Apologies if this has already been addressed/answered, but I was unable to find anything relating to this specific problem.

I have a little open-air market going on at one of the flat foundations found around Sanctuary Hills...slapped up a nice wood floor, a back wall, some mood lighting, store shelves and 4 trader posts: A medic, armor shop, clothing store and general trader. The general trader I had already had assigned since the early stages of the game, but then I decided to group all my shops together and build the market up a bit. Anywho, long story short, the general trader (along with my settler assigned to the scavenging station) have completely disappeared from my settlement. Everyone else is at work bright and early, but the trader stand has been abandoned for over an in-game week. Both the trader stand and the scavenger stand show green as if someone is still working at/assigned to them, but both the ladies running them are gone. I've rung the bell. I've searched every inch of the settlement map. They're just not there...I mean, i guess it's not that big of a deal as long as the resources are still coming in from their stations (although the trader being gone means I'm out an easy source of copper and crystal scrap) but it really bugs me that I cant find them...

Thought? Ideas? Suggestions? Anyone else have anything similar crop up for them?

I had assigned a settler to a store - she was forever missing - but I'd come across her wandering around and could trade with her then.

But very irritating that she was not at her stall - in the end I reassigned a new settler and he seems to stay put.

As long as we keep posting about these glitches, I reckon they'll eventually get fixed in patches.

My main home base (Red Rocket Station) got one settler (from Diamond City), but showed up as having two, I built a beacon and now I have two settlers (one farmer and one trader) and its showing up as four settlers.......I assume its a bug since I've never seen or interacted with the other two.

Do you have any supply lines/provisioners coming in to Red Rocket? That will jump your numbers up, as they technically "live there"...I have a town of 13 in Sanctuary Hills, but only 7 of them actually are there, the rest are roaming around with their brahmins. Supply lines are something the game should have done a better job of explaning, my supply line map is a right mess, i went about it in the most complicated way possible while trying to figure out how it worked

In my case I've never set up a caravan, my largest settlement is Sanctuary Hills with 5 people (and Codsworth), I'm unsure why I have so few settlers in the Red Rocket one especially, its a veritable palace compared to most of the wasteland (with free food, water and power) and has a defence of 132 (ish).

I've only really spent a little time on a couple of the settlements beyond the Red Rocket one which I've maxed out, so no more building.

Certain settlers don't stay at their stand, especially if they're named and they may disappear during lunch. If you remember which one you assigned, you can still trade with them even if they aren't at the stand itself.

Crap, so there is a build cap then? The "size" bar in Sanctuary is getting very close to full, but I've still got two more shacks to build! I guess I'll have to take some stuff down so I can focus on some defense...no one really uses the basketball court anyway...

They're both just regular settlers. Jun, Preston and Marcy are farming, Sturges is on guard duty and Mama Murphy is *Spoilers!* dead... Everyone else is a regular ole settler. Thing is, the trade shop gal and the scavver are not even in the town at all. If they want to roam around during work hours, I don't mind, I'm not a hard ass like some Wanderers, but lets keep it within the perimiter, yea? I can ring the bell all day and everyone else shows up, even Codsworth, but those two are just gone.

I too have noticed them wandering around strange places. Somewhere I read about the Bell. I don't know where I came across it, but I don't thing the game told me what the Bell was for. Now if I can't find them and I don't want to spend a lot of time looking I just ring the bell as soon as I get into town.

How did you learn of the Bell? Do you use it?

It's worse than that. The build cap is a hard cap, but there's clearly some soft caps as well. After a certain point settlers just won't appear anymore, even if you aren't at the build limit or support limit. Last night I sent some additional settlers to my main base, a beautiful structure I built three stories high in hangmans alley to accommodate and protect 5 female npcs. I was really proud of it and pleased with how it turned out, and the npcs already living there seemed very happy. I wanted to move these particular three guys to open up supply lines to some other places, but they never appeared. I fast traveled back and forth between there and the castle (where they came from) 4 times, slept in a bed for 48 hours and then another 24, went out and did a few quests... The guys still never showed up. I know they never showed up because they were the only male npcs in this particular settlement and would have been easy to spot in the sea of red dresses. They didn't come to the bell, I couldn't find them anywhere in the place. I dismantled the entire structure looking for them - nothing. They just weren't there. I left it dismantled and fast traveled back out and in again - magically they appeared! This is the first time that sending a settler to a new place took more time than one or two fast travels back and forth, even when I sent people from the castle back to sanctuary.

So there is clearly some bug or intentional design limit that we just don't know yet. I'm thinking that there is a soft cap on how many of any one particular structure the settlements can support without causing problems elsewhere. In this case it was probably floors\ceilings\walls because it took a lot to build three stories high in that alley. Regardless, I did eventually get my npcs and set up my supply lines, but it's disappointing that settlements have such weird limitations and break so easily. This was even more annoying than half my orchard not being selectable\farmable in the castle and needing to store every tree and fast travel back and forth several times, taking down a few more at a time (as they became selectable) before I could get rid of all the creepy unselectable trees.