So I have completely removed and re-added all my settlement beds at Sanctuary, manually assigned each NPC to an individual bed, and verified that at night, they all go to where they are supposed to.

HOWEVER, as soon as I leave the settlement my data tab shows my beds down to 4 (from 23) and my power and water also drop to 0 when the bed number glitches. This is NOT just cosmetic, as my happiness will drop as long as I am gone.

As soon as I come back and enter build mode everything returns to normal and happiness begins to rise. But leave and it all starts again.

Also, once this cycle of bed glitching starts random NPC's will just ignore their bed assignment and pick a random empty bed, which seems to make the glitch worse. I have deleted all beds, and left only assigned beds (1 per settler), and after re-assigning them all the problem persists.

Maddening for a borderline OCD like me.

Hah anyone else's eyes go wide thinking your settlement could be infested with bed bugs?

Not 100% sure yet but i believe some additional complication, perhaps even direct correlation to bed assignments going all screwy is the charisma gear issue.

It isnt explained well, but you can prove this easily - charisma gear not only boosts merchant prices, but raises your settler maximum. The problem is if you were already at soft cap (you charisma + 10), and had that many settlers already there, wearing charisma gear even for a moment can attract more settlers.

For example with 7 charisma i had maxed out sanctuary at 17 settlers. But wearing charisma gear routinely when i sell/buy at my store merchants raised my settlers to 21. problem is, when i leave sanctuary (and equip combat gear), my charisma drops and those extra settlers go away.

Or vice versa. I am away from sanctuary selling/buying with charisma gear, which attracts new settlers to all my settlements, but lose them when i remove charisma gear. The fact i lose this temporary settler increase i have no issues with. But i believe this constant in/out of settlers who still require real beds, food, etc - and auto assign themselves to jobs and then abandon them - adds to or is one of the reasons why we have so many broken assignments as well as the bed issue.

It is not practical to never wear charisma gear, and i suppose someone would and could perma wear charisma gear so they permanently have 24 settlers (or whatever is max charisma boost via gear, ive only found +4 so far)

Anyway, my 2 cents is these constant temporary settlers are screwing with the assignments.

It turns out the temporary solution is to remove all tvs in your settlement. It sounds crazy, but apparently the code of the tvs is messing up settlements, and making it so resources and defense values don't work after leaving the settlement.

Some also say that radios and juke boxes cause the same problem, but from what I can tell, its just tvs.