After the recent patch, I decided to revisit Taffington and build out over as much of the water as I could.


Previously, I'd tried to move all of my trade booths and vendors out there. I vaguely recall some wouldn't even take up their positions. Did I not give a clear enough path? I don't remember now. But the ones who did stand at their posts wouldn't actually interact as vendors.


So this time I tried again, and made it big, with lights and outdoor seating near the Tier-3 Restaurant. Once again, the vendors did move out there to take their positions. However, the only vendors that interacted as intended were the ones working the Tier-3 Clinics. Every other vendor was all "huh?", "I hope you aren't here for me", etc. So I built up the open land in front of Tarrington and restationed them there. Then I built up the waterfront deck to be a new dwelling place, and moved the necessary beds out there. The settlers *mostly* seem to use the beds (a few stood in the beds despite being asleep - but that's another bug AFAIK).


This "hydrophobia" doesn't seem to affect vendors stationed on preexisting game assets: I have a Tier-3 Restaurant at Egret Tours Marina built out on that boardwalk, for example, and the vendor interacts as intended.


Has anyone else had this type of behavior? I've only tested at Taffington (that's where feeling cramped for space motivated this design choice).

Did they foam at the mouth and attack everything on sight?

Vending stands in general are kind of finicky with their placement. I've found that there are some apparent 'dead spots' or something like that within the settlements where vending stands just won't work. Sometimes tweaking the position a little is all it takes. Some areas seem to not work though.

I mean, yeah, but that's normal, right?

I also wonder if the navmesh pathing the NPCs use gets confused over water. Or maybe if I didn't hoist the decking high enough.


With the latest attempt, the vendors *did* all make it to their booths, so their pathing worked. Just... not forthcoming with the vending.

It's possible that this is the case in some locations, but definitely not in all of them. The building components have their own navmeshing built in. I built a bridge (using console commands) from the Castle to Spectacle Island, and companions and the provisioner from the Castle to Spectacle Island all use it, and the whole thing is over water. I haven't observed new settlers walking across it to Spectacle Island, but I don't think I've ever observed a new settler arriving at Spectacle Island. They seem to only show up while I'm away from the island.

I've had a similar issue with Taffington. I just recently started building it up over the water area, allowing room for the industrial water purifier. Mainly started building over the water because there is so little ground to plant crops on. I've got a large pier built, with 2/3 of it having walls & roofs for settler housing, the other 1/3 is for shops and a few tables to increase settler happiness. My designated shop keepers bump their way around, but eventually find their shop stalls. Unfortunately, they won't trade with me, nor can I upgrade their gear once they are in their shop/stall. I can upgrade their gear if I get them before they get to the shop, but not after. I've only just built this up just recently, so I'm going to leave it alone and do other things for a few days, as I've found leaving and coming back corrects things like this (sometimes). If not, I may have to rebuild the whole thing. But I really like the layout.

Best of luck! I will note that I also tried leaving and coming back, and for me, at least, it changed nothing. But it'll be cool if it works for you!

Totes jealous over here. One of these days I'll bite the bullet and mod in the capacity to build that bridge.


I had been idly considering running one from Warwick. Is Castle the better choice?

Ah, yes, right. I should have used "aquaphobia". Good catch.

I think Warwick is a shorter distance, but I don't really use Warwick Homestead all that much. The Castle and Spectacle Island are two of my main settlements, so that was a more logical choice for me. There's no reason that one couldn't build bridges to both though.

Building it was pretty simple. I just started on Spectacle Island and started building a bridge toward the Castle until I hit the end of the build area. Then I toggled TCL and walked out over the water a little way and spawned a workbench (player.placeatme C1AEB) at my location and toggled TGM (god mode is needed since the workbench will have no building materials). If you interact with the workbench directly, it displays a message that you need to clear the enemies from the location. If you open build mode with the hotkey it'll open up though. Then I just kept building farther out. I had to repeat this process 2-3 times to reach all the way across to the Castle. I also built myself a big house on the water at roughly the halfway point of the bridge. It doesn't function as a real settlement with NPCs, but it makes for some very nice updated General's Quarters.

Then you'll likely want to get rid of some of the workbenches, so just click on them and enter 'disable' and then 'markfordelete'.

For what it's worth, you can use this same process to build a settlement basically anywhere on the map. There are some interior cells where it won't work though unfortunately.

It's true!

Also, folks have made mods to do this more easily. I'm all modded up so I don't know what my hesitation is.

The mod I've seen that lets you build settlements anywhere is actually nothing more than a batch file with that console command within it. There will be better ones later on though that add full settlement functionality to new locations.

Oh! That makes sense.