I don't mind building the settlements, it's kinda fun (even though it's a PIA). I can overlook the notion that it could have been done better, with perhaps extended workshop range, easier to place buildings or a way to level building sites, or just get rid of pavement and concrete where it's not wanted.

To get to the point of my post, and this thread, what I'm having trouble with is simply keeping up, and especially at Starlight Drive-in. The place has only been operational for a short time, and I've already gotten to 9 settlers. Every time I have enough beds and food, another homeless vagrant shows up.

I have not the slightest idea who's assigned to what, and things change in the oddest fashion. For instance, on discovering I was short of food, I planted to corn, a tato, and a couple of carrots. The food stat immediately dropped from 8 to 4. I went inside my structure and built a couple of new beds, and the bed count went up and so did the food count. All the way to 10, and I have no idea how it got there.

My compound is too small, I'll have to make it bigger, and I'm concerned that I won't have enough dirt to plant crops pretty soon because so much of the place is covered in pavement. The Sunshine Hippie Commune is is growing rapidly and will soon be having similar problems I suspect, so I have a question.

Sanctuary still has only the 5 originals who went there, and I'm pretty certain that it's because I never built a recruitment tower there. So, that leads me to wonder if I can stop population increase at Starlight by disabling the recruitment tower... Has anybody tried this? Will it work?

Yeah, the recruitment towers have on/off switches. Just switch it off when you don't want more settlers.

I only wanted a couple of people in my settlement and switching the signal off stopped more settlers from arriving.

That's great news, thanks!

Just remember if they're off they can't transmit power to other objects.

Recruitment towers don't power anything.

You can use the Recruitment tower to string power lines between distance objects and save yourself some copper and other materials, however that means you have to keep it on.

I'm having the opposite problem in Sanctuary. I have my radio beacon on all the time but the settlement has stayed steady at 13 people for a good while now. Can't seem to get more to show up. It just seems to be there though, my settlement at Jamaica Plain was already past that two days after I built it up.

You could go to another settlement and move them to Sanctuary, also companions stationed in town count towards the population limit.

You can also send them off to other settlements. I turned off all towers except one at starlight which I keep on as the recruitment center to control how many of who goes where. I'm going to send only women to red rocket and put them in dresses unless there is a better locale for my cat house.

Now THAT'S role playing right there! I like the idea, lol.

10+Charisma is your population limit. If that doesn't explain it, you can at least set up towers in your smaller settlements and transport people from there.

Huh.. I never realized they could transmit power. I always build a generator, then a pylon, and attach the tower and everything else to the pylon.