Okay, so this is an odd one.

Whenever I leave Sanctuary Hills, my stats fall and my settler's happiness falls fast. The two things that keep dropping is Defense and Beds. When I'm in Sanctuary Hills, my Defense is 114 and Beds is 24. But when I'm not there, Defense drops to 5 and Beds drops to 15 (there are 19 people there, so this makes them unhappy).

I can't get my settlement happiness above 77 because of this, and if I stay gone for the length of a mission their happiness gets down in the low 60s. Also, no matter how high I get my defense -- up to 120 before -- there's always an exclaimation point next to it like its too low.

Any way to fix all this?

I've discovered what's causing the "everything drops when I leave" bug: it was placing televisions around the settlement. When I scrapped the televisions, the issue sorted itself out. That really ought to be fixed.

I dunno what's causing my Defense to show an exclaimation point next to it at all times. Doesn't matter how high or low I go, it won't go away.

Doing some reading online, I've worked out the issue with my constantly exclaimation marked defense: the only way to get the mark to go away is to raise your defense to the combined number of your water and food. I have 114 Water and 26 Food. If I get Defense up to 140, the exclaimation mark goes away.

Not sure if that's intentional as the game doesn't explain the settlements very well, but that's the issue.

They probably need to be repaired. Walk over to them while in build mode and see if you need to fix them.

So far as I can tell, there's no way to repair them. And they turn on and off fine. All I know is that as soon as I build a TV, place it, and quick travel elsewhere, the entire settlement's stats go nuts. When I tried again just now, the water dropped from 114 to 0, defense dropped from 140 to 5, Bed dropped from 23 to 15. Happiness immediately began to tank.

Went back, scrapped the TV, quick traveled away, everything was fine.

That's good to know. I'll try to duplicate that some time and see what happens. I haven't really done much with settlements except in Sanctuary.. I've built everything the need except for electricity. They've remained steadily happy at 88 so far.

I also was wondering about why I had an exclamation point at a few of my settlements where I had built some minor defenses. So knowing that it needs to equal food/water will come in handy. The goofiest thing I think is that settlements that have no residents still have an exclamation if there is water or food there. I definitely don't care about defending one lone water pump. So far I've never seen a settlement with no people get attacked... and even if it did.. who cares? It's a water pump that I didn't even build.

Thanks for this! I'm having this issue too. I'll try scrapping the TVs tomorrow, hopefully that will fix it.

The game tells you during your first dive into settlements that defense should equal your food + water.