Discussion The Settlement Recovery Procedure

Nice to know. I would appreciate if you'd copy it into the new thread as well, just to keep it all in the same place for easy reference.

Not related specifically to settlements, but only tangentially. I had Preston as a companion while doing Minutemen radiants and other stuff, and eventually he gave me Taking Independence, so I agreed and he went off to the Castle. Went to pick up Ada and do A New Threat at the General Atomics factory, and after that I went with Ada and did Taking Independence, but after turning in the quest to Preston the game would crash within a few second of completion every time.

I was able to turn in the quest and immediately fast-travel away from the Castle, but going back to the Castle for Preston would result in a CTD. Noted some suspicious-looking stuff in the Papyrus log relating to companions so I tried dismissing Ada and re-recruiting her, thinking maybe Preston was halfway glitched in a companion state, but that didn't work either. Waiting several hours for Preston to return to Sanctuary didn't help, because he stayed at the Castle according to the Vault-Tec PMS's Overseer tracker.

Solution: prid 1a4d7 to select Preston and moveto player to extract him from the Castle and to my location. After that I was able to recruit him and return to the Castle to rebuild.

Thank you, I'm playing survival and this just saved me from going from lvl 117 to lvl 70, not to mention losing a lot of building settlements

I think the ForceClearSettlement console "Nuclear Option" would be much more useful if there was a "Neutron Bomb" option which would at least not delete named NPCs which weren't script created; i.e. the original robots at Gray Garden, the original Minutemen settlers who came with Preston, etc. This also goes for any companions you may have re-homed to the settlement one way or another. The spawned settlers are fair game of course

I want to point out an alternative to the painful "walk slowly toward the CTD minefield until you can do remote self destruct" procedure, because I have never been able to get close enough to do it before the crash.

@pra's excellent mod "ASAM Maintenance Software" (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/30500) allows you to load and maintain a settlement from anywhere. I just used it to self destruct Hangman's Ally from the comfort of my Oberland office. It fixed the crash and rescued my play through.

To use self destruct with AMS just load the holotape into a terminal, load the settlement from the main menu, view the settlement, scroll to the very bottom of that entry, and select the remote self destruct option. (I can provide screenshots if anyone gets lost, but it is pretty intuitive.)

The software also allows you to interact with individual plots. If you have the patience and don't want to start your settlement over, you could try refreshing all the plots. You can even remotely click the ASAM, so you could change the build plan for each plot until you find the problem one.

Hope this helps someone. Maybe the main settlement recovery thread should include this info, @snarkywriter.

Uh, it works after all? I suspected that the remote self destruct was buggy, but couldn't find time to actually look into.

Also, you shouldn't need patience to refresh all plots. It should also work via Plot Tools -> Load All Plots -> Refresh Loaded Plots.

Not quire sure how I called that last option, but it should be somewhat along these lines. There should be two, one saying "rescan" or "recheck", the other one "refresh". You need the latter, the first one is to run the problematic plot checks on the current list.

You should also get progress notifications while the refresh is ongoing, and a message when it's done.