All of the unique level 4 vendors are broken, but specifically the ones found in random wasteland encounters, Smiling Larry, the Scribe, Doc Anderson, and Ron Staples from my own personal experience, but according to the internet they all are, across all three platforms. When you speak to any of the 4 random encounter vendors and recruit them/send them to a settlement, everything seems fine and your population count increases by one both in your pipboy workshop menu and in the map menu when hovering over the settlement you sent them to. However when you fast travel to the settlement the population will have dropped back down by one, and the NPC will have effectively disappeared from the map permanently. Tonight I found Doc Anderson by the campfire on the river nearby Westing Estate. I decided to try to escort her to my settlement on foot after recruiting her this time, so I did the recruitment dialogue and then waited. And waited. And waited. She walked around in small circles and occasionally sat down for 6 game days, then when I got bored and walked far enough away for her to despawn, she disappeared off the map and my population count dropped by one. Having done some research on this myself before coming here, it seems that PC players on the Steam forums found the broken code that causes this issue and figured out how to fix it themselves a month ago. So why haven't you Bethesda? I just spent a good 20 hours and easily 10,000 caps making a market settlement in preparation for this feature that doesn't work. That makes me want to play something else.

Yeah, it's infuriating. Sadly as a console player I will have to wait for the eventual patch before this can be fixed. Here's hoping its around the corner, and not three months from now.

For real. You'd think if it's really something so simple that players figured it out themselves, and wide spread enough that literally every search result on the vendors said something about the bug, that they'd have just done it already. In all fairness my experience with 4 has probably been the best bug wise since Fallout 2, but even still. It's annoying how much time I spent trying to set this up, and then got all excited when I finally found one of the NPC's that I'd met the criteria to recruit, only to find that the feature just doesn't work. If it were something you could do in 5 minutes I wouldn't care, but this was at least 20 hours of building, several perks, an unbelievable cap commitment, and god only knows how many hours spent wandering around the wasteland looking for random encounters. Pretty annoying.

Indeed, I spent six hours trying to farm random encounters looking to recruit the Scribe. Needless to say I was a little miffed when I learned of the bug.