My settlements are moderate size and are all adequately defended - just a small margin over the food + water formula. However, at small settlements with a lot of product output - e.g. three water purifiers at Lighthouse - this means a very high concentration of turret firepower.

I've now got a problem in that, when I get I "defend x settlement" message (which usually fails to happen) and immediately fast-travel to that location, the turrets and settlers wipe out all of the attackers in the couple of seconds after I arrive. This means that I rarely get to even spot a live attacker, let alone get a shot off.

(E.g. At the Lighthouse, I spawn next to the house, whereas the attackers spawn out of sight on the approach road below. At the Drive-in, I spawn at the gate, whereas the attackers spawn behind the workbench shed.).

It seems that hitting an attacker with one shot is the success trigger for defending the settlement. Hence I find myself standing in an undamaged and victorious settlement but, when i leave and move on, I get the "failed to defend" message and the settlement appears as trashed in the Pip-boy listing.

Is their a workaround for this? Am I supposed to dismantle my defences to the point that attackers survive long enough for me to engage?

I am not sure what's the problem either, all I know is that I need to be in the area no matter how good my defenses are.

Yeah there are a few bugs within the 'defend settlement' mechanics. Lots of people have reported different issues, I'm sure Beth are working on some fixes, problem is they are probably working on more major fixes first.

The current work around is to fast travel to nearest spot and walk to the hot location on foot.

I used to have this problem, but not after I fast travel to nearest location.

Sometimes there are more enemies out there and you've just gotta spend a few minutes walking around the settlement. I've found that sometimes walking away a little distance and coming back will cause the rest of them to spawn. I haven't experienced this with fast travel in particular, but I've experienced it both with fast travel and when arriving on foot.

There is a mat in the build menu used to move your spawn point, maybe move it closer to the enemies spawns would help.

This. Even after things appear to have stopped I hang around for a while - taking a walk around the settlement. Enemies that are still around - that would normally destroy your base if you left, are all flushed out. I never leave until I've walked around the settlement a while or get the successful defence message.

Gouals are a problem. They lose a leg and sit there. Easy to miss

Like the OP, my settlements do an admirable job of defending themselves. My participation is entirely superfluous and it amazes/annoys me when afterwards the settlers gush about, "Who knows how bad off we would be had you not shown up." _I_ know; they wouldn't have been bad off at all. In EVERY settlement defense, the settlers win without losing anyone while TOTALLY annihilating the attackers. Yet, in the one instance where Abernathy Farm was attacked and I missed the notification, the settlement was ravaged by the attackers. That strikes me as a very heavy-handed dev manipulation to punish players that fail to follow the one path that the devs want the players to follow. Bad consequences artificially applied to alter probable outcomes (settlers win easily, as usual, entirely on their own, with no player character assistance required).

One thing I have noticed is that after the attack is done I will get a fail notice if I have not talked to one, or more, of the settlers.

I guess they have to say "thank you" for the mission to succeed?

is the area entirely clear? i once has to chance a rogue super mutant out of starlight who just kept doing hit and runs. was probably locked in panic loop once fired upon.

These were synths - blown to pieces by my missile battery. I've searched and shot each piece of synth around, and then searched the area in minute detail. My settlers even go through the post-battle "thank you for saving us" dialogues. I can wait there for days with nothing happening, but get the "failed defence" message if I go too far away.

Its as if the game has actioned both successful defence and failed defence simultaneously.

Anyway, I had to abandon that save - I lost four hours of gameplay to get back to a stable state.

Ironically, I've now got another problem - one of my settlements being destroyed in front of my eyes, but with no signs of attack, no visible enemies, no reaction from the settlers - and definitely no prior warnings of an attack. This game is so bugged that its unbelievable....

I had this happen to me today as well. Cost a lot of mats to fix everything when I had already "beaten" the stupid attack before I left. I know it'll get fixed eventually, but it makes me want to delay doing much more with settlements until then.

I've abandoned most of my settlements. All my stuff is at Sanc, all my adhesives come from Abernathy and my Companions all get ditched at Red Rocket. Everyone else is on their own. Haven't spoken to Preston in months.

It's a bug I wouldn't worry about it when I get defend X I 99 % of the time ignore it all of my settlements have a defense of over 200 well placed mixed turrets even the obserd 10 super mutant master & 1 super mutant primus kill team all armed w/ missile launchers & mini guns / laser snipers don't last to long

It's a broken system that Bethesda half assed. I have 24 settlements with 75 or greater defense and a perimeter wall of concrete or metal walls, yet my settlements get destroyed when I fail to defend. It's lame and made me quit caring. Now I just collect purified water and help once in a while when I can. It is very easy XP and I like to scrap weapons and armor for parts.

Enemies can & do spawn inside the buildable area in some settlements tho I have noticed that in certain places mainly in the southern regions the attackers actually come in on the settlement from well outside your build zone

i believe the synth attack is the most broken one

have read this on many occasions that it fails cause there is actually a synth infiltrator that doesnt spawn so you always fail

the posts (on here) i read about was you can spawn the last infiltrator and kill him/her to complete but you will only be able to do so on PC

if you do a search on here you can probably find the threads

I hadn't seen this one before.


The biggest glaring issue with the 'Defend Settlement' mechanic is that is requires your presence to function, at which point -at least late-game- there's no real reason to put up defenses in smaller settlements because you're a one-person death squad and you're there you might as well just shoot them yourself.

There needs to be a calculation added based on the type of attack force spawned that pits their level and the weapons they're equipped with against the type and amount of defenses you have so that, say, a regular pack of Feral Ghouls attacks a settlement with 70+ defense that consists of Heavy MG Turrets, Missile Turrets and Guard Posts, you don't need to show up.

I'd say there should be a pathfinding consideration as well to determine if they can even get past your front door, but that would both be (I imagine) difficult to script correctly and could easily be exploited by totally walling your settlement and only using Fast Travel to go in and out.

sounds like one attacker is still left alive, sometime I find them attacking one of my pack Brahmin half a mile down the road (starlight drive in) also had a on who stood at the crossroads at the bottom of the driveway at Kingsport house, although considering he was only armed with a security baton and his mates in power armour got shredded in seconds I can't say I blame him.

The real problem I have are synth attacks, I've had 3 all failed to defend, first one at zimonja I got the notification, arrived and saw no hostiles but then my missile turrets obliterated two settlers who I'd just scanned with vats (they didn't appear hostile to me) upon examining their corpses I found the synth components, but the mission would not complete, I tried waiting (sitting in a chair), sleeping and fast traveling from zimonja to zimonja, all to no avail.

Since then I've had two other synth attacks that follow a similar mo, the synth settlers don't appear hostile to me but my turrets can detect them and deal with them but then the mission wont complete and I end up having to repair an entire settlement, next time it happens I'm going to kill every settler left standing and see if any of them have synth components

After level 50 I've started seeing regular multi-wave attacks. On more than one occasion, where it seems the attack has been put down and the settlers are already celebrating their victory or expressing relief, a second wave of attackers just pops out of the woodwork. On some occasions I've nailed them while cleaning up the battlefield and on one occasion I slipped away before they showed up and got the "failed to defend" outcome. This may be a related issue, especially if your character is getting a little long in the tooth so to speak

It may be best to scout around until the "successfully defended" message pops up or until the mission drops off the active list.

One of the first things I do, when I set up a settlement, is to use the workshop to move the fast-travel marker into cover and out of sight so I can fast travel to the settlement without getting killed before the scene finishes loading. This is more important in some settlements than in others but I make it a standard establishment procedure for all my settlements just the same.

One other thing. I've found it very effective to let the settlers and the settlement defenses handle the regulars while I focus on identifying and nailing the heavies and the mobs operating on a deeper combat AI. This helps speed things along unless some of the attackers are late for dinner

EDIT: While I remember it, those second waves seem to come in from a different direction which would be more parsimoniously explained by the skirmishing AI which would send some of the attackers around to flank but would make them late to the party if both skirmisher and regular ai mobs spawned in at the same location and time.

Could be that one wave is just a random encounter, group of npcs get drawn in by your supply lines or similar, and the second wave is the scripted attack, are the two waves always the same faction? Raiders then more raiders etc?

Somehow when I think of my settlements armed to the teeth with machine guns and missile turrets, I always think of the prison escape scene from Idiocracy.

Yes, always the same faction. And I'm beginning to wonder if that "second wave" I'm seeing isn't just an artefact of skirmishing AI in some mobs. Somehow, I don't think it's scripted that way.

And the possibility of a wandering mob (some of the places still have one or two of those turning up at random) being drawn in by a provisioner - as you've suggested, makes sense to me too. I'm not sure if the engine would count these in as part of the attack, though. When, after an attack, the settlers go off on a bug-shooting rampage, I'm sure I've seen the attack mission close once, say, the raiders are done but before the settlers are finished "taking out their frustrations" on the neighboring bloodbug community. I think I'll want to keep a closer eye on this next time there's a fireworks show being put on over at

- I'm kinda curious about how some of this works, myself. Last time I was there for fireworks, things got very interesting because the delay between a power armour unit with support crew showing up and the mop up troops coming in later was almost on the money.

I haven't seen Idiocracy yet but I do get a prison-camp sort of impression when looking at a settlement with a complete defense system (i.e. outer turrets, barricades, inner turrets, corrals, etc.) - possibly because the little thing about fortresses nobody really likes to think about is that they usually make better traps than defensive positions. This is not to say that fortifications are not strong defensive positions but that the stronger a defensive position, the easier it is for the attackers to find a way to turn that position to the disadvantage of the defenders.