Read on another forum that someone playing with mods had made a program that rooted out Synth spies in Settlements. Is that really a thing? All this time in F:4 and I don't remember ever seeing or hearing anything about sabotage in a settlement. No attacks by Synths on a settlement either. Not that it would do any good with the massive defenses I have stacked up against them.

Its one of the radiant quest 'Settlement under attack' things.

If you go you'll see a settler randomly start shooting everyone and then Gen1s spawn in.

Oh, I had my share.

And there's a problem with these attacks, since they are logged as any other given attack. It's only that it's a lonely settler most of the times. And whenever I go there to take care of attackers, that one person is already dead. The log however doesn't dissapear from the journal. A few days later you get the failed message.

If you discover a spy and preemptively attack will the entire settlement turn against you???

I've had 2 of these infiltrate my settlements so far. The only way I can tell is by sifting through his/her/it's inventory

Oh, is that how it's supposed to work? I had that once, but when I got there (I was actually nearby, and ran there instead of fast travel) there was a dead settler synth on the ground, no gen1's showed up, and the quest wouldn't resolve. Whee!

I guess my turrets killed him once I got close enough for them to activate, but it wasn't near enough for the "summon gen1's" cue to go off....

Exactly, that's why I keep stressing, the Synth infiltrator attacks are broken. They are disposed of before you get a chance ot get there. And that fools the game into believing, you didn't go there at all. Hence, you lose, since you didn't resolve the situation.

You need to use console commands on a PC in order to complete the quest. http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1576764-failed-to-defend-settlements-where-synths-attack/#entry24767012. Basically, you have to resurrect the dead settler (the synth infiltrator) and kill him or her again to complete the quest. The quest won't complete without using the console, sadly. This is obviously a bug, of course. At least this doesn't seem to occur that often. I'm up to level 54 and only have had 2 synth infiltrators.

To resurrect a dead settler, point the cursor at him or her until the cursor turns into square brackets (i.e. [ ] Settler). Press tilde (~) on the keyboard to bring up the console. Left mouse-click on the square bracket cursor, and you see the settler's ID appear. Type the console command resurrect and press Enter. Press tilde (~) again to close the console. The settler should come back to life. Kill the settler and your quest should be completed. You may need to resurrect-and-kill more than once to succeed.

In trying to be vague,

It does, but it doesn't take care of the problem. For reasons unknown.

I'm on xbox, so I don't use mods, but this playthrough, I don't have any faction alignments to protect me from synth attacks, and twice now I've had a few of the settlers at the castle suddenly go aggro on me.


One of them had a synth thingy on their corpse.

I've actually had the Infiltrator turn out to be one of my Brahman before.

Whaaaaaat?

I'm aware of these quests, but somehow after 350 hours in my first play through...I never got one of them. The only quest like this that I got was

I never saw any Synths in random encounters in my first play through either until I was quite a bit into the game. I'm on my second play through now and I stumbled across some synths in a random encounter like ten hours in, and I haven't even gotten to a point in this play through where I've even heard any mention of synths.

That explains why the settlers at the Castle killed the doctor! It also explains why she had some piece of synth technology on her corpse.

I wonder how many more synths are hiding in my settlements.

I had a similar experience at one of my settlements. I fast traveled to it and killed the synth. Then I waited for the gen1s to show up, but they weren't and the quest wouldn't complete. Then I got attacked at another settlement and ran off to defend it. While I was defending the second one, I failed the first one. Yay!

Imagine how bummed out the synth brain is trapped inside a brahmin body, swatting at flies all day and eating out of an old bathtub. Poor synth

This certainly explains what happened with me which after the fact, I found very interesting. Sometime while playing last weekend, I noticed that my Sunshine settlement jumped from 18 to 28 people. WTF! I just hurriedly made more accommodations for my new settlers. I never thought about it other than it was odd that I got so many new overnight. Fast forward probably a week in game time, I got a notice of an attack on Sunshine. I got there and was surprised to see I was getting hit by synths. After the damage was done, I looked around and there were a few dead settlers......they all had synth components. Now the population is 20 so I could still possibly have a couple synths amongst the group.

That's the greatest thing I've ever heard.

I had no idea what was going on. I got there and there was my trader shooting and a whole bunch of other people shooting. I ran over to see what the trader was shooting at when dogmeat ran up and "chomp" Dead trader with synth component in his in his ventory.

Never happened since in 300+ hours.

I don't think that they are so much spies as they are saboteurs. they are probably feeding info to the Institute, but being undiscovered Institute agents inside a settlement, they have the opportunity to just generally keep making things go wrong, reducing or destroying settlement productivity.

They are there to watch you for a certain "father" figure who is interested in your progress as far as I can tell. They have never sabotaged anything that I have seen and only go hostile when other synths attack and get fired at (maybe this depends on your rep with the Institute or RR). If you keep a close eye on your settlements population you can see when they infiltrate you, it will jump up by 1 or 2 then drop back down in a day. What happens to the person they take the place of I don't know, I have never found any bodies which I thought would be a cool feature.

That makes no sense. If they're sent by Father to keep an eye on you, why would they go hostile and attack the other settlers when gen 1 or gen 2 synths show up?


If they were "free" synths, they'd attack the other synths when they show up. If they were sent to observe you, then why do other synths show up to attack at all? Or when they do, why does it attack you with the others instead of holding back and observing during the attack?


The only thing that makes sense is that they are trying to disrupt things at the settlement.

Yet they never disrupt things that I have seen. The only time you know for sure they are there is when gen 1's attack which from what I have noticed is random. When talking to father for the first time he will mention keeping an eye on you how do you think he is doing that. I don't know why they would break their cover when an synth attack happens other than their programing is flawed. The free synths that we know of do fight for our side.

I'm leaning towards them being Synths placed in your settlements by the Railroad who are killed by the defences when they go loco rather than Institute spies.