they even try...

Luckily I am not really interested in achievements, so if happiness is around 80 I am content. But being unable to reach one achievement is a good argument to do something. Probably just by making it easier

With you 100% on that one as well. Currently managing 22 settlements and they are all in the mid 70's to 80's happiness.

What is the point of reaching 100%? Is there an achievement that you receive or something else?

That too. I have found that if you build multileveled structures you pretty much *must* use the snap-in feature on stairs. If your stairs don't neatly snap-in and you place them manually, settlers almost always have trouble navigating them.

The thing that really tipped me off to the pathfinding dumbness was Danse and other companions pretty much *never* managing to successfully enter Red Rocket when I did because I had built exterior walls around it. They navigated the pre-existing doors in Red Rocket fine, but could not find their way through the doors I built in the added walls. I removed a section of wall and just left it open and voila they could not make it inside no problem.

I had issues too with happines, I scrapped all radios, tv & jukebox, and no more problems.

I noticed that even reaching max dwellers number & having recruitment signal on, can cause happines "warnings".

About pre-existing beds in setllement, you can scrap even them to replace them with better ones.

1. build a floor (even small ones are ok)

2. point a bed, keep pressed E key (PC, of course), even if greyed, for a while and the bed will be selected and you will able to move it.

3. place the bed on the floor

4. scrap the floor. The bed wil disappear with the floor.

Now you will be able to build another bed and assign it to everyone.

A note about beds: Bethesda is strange... It seems that even robots need beds... So be sure to have a bed even for Codsworth and assign it to a bed too... Im having no warnings in Greygarden, but happiness is stuck at 53%. Not tried yet, but Im pretty sure that building beds for all robots (... really?!?), will rise happines.

To Bethesda: please add buildable/placeable "Robots recharing spots", counting as a bed, but just for robots of course...

Yes, you can assign pre-existing beds, but there are caveats. Sometimes each pre-existing settler has to be assigned to a PARTICULAR pre-existing bed for it to be successfully assigned (green icon, happiness raised). In The Slog, for instance, Holly has to sleep in one particular pre-existing bed, Jones has to sleep in one particular pre-existing bed, and so forth. If you don't assign them to the correct beds, you don't see the green icon, and you don't raise the happiness. This doesn't happen in all settlements with pre-existing beds, but it happens in The Slog and a few others.

Adding to the confusion is that Arlen in The Slog (the "toy part" guy) can't be assigned to anything. Even though there is a pre-existing bed for him, you can't assign him to it. And yet he counts as one of the settlers, so his unassigned bed means you will always suffer a loss in happiness. The game seems to figure that if there are N settlers, there should be N assigned beds (not just N beds, but N *assigned* ones), otherwise you lose happiness.

Well, you could RP them as [censored]ty Scotsmen.

Yes, Greygarden is an issue for me. Stuck at 50%, even though the one provisioner has a sheltered bed. Do the robots need beds?