UPDATE:
My suspicion was correct!
It is indeed Sturges that breaks sanctuary.
I assigned Codsworth as Mayor instead and did the institutionalized, went back and now everything is fine.
I want to make an observation here as this appears not to be just coincidence.
There are many things that can lock up a settlement and cause the CTD-Settlement-Access issue.
I will be specific here. I don’t want to talk about them all. Nor are all my statements going to be fully substantiated.
After helping several users with SS-solutions to unclog things “settlements”, users have come back with an interesting observation at the end of that process to something of a vanilla bug:
When you break the vanilla dialogue or it gets interrupted with Quest related NPC’s things can get pork’d up. In a purely vanilla game a user can often fix this by completing the dialogue or quest options, using console commands or glitching NPC commands or behavior. “setstage” etc….
I have helped several users over the months with getting them back into their settlements. It is interesting to me that NPC’s like Preston, De luca / traders, this thread here is Sturgus but there seems to be a reoccurring theme - that if they do get the settlement fixed they have an underlying “dialogue or quest” glitch going on with an NPC that then seems to have been the root cause of SS or other settlement process getting clogged up. Thus, the settlement-process is just the log jam the bug was something like the dialogue glitch. I think that city leaders and complex settlements can compound it and perhaps mask what is really going on.
I generally do not use city-plans “play-style preference” nothing else but that also makes me an uninformed uneducated user of city plans. Still, I think it is prudent as an ounce of prevention to mention the below:
- Complete the full set of dialogue options with NPCs, with attention to NPC’s giving quests and Vanilla merchants “particularly the lvl 4 ones.”
- Many mods can cause problems here or specific game play issues. If you think you glitched a conversation go back and replay that conversation. Haha, Preston likes to pause fooling players into thinking he has finished babbling or drop a long range dialog on the player at times.
- If using an NPC as a city leader maybe better to pick someone else if they are still or going to be involved in a game progression quest. “In that, not that the city leader will cause the problem but the increased opportunity to have an incomplete or glitched dialogue interaction can.”
I am not saying NPC’s or SS are causing the Settlement-CTD. I am saying that it appears if the player glitched the dialogue or quests then “yes” the scripts / settlement process will get all clogged up to the point of a full-on porking hours later.
I would also recommend that users ask themselves the above questions in their troubleshooting process as that “NPC dialogue” is the save location I would target first. It may cost players a few hours going back, but save them a games worth of construction and progress or perhaps a long mod-troubleshooting session that really did not solve the problem at the level it should have been resolved at.
