I gave up on trying to track down the new settlers the game decided to add to Sanctuary a while back. Lazy bastards are nowhere to be found. That bell you get from the workshop is 100% useless because it appears whenever you ring it, the settlers suddenly go tone deaf...

And now lately, it appears Dogmeat has gone AWOL as well. He was no where to be found when I FT back to Sanctuary with Piper in tow. Hope he didn't end up like some of the junk I loot and fell through the world. Found a safe in that position using the tcl cheat once.

I have also had my frustrations with idled settlers. It would be nice if you could ask them how they feel about their job, or if they would be all upset and whining if they had nothing to do. But no one has implemented that yet.

So, instead, you can create self-assigning jobs - food and defense both seem to be the sorts of things they will pick up automatically. If you have extra stuff for them to do, you can just reassign people arbitrarily until things seem mostly ok. That is probably what the Approved Vault-Tec Management Guide tells you to do anyways. (And, I think some people seem to do worse than that in real life...)

Anyways, the commonwealth is a harsh place, and you should not be surprised if sometimes people go missing, if provisioning routes sometimes get interrupted, or if vault-tec's gleaming perfection turns out to have some occasional flaws.

(Though it would be nice if we could get better feedback about such things, after they have happened.)

Yeah I wish it were easier to know who was assigned to what, even if there was a little icon that appeared when you hover over a settler telling you if they are assigned to scrap, defense, food or shops would be a huge help

Hm. Ill have to keep an eye out for that.

I LOVE the whole idea behind the settlements.

I HATE the frustration that comes with not knowing who is who and having to deal with 20+ settlers and arranging them without a comprehensive list of what each settler is doing.

Yeah, I love the settlements part, but the management is meh...

My suggestion (probably just reiterations of what other people are saying).

1. Automatically name generic settlers:

No job = Settler 1, Settler 2, Settler 3 and so forth...

Farmer = Farmer 1, Farmer 2, Farmer 3 and so forth...

Guard = Guard 1, Guard 2, Guard 3 and so forth...

Provisioner? = Provisioner 1, 2 and so forth ... or settlement names for them?

Store people = name of the store they're at...

If you re-assign farmer 2 out of 3 to guard 1... he becomes guard 1 and farmer 3 instead becomes farmer 2...

...

2. An interface to assign preferred equipment to people. Either at the workshop or through a computer terminal? The inhabitants will try to "withdraw" a predefined set of equipment from the workshop automatically...

Either for a category like farmers, guards, store people and so forth... and possibly also for each individual.

...

3. Possibly even letting me reassign newly arrived settles to task straight from the interface in 2.

So I only have to set up equipment and outfits once. I can then easily recognize who is who.... and if I assign more people to a task or reassign them... they're gonna automatically equip themselves for it ...

id also like some of the settlement zones to be increased in size, i mean why cant we use all of Sanctuary Hills Isle, Why is jamacia plains not the whole town and instead just 2 building, Why doesnt Croup Manor's border extend into the water, conversely Abanathy Farm has a large area but npcs dont path well outside of the actual farming area