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Settlers won’t use stairs!

S

Smoke me a kipper

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79
I brought Sanctuary to level 3 and I’ve been spending hours tweeking in and building around the completed city. After sinking several hours into building I’ve noticed that my settlers won’t use any of the stairs I’ve built, only the ones that were built as part of the city plan.

It’s frustrating as I’ve built a lot of plots on a second or third story but the settlers just wonder over to it and stand under them rather than even attempt to try the stairs I’ve built. They won’t even go to bed at night they just stand in the middle of the road complaining “the farms not much but it’s something”
If I want everyone to go to their stores/homes I have to leave the city and fast travel back

Is this an error in the AI programming or is there anything I can do?
 
Oh young padawan.... When I read your post, I saw myself in your position months ago. My first post in this forum was asking the same thing!

As you can see, pathing is terrible in this game. I mean, really terrible.
Sanctuary is one of my favorite cities to build (building for the fifth time there), so I faced this issue many times and learned a few tricks. My first time building there I didn't even knew that navmesh was, and didnt worried about testing anything because I didn't knew that this problem exist. In the end I had to create a new save and start all over again... I hope that you don't have to do the same thing.

When they're trying to reach something and the AI doesn't doesn't recognize the navmesh, they will simply stand there. Sometimes the engine teleports them when they get stuck, sometimes don't. Between 9am to 19pm they will try to go to their working plot (industrial/commercial/agricultural/martial). If they're stuck during this period, you have to fix the pathing to their working plot. If they're stuck during night time, it's the pathing to their residential plot that needs fixing.

The height is important too, since the AI only recognizes until a certain height (max two stories height if I'm not mistaken)
You can try this mod to see if fixes the issue. If not, I recommend you build on the ground, and after building something, try ordering a settler to go there, to test if the navmesh is ok.
Also, you can download the City Planner's Toolkit mod, wich has some special navmesh invisible objects that you can use to fix the navmesh yourself.
Hope to be of help.
 
Zonary said:
You can try this mod to see if fixes the issue.
Click to expand...

Hey thanks for that link. Im going to try it out later today.
Ive been having issues with Settlers not using stairs, not walking around or just bunching up.
Tried the Nav Mesh pieces, but I cant seem to make them work either. NPCs will just stop at the edges of the Nav Mesh block
Hoping this Mod will help my Settlers move around better.
 
The vanilla wood stairs with the 1/4 tile attached top & bottom have broken navmesh. It's a vanilla bug that was fixed then unfixed.
Sanctuary is the poster child of how not to build in F04. It looks kool as hell!
But rotating pieces out of the normal, causes a shite ton of issues. Because the data (snap point, collision, navmesh etc) doesn't always rotate with the piece.
Clipping items inside others also causes issues with the *bounding box* (that's what I call it LOL) which NPC's will not walk trough.
The bounding box is not the collision plain, that's different.
It can also cause the engine to incorrectly place that box where it isn't supposed to be. Like having a clear path that NPC's wont walk on, but you can.
It's used for example, in pre war Sanctuary to prevent Codsworth from moving from the beside the TV. The bounding box on the TV reaches all the way to the couch. Effectively making an invisible fence.

Junk walls also have high to very high bounding boxes. The one with the stacked tires is really bad.

So if ANY of those problems (or a few others) are active.. your settlers wont go to bed, because the engine can't calculate the pathing correctly.
 
Much to think about in here.

I now know why those vanilla stairs always seemed to be a huge pain. :bomb
 
The are a pain. You can do the exact same thing with 2 tile & the plain stairs.
 
woodfuzzy said:
The are a pain. You can do the exact same thing with 2 tile & the plain stairs.
Click to expand...
Better, the plain stairs are actually wider. Hmmmm...thinking...
 
@Smoke me a kipper

That one does have navmesh blocks, as a small part of what it gives you. From what Zonary and woodfuzzy said I gather that you only need them in the “problem” areas - not everywhere. Especially places like those blasted vanilla stairs that we got to talking about.

Without seeing where your settlers fall through things, we can’t really figure out what might be happening. It could be something simple as a tiny gap (—edit— in the invisible navmesh) which makes the AI do stupid things. A navmesh over that type of thing may fix it, you’ll have to do some trial and error. I’d be very interested in knowing how it goes.

If you’re needing a quick cheat-sheet of how to find stuff in the very large menu of that mod, check out this topic (if you haven’t already): https://simsettlements.com/site/index.php?threads/project-blueprint-menu.7171/
 
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