SarahAda
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 927
i asked this once before on the other forum, but i didn't get much response. hopefully reposting here will prompt more people to weight in on how they handle this "issue" without being quite as rude as screaming "bump" into the void. so here we go, yada yada, not really "i need help" question. bingo bango "how do other people deal with this?". Arguendo "am i just making problems for myself with my own paranoia?"
i've never really been happy with recruitment beacons. it seems like a bit of a cop-out for the question of finding residents. to be fair, it kind of is a cop out, one put in place by bethesda's developers who didn't want to think (or didn't want the player to have to think) about where these people who were filling out the settlement were actually coming from.
what's worse, beacons solve the problem so completely it's often the opposite issue; i'll set up a beacon at Outpost Zimonja, get the first settler, set up a residential plot, a caravan plot, some food plants or an agg plot, a generator and a water pump, then wander off into the wastelands. i come back 3 quests later to find 40 people crowded around the workbench, draining all the food and water out of my caravan network, waiting like chickens drowning in the rain for me to build them something to do.
i've tried alternative recruitment methods. i use lots of LarannKiar's recruit NPC mods, i use Recruitable Settlers, i use msalaba's Unlock Vanilla Recruitable Vendors mod, i use 3dnpc's settlers of the commonwealth. i've payed The Ron a bunch of caps, but it still seems like i am short settlers constantly. i have like 15 workbenches in my current network, just at the start of How to HQ, and none of them really have a sustainable population, let alone enough spare corpses to donate to GNN.
i could just turn the beacon back on, that'd be the simplest answer, but again, it feels like cheating (developer sanctioned cheating, but still). paying 500 caps to The Ron for another lead to scam-in-the-box tim seems like a poor demonstration of my wise and conscientious leadership style. wandering around the wastes clicking on people one at a time is working, but not really fast enough to fund my barbie GNN dreamhouse, or even the settlement network around it. i'd really like a bunch of "here's a story quest to recruit a few people at once" type quests like the Powell family or Grey Matters, but i know those type of quests take a TON of work to create. even a lot of the unique settlers in ss2 that have simpler fetch quests attached to them seem to be gated behind the beacons.
one additional thing that has come up since the first post is that i have become a bit looser on my beacon ban by using communications plots, which seem to have some automatic recruitment capabilities. i am still seeing random unknowns magically appearing at the settlements with comm plots, but it seems less like the flooding of zimonja then stock beacons.
so, TL;DR: radio beacon techmology; is it good or is it wack? how else do you get bodies to feed your settlement engine?
i've never really been happy with recruitment beacons. it seems like a bit of a cop-out for the question of finding residents. to be fair, it kind of is a cop out, one put in place by bethesda's developers who didn't want to think (or didn't want the player to have to think) about where these people who were filling out the settlement were actually coming from.
what's worse, beacons solve the problem so completely it's often the opposite issue; i'll set up a beacon at Outpost Zimonja, get the first settler, set up a residential plot, a caravan plot, some food plants or an agg plot, a generator and a water pump, then wander off into the wastelands. i come back 3 quests later to find 40 people crowded around the workbench, draining all the food and water out of my caravan network, waiting like chickens drowning in the rain for me to build them something to do.
i've tried alternative recruitment methods. i use lots of LarannKiar's recruit NPC mods, i use Recruitable Settlers, i use msalaba's Unlock Vanilla Recruitable Vendors mod, i use 3dnpc's settlers of the commonwealth. i've payed The Ron a bunch of caps, but it still seems like i am short settlers constantly. i have like 15 workbenches in my current network, just at the start of How to HQ, and none of them really have a sustainable population, let alone enough spare corpses to donate to GNN.
i could just turn the beacon back on, that'd be the simplest answer, but again, it feels like cheating (developer sanctioned cheating, but still). paying 500 caps to The Ron for another lead to scam-in-the-box tim seems like a poor demonstration of my wise and conscientious leadership style. wandering around the wastes clicking on people one at a time is working, but not really fast enough to fund my barbie GNN dreamhouse, or even the settlement network around it. i'd really like a bunch of "here's a story quest to recruit a few people at once" type quests like the Powell family or Grey Matters, but i know those type of quests take a TON of work to create. even a lot of the unique settlers in ss2 that have simpler fetch quests attached to them seem to be gated behind the beacons.
one additional thing that has come up since the first post is that i have become a bit looser on my beacon ban by using communications plots, which seem to have some automatic recruitment capabilities. i am still seeing random unknowns magically appearing at the settlements with comm plots, but it seems less like the flooding of zimonja then stock beacons.
so, TL;DR: radio beacon techmology; is it good or is it wack? how else do you get bodies to feed your settlement engine?
