I've seen threads on this, but nothing I try works. Is there any actual way to use the magazine racks as intended, or are they just going to scatter to the floor no matter what?

Did you put your magazines in them the same way you would put items in a container? If yes and they fall on the floor ive got nothing for you. It works in my game fine.

What platform are you on?

I use the shelves and they stay, and shows them off better..

i have both magazine racks in my settlement and if you use them like regular containers you should have no issues of them not staying put.

Are you trying to lay them on it manually or are you putting them in it like a container Default button on PC for that is "r" but I wouldn't know what the others push.

Guess I should just do this instead. I liked the idea of the racks, but the mags won't stay put. putting them in with the container menu, they don't stay put, and I'm not going to manually place dozens of items just to see if that works...

You are supposed to use the racks and shelves through the container menu. But, it is probably impossible to get them to stay put, for the same reasons small objects sink into the surfaces they are supposed to rest on. A likely guess is that the engine tries to calculate the position of movable objects before, or at the same time, as the positions of static objects. That can lead to undesired results, if the timing is even the tiniest bit off.

weird. sounds like a bug since you are using the right menu.

They only scatter them when you put more than 20 magazines in one rack....

I placed my magazines into the shelve's and rack's inventories. They display as intended... for a bit. Then, after a while, when I return home there would be a couple lying on the ground and sometimes one or two just gone.

Again, I wasn't using the grab function and placing them manually, I placed them in their inventories. It's just as broken as any other method of decorating your player home.

That's what I thought too, at first. But that's not what I've seen. The more I enter and leave the cell, the more of a mess I come back to, whether a rack is full or not. Obviously, the settlers are @#$!ing with me.

Damn settlers, I wish they'd stay out of our houses!

I haven't had these issues yet. I've set up 3 magazine shelves/stands. Not the wireframe ones but the wooden ones. I put them in Shaun's old room with the Bobblehead display.

They're going to hit the floor, no matter what.

The game has a serious design flaw in that the x-axis sinks so damn much, it's pointless to even try to decorate. When this sink occurs, magazines lose their ability to stay on the rack and fall off, usually underneath the rack. In addition, set items will sink into whatever they're set on. I even tried to put a pillow on my bed only to see it go through the bed and onto the floor.

PC gamers probably have a mod which fixed this, but us console players have to deal with this until Bethesda fixes this (if they fix it).

Even though magazines help increase happiness, it's not worth the hassle to put them out.

I'm on the PC, haven't seen a mod for it yet, but I'll cross my fingers. I didn't know the mags increased happiness...

It doesn't increase it by much (2 points), but I only added a magazine rack after one of my settlers said having something to read would be nice.

I think I may need to upgrade my clinic shop, since settlers won't stop whining about picking crops.

Mine scatters from time to time, I just fill it until it won't accept any more. All you have to do is walk up to it and open the transfer window, close, and it'll rearrange itself.

OCDecorator mod, lets you place any junk item like it was a build item, also removes the items physics. With this you could make a whole table setting, lob a grenade on it, and your plates stay nice an neat just how you intended them to look.

Uh I never had a problem with the mags though.

Mods be coming soon man. Hang in there.

Eventually consoles will be able to access at least mods posted to Bethesda.net. But until then...

Item decorating physics with this game engine have always been a bit wonky. I've had items in FO4 disappear entirely, or be "teleported" to the roof on the other side of my base fort or across the road etc. So I haven't even tried the magazine racks.
FNV I'd toss tons of those toy dinos onto a bed and they'd stay there unless kicked by my chr, but this game even single items eventually randomly just "disappear"/fall through floors/teleports away or something - for me at least. :/

...at least number of items in a container doesn't seem to cause massive lag after awhile, anymore.

Easiest fix there is for this. Just open the rack's menu and exit, and they'll warp back to their proper place.

I'm really hesitant to put any of my magazines or bobbleheads in display racks like this. I've had a lot of placed items end up disappearing, and losing these would be worse then something like losing the lab equipment that I placed on the table next to the chemistry station in my workshop. I can replace those if they get lost. I can't replace the bobbleheads or magazines.

I find the wooden magazine rack works quite well. The rotating metal one would dump all my magazines on the floor in a tidy pile.

When they fall to the floor, just open up the container menu and immediately exit. They all go back into place, and there's no more trying to figure out if one fell through the floor.

Very odd. Mags haven't gone crazy for me. Even "placed" items have been ok. The only issue I have had so far is those damn skeletons doing a disco dance.