Should have known better than reading guides, written by people who play the game to write guides. Not play the game to discover how it really works.

This is not a huge how-to post, I am still an amateur. What I do know is one fact vs. fiction debunk myth - one guide I read sounded credible and DID have excellent tips on how to power homes and use conduits. But it also mentioned building lots of paintings to raise settler happiness after basic food, water, defense is met.

After 3 aborted playthroughs and marathon play with my vacation from work - yes, there are people who planned work vacations around FO4 launch date - i've now put in about 35+ hours, with ton of that managing settlements.

Consistent fact #1 - in all 3 playthroughs, I raised my main Sanctuary base to ~78 consistent happiness. As in got there, stayed there. 15 settlers.

By experimenting what manner I built up Sanctuary, I can debunk or explain only a few things, but feel very confident in these few:

A. Paintings are for you, not your settlers. The guide writer was deluded - excellent power conduits tips, total baloney re: paintings.
-placing 6 paintings in every house in one play run got me to 78 happiness just as fast/slow and leveled there, as when I put zero decorations other than bed to sleep in out of the rain.

B. Excess food, water and defense have some weighted importance I wont pretend to know formula to, but on run where i had basic needs only covered, happiness capped around 60. E.g. Basic as in minimum number needed for settlers plus minimum defense based on food + water formula.

With significant excess water, food,mand defense - e.g. 40+ food, 40+ water, 96 defense with only 15 settlers, my happiness shot to 78 and stayed there. With bare minimums, in high 50s to what seems cap at 60.

C. Beds dont seem to matter other than everyone needs ONE. Building triple the beds vs settlers seemed to have no impact on happiness.

So that is it. I am not a settlement expert, just curious what the heck affects thungs given zero manual from bethesda and poor in game messages / tutorial / short hell descriptions.

Each run I aborted to restart using char tweaks I learned I wanted from prior plays. And of course to move the difficulty up. However, all games were started on Normal - and i never moved difficulty up until had done my settlement expansion / test to 15 settlers in order to keep same variables over all tests.

I say this because I've not gone far enough into each run to truly get lots of stores up and running, just basic stores and jspust enough to test assigning workers to stores. I suspect getting higher happiness past 78 or so requires stores and other advanced settlement options.

One variable i have not isolated to test, but worth noting is that in all 3 runs, i powered only my personal house. And still got to 15 settlers and leveled off happiness at 78. So either adequate lights are needed for higher than steady 78 happiness, or settlers are fine living in the dark.

Restarting last new start for hopefully first full run to end of game campaign, and this time will try putting in lights all over but i suspect it wont change anything.

Does anyone else have proven facts for direct linkage to settlement happiness? Without a manual or statement from bethesda for how mechanics like this work, trial and error seems only way to run a settlement.

thank you so much for your work!

*runs off to plant more corn*

that worked. I had to QT away and then QT back to get it to show as once again "gaining" happiness.

Also, something else I'd like to dispel is the whole total number of settlers is 10+ charisma. My charisma is 8, so, theoretically, I should have a max pop of 18. A 19th settler just showed up to Sanctuary.

I did everything you did plus built a bar for my settlers and got their happiness to 81

i just wish we had more settlers. I can tell you it will be one of the first variables i look to edit as soon as we have FO4Edit/GECK.. I want a settlement.. not a few scattered people..

I thought the same thing until I realized you can relocate settlers to Sanctuary. (sort of). Anyone that shows up to a settlment that is "new" can be moved to Sanctuary. As soon as I learned that, I shut down all of my other settlements (i.e I moved everyone that would go to Sanctuary and executed the rest (oops?)).

If you remove the bar, do you see a drop?

The way I tested was by increasing only one variable - and wait reasonable time until I saw any happiness rise, and if it did - stay there as steady state, not temp spike up or down

Once hitting steady state, i tried adding bunch of paintings as well as rugs, neither produced any upswing, and no down swing on complete removal. Whereas take away a few turrets, and you see fairly immediate happiness drop.

Maybe other 'entertainment' things like bars and radios help, havent tested that.

What i am trying to angle towards isnt so much simple curiosity but raw greed - i want to know if happiness affects production like some guides mention, and if true, how i can get my serfs to farm and scavenge and produce store profts faster. (If possible, otherwise of production is a constant rate i will be more than disappointed in bethesda. Modders always can make things better but if settlement economy isnt linked to happiness, that would see a pretty low bar to launch with)

I'm still on my first character, and I've gotten Sanctuary up to 80 happiness and have managed to retain that somehow... I have plenty of food, water and defense, got 26 beds, and only two stores (surgery and clinic). I don't have any lights there, but plenty of power atm. I'm currently working on another settlement I recently took over and trying to work out how to get higher happiness.

Except that however you reshuffle settlers, it does appear the formula 10+charisma is the max settlers each settlement can attract.

So if you have 5 settlements - a char 6 character can have 16x5 = 90 settlers max. All redistributing people will do is move you faster towards the cap at one settlement. Having multiple settlements all started up with beacons will also help you reach cap faster. But does t move the cap higher.

I have 18 charisma and 19 settlers in Sanctuary right now...

Are you counting the number you see when outside sanctuary (and adding your provisioners) or the number when you and dogmeat are there?

I am only partly sure here because the weird UI bug showing false numbers is also an outstanding issue, but if you are outside sanctuary, it will always be displayed (at least for me) as total settlers minus roaming provisoners minus you and dogmeat.

So,for example, when i and dogmeat are at sanctuary, my total will say 17. When i leave samctuary and view population in pipboy tab, it will say 12 (it appearsto not count my 3 roaming provisioners plus me and dogmeat)

What is consistent, again for my games thus far, is that total sanctuary displayed settler population is settlers at sanctuary + roaming provisioners + dogmeat + me. When i leave sanctuary, displayed population is always reduced by however many supply line provs i have + me + dogmeat

The 10 + char cap seems to be total settlers plus supply line people. I and dogmeat would push my cap above that on display. But 60-40 on this as I've yet to reach my 7 charisma cap of 17 settlers, highest i got was 15 (excluding me and dogmeat).

Anyone else notice their settlement pop number at sanctuary always goes up and down by exact number of provs plus you/companion when you are in / out of sanctuary?

I'm currently doing an experiment. I have 14 settlers and a happiness of 83%.

So, the experiment is, I'm replacing all my crops with mutfruit. I had a combo of corn, tato, razorgrain, melons and gourds. Seeing if having a single food source affects happiness or not.

If it does, sadly that is one lever i couldnt use. I run a gigantic mutfruit + corn + tato farm to produce adhesives in huge bulk. So much adhesives it has become a zero obstacle for equipment modding. Things I cant grow are the new limiting reagents - typically oil.

I am waiting for the mod that lets us grow our own biodiesel oil substitute.

Sell the extra food, buy shipments of oil. Works fine for me he he he.

A few things I've determined:

1. I did get a 1% drop in happiness after a few days, but I "stored" all the food than reassigned my farmers to the mutfruit. When I added 10 of each of corn, tato, melon and gourds and waited a week, happiness did not go back up.

2. Waiting/sleeping a whole day seems to make it where food doesn't "grow back" (I slept in camp a week waiting for happiness to drop and after a few days I went to check on my crops and nothing grew). Yet fast traveling back and forth across the map allows crops to grow back.

Happiness seems very glitched in my opinion, I've gotten several of my settlements up to 89-90% happiness, most of them have 10 times the water, food, and beds they need for max capacity, plus each settlement has at the very least, a max clinic, max trader, and max restaurant. However, several times those that I've gotten up to about 87-90% happiness suddenly drop down to 70% and below, sometimes so much as down to 50%. Not sure if it has something to do with fast traveling in general, whether in or out of the settlements or what, but one settlement(Drive-in Movie lot) seems to be completely bugged, no matter what resources and tons of stores they have the happiness keeps dropping...went from 89% to 32% now and dropping unless I travel to the settlement and only then does it show a rise and only while I stay there, trying my hardest to get that Benevolent Leader achievement and been so close several times just to get screwed, getting super annoyed.

If I understand what was said before, Settler max = 10 + Charisma score. So, given that Charisma (like every other Attribute) tops out at 10, the max number of settlers would be 10 +10 = max 20/settlement. [On a ten-point scale, how did you manage to get a Charisma of 18?]

I saw one guide that claimed that the limit was charisma + 10 per workbench (presumably they meant the red 'settlement' workbench). Anyone know if you can actually build more of those in a settlement?

Man, I wish to god I knew how to actually make my settlers happy.

Such a whiny bunch of whiners.

"Wa-wa-wa, Super Mutants stole my baby."

LIVE WITH IT!

SOMEONE STOLE MINE AND HE COMES FIRST!

My Sanctuary settlement holds 5 residents, have 7 beds, "9 food" and "9 water" plus 15 defence and a happiness level of 68. No other constructions built except for a generator and a lamp-post (connected) just to try out how to build a power grid. And a chair for the jet-addicted old lady.

I have 3 charisma btw.

Out of the ordinary or just normal?

The highest happiness I've achieved is 82 (but that often drops to 81 or 80).

I don't maintain a huge excess of crops or water; I just keep 3 to 4 extra per number of settlers. I keep ahead of the curve by planning ahead when placing extra beds and always keep at least 2 extra beds out. So, I look at the number of beds I have in the settlement and that lets me know approximately the max number of settlers I can have. Then I place 3 to 4 extra food and water above the number of beds. That seems to keep the settlers fairly happy and prevents having a big drop in happiness while I'm off somewhere else and the settlement is growing.

I keep defenses above food plus water and place the siren. I also put out extras like the bathtub for feeding brahmin and the scrapping bench. Right now, I'm in the process of building stores whenever happiness starts to decrease. I haven't messed with power much other than powering water, the radio and siren. I imagine happiness will increase more once I learn how to power houses.

This could be unrelated, but I noticed an increase in happiness shortly after building my bobblehead stand.

Anyone else seen this or was it just a coincidence? I didn't build anything else at around the same time...

except your charisma can go past 10.. my charisma is currently 13.. (wearing the red dress and charisma bobblehead) unlike other fallout games your special stats can go past 10 in this one.

And i wear those clothes to help with intimidation and persuasion checks (it does help too ive noticed much less failures at 13 charisma than 10)

For the purpose of actually having settlers in only your base attribute is counted. Items and status effects with +CHA like suit don;t count.

I run around with 14-15 CHA set on myself and Power Armor. When I fight I sit in armor, when I talk I get out of it

I've got 6 charisma, 11 when I put on my charisma gear. I've built emporiums of each type and set up a giant recreation house for everyone. I've got 17 settlers, a lot of water, decent amount of food (I'd have more but don't have enough settlers to assign), great defense. I've even set up power pylons and generators everywhere and have been slowly getting lights into every house.

My happiness is at 66. I had it in the 80s early in the game.

I have not been able to figure out what affects it. Seems really inconsistent.

dunno, adding furniture and adding electricity did increase my settlement's happiness. Just not by much... at 1% for one or two fully decorated and electrified houses. The need for luxury seems to grow exponentially.