Has it been considered that everything discussed above is CORRECT, but when chems/alcohol wears off, or cloths are removed, that the max settlement size DOES NOT REDUCE with them; in other words the game is periodically checking your charisma and when it sees that it's higher, it ups your settler size limit, but it's not reducing it due to drugs wearing off or a hat being removed. Then, later, you take more drugs and the cap size is increased again ... so the game isn't necessarily saying "hey, you've got a 14 charisma, so 24 settler size for you!" but rather "hey, your charisma just went up 3, so settler size=settler size+3."

This would mean that it can only ever go UP and not down.

my game, 10+cha is absolutely correct

i have many settlements that havnt bothered with that are under cap, but both my "big' settlements are capped at 16 (my cha is 6)

whenever i leave my beacon on (all the time i forget lol) it stays at 16 and if i want to send someone there it is greyed out and i cant select said settlements.

now if i want to send someone there i just don my cha gear an voila i can now send

also because i constantly forget to switch my beacons off, when i don cha gear quite often will get someone turn up at settlement

these days my sanctuary is at 20, which is max for me (10+6(cha)+4(cha gear)=20) i purposely left beacon on for 2 days now as test and not a single settler has turned up.

formula is definitely 10+cha, and cha = your current cha not raw cha

but people have more you say? yes they do because there is a lot of bugs in this game (and exploits) ofcourse and for some reason even for what should be hard wired rules players are experiencing different "game rules" to each other.

for example you know how you are storing stuff at your settlements, well some players cant because any container at their settlements is restocking like a normal container giving them new stuff if empty but worse overwriting any stuff they store with random container stuff

also curie, many players cant send her to any settlement she just disappears back to her vault (known bug) yet many players also works fine, like me she's exactly where i send her everytime.

so basically the formula is correct, as for many players this is true

for those players who have more, then you are bugged/glitched/whatever you want to say

i say this being the official guide says this formula and it is true for some so it makes logical sense for those that its not true for would therefor be glitched or whatever you want to call it.

Settlements, and pretty much every thing about them, seem to be glitched in some way or another; it's likely that speculating about why some are able to exceed the "limits" is really pointless.

Case in point; my CHA is 11, wearing +5 CHA garb my pop max should be 26, yet I have a settlement with 31. Never used a drug or alcohol, and pretty sure +5 is the best you can get with garb. I've checked the settlement in question out, it really has 31 people, not a PipBoy glitch.

Something here doesn't seem to be working as intended.

Until we see a seriously focused patch, I reckon we're just gonna have to keep guessing.

My personal suspicion about the high settler counts on consoles are due to the workshop screen in the pip boy sometimes displaying 0, so it resets the counter without realising the settlement is already full, thus you get 2 or 3 loads of "full" I do recall he said he never went to that settlement so the bug continued.