I was going to post the same. I came across my provisioner in the wild and he was attacked by raiders. Basically took a knee and then got up again and kept going. However, they can get stuck in sort of a death loop. if they walk through a raider infested area just get put down, get up, immediately put down again. Eventually they make it out. I also made sure I used a ghoul to provision to spectacle island, I think the radiation would take down a normal human.

Only lost one in 300 hours or so.....poor woman got replaced by a Synth and the turrets at Ft Starlight blasted the Synth to bits. The Brahmin got away though.

"Ricocheted", got ya. *wink*

It's wacky, and not 100% but a provisioner can die if they're within your sphere of infuance when they receive the fatal blow.


Like how you receive xp out of nowhere, two groups are fighting, because your near, the xp rings up on you.


I had a provisioner die from a bloodstinger because I was near them. Yet, I faught along side on on the road, he go's down but stands up 30 seconds later. Like a lot of things on this game..wacky.


"Now, a moment of silence in dear Roberts memory."


*10 seconds later, settlers start screaming*


"IRISH WAKE, IRISH WAKE!!"

Nope. Protected doesn't mean immortal. It only means that they collapse with enough damage and if they take more damage that's fatal at that time, they die. A Deathclaw ripping an NPC apart, literally, is more than enough damage to eliminate them. It's exactly the same as Legendary enemies who take too much damage and do not have a chance to mutate to their stronger forms before dying. That is what happens to provisioners. Not a bug.

I equip all my provisioners with miniguns, at least they have a good fighting chance out in the wasteland. Once I walking near Hangman's alley and I heard a minigun cutting loose in the distance, so I headed toward the firefight to see who had the gun. When I got close it was my provisioner battling it out with super mutants just outside of Diamond City. Also if your provisioner is around or near one of your settlements with the minigun, he'll definitely help out tremendously if it is being attacked.

Those bots are rare and unrecruitable.

Human settlers, otherwise, can just re-appear out of nowhere, die, and repeat

His name was Robert Paulson.

If ever we can name settlers, here's one that I'll use.

I have soooo many settlers that I have multiple provisioners going all over. I wouldn't even notice if one was dead! just use multiple routes and always have more than one to each settlement. daisy chain them all. you will never miss a beat!

I prefer Tyler Durden, it has a slight touch of Herp Derpaderp.

I never said protected meant immortal, but whatever. Since that's absolutely not how "Protected" works in Skyrim, I'm assuming you're basing your belief in a change on things you've observed. That's fair, but it's more believable to me that you're encountering a bug than that Bethesda changed a system like that. We won't know for sure until we get some CK documentation or a testing sample size greater than the two of us.


As for legendary enemies, I one-shot them with no problem all the time, so I'm not sure what you're getting at there.

Robert Paulson, as portayed by Meatdog!

When a provisioner takes to much damage, they will usually sit down and the enemy will leave them be until they recover, but I personally witnessed a provisioner die by the hands of a super mutant suicide bomber that was running passed a downed provisioner headed for me and when I shot him, he detonated, killing the provisioner. At the time, I didn't arm that particular provisioner with a minigun, because I gave out all the ones I collected (7 total) to other provisioners.

Doesn't anyone think this is funny? I mean a lot of us complain about how our companions get in the way of us, now it's the other way around?

Well you said the body isn't there so maybe there is hope and he got back up or or or or

Zombies confirmed in Fallout 4

I thought it worked the way you are saying Ishmael, but who knows.

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that Robert is confirmed MIA. He was been automatically replaced by a Settler who has not taken the title of Provisioner. His body remains missing, his family in Tenpines Bluff never got to say goodbye. I hope Robert is in a better place.

I checked the the wikia, and apparently settlers are protected from death, so long as the damage is from a hostile NPC. However they can be killed by any kind player damage (not sure about mines or friendly fire from other townsfolk), so avoid using with weapons with splash damage when protecting your towns. But strangely, provisioners do not have this protection, so they are in fact mortal.

It is either intended design, an oversight in design, or known issue allowed to launch - but the above is essentially correct and easily obervable / testable in game.


Provisioners are not immune or immortal. What they have is the basic level of protection that former bethesda games ala Skyrim used to call 'recovery mode' - it usually covers them but rapid damage with high enough dps can and will kill them.


When a provisioner suffers enough damage that it would normally kill them, they are instead set to recovery mode - zero hp but alive, sitting on the grround and no longer targeted by enemies. This lasts until they recover or battle is over and most situations ensures they live.


But either intended design, design flaw, or bug in design that was allowed to ship - if a provisioner is shot by the player, no recovery mode kicks in. If a prov is shot by npcs with high enough and fast enough spike damage, it kills then before the recovery mode can initiate and kick in.


Super mutuants with missiles, deathclaws with gibbing attacks, etc can and will kill provs on their routes if loaded into world by your presence. Not sure how many ugrids the range is, but neighbor cells are loaded as you enter and move around FO4 world and if a prov loads offscreen or around terrain withing this ugrid proximity they load, they can easily die before you even know they are under attack.


Its part luck - you can go entire campaign without single prov ever dying, and then have a playthrough where they die often.

He's gone to that big settlement in the sky...unless he died suddenly and horrifically, in which case he is probably doomed to wander his old route forever and ever until his little ghost mind gives way and turns him into a bloodthirsty spectre

Fun fact: after some testing with one of my guards armed with a fat man and a few stray punches in a crowded bar , settlers don't seem to do friendly fire to each other. The first test, no one was hurt, the second where I just blasted the room myself, Several were dead, or seriously hurt.

Damn it Robert... /cry .. I TOLD you to take Dogmeat with you!

Here is what UESPWiki has to say about the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Essential_NPCs:

And http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Protected_NPCs:

The crucial part for the Protected tag description being:

Based on this, it wouldn't matter if a Deathclaw attack would normally rip them to -500% health in one blow, it still wouldn't have that effect, because they will not go below about 10% from NPC attacks (or at least from a single NPC attack) and once they are at ~10% they can only go lower as a result of damage caused by the player (with splash damage or possibly things like land mines, turrets, etc., possibly counting as "damage caused by the player").

An important caveat is that, it got changed a bit with the final patch for Skyrim:

So, in the final vanilla version of Skryim, the "splash" or "overflow" damage from player being able to kill "Protected NPCs" was removed. Protected NPCs would never go below some low threshold (around 10% or maybe less) from ANY source of damage other than a direct hit by the player.

I am certainly no expert on this stuff and do not pretend that the way it works in Skyrim is necessarily proof of how it is working in Fallout 4. But my limited observations up to this point suggest to me that the same two (well three if you count the additional tag on children) tags are being used in FO4 and that they work just about the same as they did in Skyrim:

Essential: cannot die by any cause.

Protected: cannot die by NPC caused damage. If NPC caused damage would take them to zero or less than zero health, they go to a low level (~10% or thereabouts), go into a sitting animation and remain in this "bleed out" status until hostiles are clear from their area, at which point they start to regenerate and then eventually get back up and behave normally. Direct damage (and maybe 'indirect' or 'proxy' damage) from the player can nonetheless kill a protected NPC at any time.

Hopefully I am not being misleading, and I don't intend what I'm saying to be the "final word," just trying to clarify what is probably/maybe going on in FO4 based on how it worked in their most recent game with the sister version of the engine, Skyrim.

It may be possible as of this time (and even without the GECK) to do enough detective work with FO4edit, and/or just in-game tests to determine if it works differently in FO4 than it did in the final version of Skyrim.

Meh, he had [censored] [censored] anyway. No big loss.