This might be a bit of a pain. But if you're like me, remembering which settler is assigned to which tasks gets overwhelming after a while. I was trying to figure out how I could keep track of their assignments and thought of this...

1) Keep cheap armor pieces and rename them at the armorer's workshop to something that reminds you of a new task you are about to assign. Then just give that piece of armor to the settler you assign the task to. In the future, you can trade with them and read what you've already assigned in the past. It has the double advantage of equipping your settlers with armor in case of attack. Also note that the use made names can be quite long, so you can reference more than one task in one piece of armor if your nomenclature is concise.

2) You can even reference the settler's bed assignment. Place varied furniture outside of each shack you make and/or use varied colored doors and reference these in the name of the armor you make. Add the location of the bed, like floor number, right, left, center, etc. For example, I put a chair and a red door in front of one of my shacks and had a settler sleeping on the second floor on the right side, so the armor was called, "Bed CR2Right" for Bed, Chair, Red door, 2nd floor, right side.

3) I've found that keeping farmers far apart helps with assignments. I grow one crop in one area and assign one settler (it appears Beth did it this way in the game as well). It seems that additional crops get auto assigned to workers, even if you attempt to manually assign them. Having two workers in the same farming area sometimes creates conflicts when adding new crops. I've seen this lead to certain corps becoming unselectable - in regular and workshop mode.

Got any better ideas? Tell me...

I've mostly just concentrated n the castle as a main settlement.

My main guards are all in military fatigues - assault gas masks - combat chests.

Artillery wear the same but are wearing yellow flight masks

Food workers have mining helmets

Medic store clerk has a lab coat

Clothing clerk has a 3 piece suit and bowler hat

Bartender has a formal hat and tuxedo

easier, just put army helmets on the guards, farmers outfits on the farmers, Suits on the traders. Colour code them. Then when you see someone wandering around in wasteland civvies you know you can freely send them provisioning/doing something else.

Also, give your guards decent weapons! You have hundreds of cool lasers etc, give one to your guards. They'll love you for it

-- edit: Jester said the same thing as me, but said it better lmao

I'll just ignore settlements after this play trough until some wonderful modders make a proper management interface.

Yeah. Color coding outfits is definitely easier with general tasks, but not so much with specific locations. Isn't it true that a settler can actually perform up to six tasks? Or is that six crops? I've heard (and maybe seen) a settler working on more than six crops. It looks like 12 might be the correct number of crops per worker. So what is that number 6 referencing, that I hear bandied about all the time?

1 settler can handle 6 "points" worth of food producing crops. Most crops produce 0.5 "points," so one worker can handle 12 crops.

I haven't delved too far down this particular rabbit hole, so I don't know if there's any crop that produces a solid 1 "point" of food, or if it's all 0.5 "points" per. Someone please inform me if such is the case.

That actually make good sense... for once and for all. Every crop I've seen is worth 0.5 food except for mutfruit, which is worth 1 food. That implies that outside of farming, settlers can only have one task then, right?

Mutfruit produces a single point, I think.

That would be my guess. Each settler can have one "job," farmer, soldier, etc. Farmer can produce 6 points of food, soldier can handle up to 6 points of defense (3 guard posts, etc). I wish Bethesda made it just a little clearer on how this all works, but that's the way it seems to work.

Thanks to both of ya for setting me straight on the mutfruit thing.

I think corn is 1 food as well. Remember having a good mix is great, for making your own adhesive.

Nice. I'm infected with the classic Bethesda curse of "ooh, I wanna do things this way from the start..." and I've re-rolled 5 characters so far. First two just to get my feet wet, so to speak, third one delved a little deeper, and the last one was what I hoped would be my "official" playthrough, but I screwed up some crop placement in Sanctuary and couldn't select the crops to fix it...yeah, OCD can be a pain sometimes.

My "plan" is to have a set of 12 tato plants, and 6 points worth of corn and mutfruit. That'd give me 18 food, enough for a decent sized settlement, and all the ingredients I need for the adhesive recipe. So this time I just got rid of all of the melon and gourd plants in Sanctuary, and I plan on appropriating tatos from Abernathy Farm. Then I just need to find enough corn and mutfruit to make up the other two plots. If corn and mutfruit are both 1 point per plant, that'd save a bit of time finding 'em all.

Edit: Just looked in game, and corn is 0.5 "points" of food per plant. So that'd be 12 tato plants, 12 corn plants, and 6 mutruit plants. Not an insurmountable task, by any means.

Nope. Corn is also 0.5 food. Every crop is 0.5 except for Mutfruit.

So is it a good idea to try to group your plots of different types in smaller units of 12 plants? I've literally got 10 rows by 10 to 15 corn, mutfruit, tatos, razorgrain at Abernathy farm. The field you can plant in there is HUGE, lol. I've wondered why many of the plants are not activatable though. But it sounds like from what you guys are saying, that smaller groupings with a little distance to the next grouping is the way to go?

Hey Man, I think I know you.

If you get crops that are unselectable, it is an issue. They're dead and the only way I found to get rid of them was to use the console - disable & markfordelete. After some trial and error, I do find grouping crops in units of 12 to be the best. In the early stages, I would planted mixed crops and ended up with unattended one which died. They also seem to die if you move them - though not always. Now I plant 12 plants in one area, assign one settler and forget it.

Much easier to get the renaming mod if you're feeling like editing some files.

What's that? Got a link?

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/2017/

Most bethesda games are enhanced with the nexus. From weapon textures, to storylines the nexus either has it all or will have it all.

Consider specializing your settlements.

- The pure farm. 16 settlers can produce 96 units of food. 80 of that can be shared with other settlements that lack good farmland. Abernathy farm is great for this.

- Focused purely on scavenging stations for junk items.

- Mercantile center and water production

Aside of tool sharing I've never seen villages share anything else so I doubt that would work?

Also... even after villages were linked they still got the red "oh noes, need more food" - alert on the command window when there's too little noms around..

If you select a settler that already has a task, look around your base, if you see anything highlighted in green (or yellow if you're in power armor) it means they're assigned to that job or items.

I.e. Select a settler who is farming it will show which plants it's harvesting.

I've found this to be true as well. Though sharing resources with a provisioner/supply line ought to work for everything transportable (not power or defense, obviously).

Hey, I know you too! You're one of the many who nursemaided me through scripting school while building Helgen Reborn!

Well, you know what they say about good intentions, lol. Looks like I have some cleaning up to do. I wonder if there are any MESG forms with generic names like Bill and Mary and so on and if so how many. Then it would just be a matter of getting the FormID's and using those to SetActorFullName. I'm OCD so I'd probably write them all down and create a spreadsheet of each farm what what bed and task they're assigned to. When I see new settlers on a farm I've started to put them in a mechanic suit and baseball cap once I've set their bed and task. Having a crew of them all dressed the same looks pretty cool, lol.

Another thing of many that I've been wondering is what packages their alisases have besides work and sleep. My folks seem to preform their work duties completely at random or at least take their sweet time going to work. Then in the evening, they just wander to a sort of random area and stand there doing nothing until time to go to bed. I'm used to Bethesda's AI going wonky and NPC's stopping following their packages because this has happened since Fallout 3, but this is different. It's like they act like they don't have anywhere to go and hang out when there are a ton of couches, stools and other furniture they can go relax on. I can't figure it out.

My guess is they're set to sandbox for a time each day, after work and before bed. You know, use idle markers and whatnot. So if you place more furniture, tables and chairs, etc... they'll probably wander about eating and sitting. Well, hopefully, at least. I haven't spent too much time developing settlements beyond growing crops to produce adhesive. So, its all a bit of a guess on my part.

Balok - Did you not mod Fallout 3 as well as Skyrim?

Thanks pkleiss, yeah I began my modding journey with F3, but most of what I did with it were not released and for personal use only. I did release a couple of things though. I began playing Oblivion only after playing F3 so I continued to learn by also creating a few personal mods for it, and then FNV came out I decided to try my hand at something substantial when I made The New Bison Steve Hotel and Afterschool Special mods. And of course Skyrim came after that.

Anyway, I began the clean-up of Sanctuary Hills last night and it looks like disabling the dead plants worked fine. They still stand around a lot after work so I'm wondering if their sandbox radius is too small to detect all the couches and chairs available for them. I'm going to try some more experimenting with some other ideas I have that might help this. Thanks for the suggestions and help!

I did the same thing, adding a bunch of furniture, and found the same thing. My *guess* was wrong. They do just stand around doing nothing after work and before going to bed. I see a mod to address this in the future.