So I'm looking around for real estate to call home (The Red Rocket outside of Sanctuary is a nice starter place, but I'm looking for something a bit more permanent and centrally located), and I stumbled upon the Tuffington Boardhouse.

Nice little two story with attached boat house, a decent sized growing patch, with just a few holes in the ceiling to fix up and various crafting stations to place...the problem is, the Boardhouse comes with a named corpse.

I've noticed how in Fallout 4, corpses have a nasty habit of sticking around....the Raider and Mongrel just outside of Sanctuary have resisted multiple attempts to tidy them up and make the approach to the community more pleasant to no avail.

If I decide to shack in at the Bunkhouse, how do I go about getting rid of the corpse? Like I said, the Raider out in Sanctuary makes me wonder if just dragging the corpse and throwing it in the river would solve anything, or if it'd just pop back in a few hours/days.

Fwict - bodies that die within settlent borders are forever, no decay.

Bodies that are scripted as location placed -e.g. Dead bodies outside sanctuary, dead brahmin at various wilderness cells, etc - are also immune to normal decay fade time.

In a thread similar to this, some are dragging bodies away via move function but I was reminded by someone else of console commands I'd forgotten about

1. Disable, then markfordelete

Disable to remove from view (but allows you to enable if you targeted wring thing by accident)
Markfordelete to truly unload from that cell location because disable only removes from view, not from behind the scenes loading.

That's handy to know. Now I can get rid of Wolfgang's corpse too.

It's grim, but it would be interesting to carry animal and other bodies back to the settlers to salvage them for bone and leather

Would be nice to be able to get rid of bodies inside building menu.

Patch Request!!

If it's a houseboat then why not just dump the body overboard?

Not true, the mole rat corpses have vanished from Red Rocket and they're both scripted and within a settlements borders.

1- scripted as in the dead brahmin example - the bodies start out dead, they are always dead, and they are always there as condition of the cell location loading - unless you use console to remove them of course

2- i believe you re: mole rats at RR - but you are in the minority. Lot of people have raised the RR location as example when complaining about corpses not vanishing, as well as of course the insects at sanctuary at start of game.

If you killed the moles at edge of road, where settlement border stops/starts, I suspect your mole rats decayed as per normal body decay. If they died inside borders, then either yours is the normal working desire actually working that way - and ours is the bug - or ours is the norm and yours is the bug. Either way, I would say based on the repeat threads about that same location and this same issue, it is more likely than not that non-decaying moles at RR is more usual than your example.

I guess I should count myself lucky with the mole rats then. I would've just moved them off my lot if they hadn't cleared.

My first character On the Xbox One the mole rats disappeared (Most were in the shop) It took some time. I walk and rarely use fast travel and I do not return to base that often. Maybe the counter goes back to the beginning if you are in the location and if you go there on a regular bases to drop of junk and doing some crafting. Maybe I was lucky too.

I usually don't fast travel either and I was away from the Red Rocket for a long time after that first encounter so maybe that has something to do with the corpses. In Skyrim if you frequented the same area often then corpses wouldn't clear.

edit: wouldn't

Found the barber dead so I threw him in a lake. Guess there's no haircuts for me

Not a houseboat. Also, I've had corpses I've thrown in the river for disposal show back up.

Yeah, that's another annoying part about the game. If anyone should die they don't clear. You'd think the settlers would get a little freaked out just leaving them there to rot, but apparently it happens so often and the fact they live in smelly craphole hobo town they don't care. Lol