this came to me fully formed in a fever dream after reading this suggestion:
a new category of municipal plots, facilities or maintenance. the first of which unlocks when Mansfield turns to a concord volunteer and says "you there, congratulations, you're now a janitor". the category of plots should tasks the assigned settler to repair damaged objects within the settlement. additionally, plots of this type should dynamically evaluate resources your settlement is running low on and produce +1/+5/+15 of whatever is shortest. the idea here is to give a plot type that converts a settler who would otherwise be doing more focused production work and turn them into a settler who's job is to smooth out the growth curve of a settlement by filling in where ever is needed.
for the first plot, call it "
Fix it Mansfield's": the plot design should be a small shack, complete with sign of a vault-suited cartoon Mansfield over it, smiling in a nervous wasp-in-over-his-head way, in a vault boy thumbs-up pose with and a hammer in his thumb hand. there should be a vanilla gathering station model with some scrapping animations the actor can wander from the scrapping station to the broken object, play a hammering animation or whatever and call the vanilla repair damaged settlement object function or F4SE it repaired or whatever, consuming the normal supply from the workshop if it can or virtual storage or whatever.
there should be a small section of the plot that is dynamically adjusted based upon what resource is needed. for Fix it Mansfield's, there should be a small bathtub just in front of the open side of the shack. if the settlement is short of food, the bathtub is filled with dirt and razorgrain. water: a manual water pump neck clipping through the bottom of the tub and a water surface. power: two small generators shoved awkwardly inside. the plot should also track virtual resources (or components, based upon difficulty) and if those numbers are "more negative" them the "primary" resources, the little bathtub gets filled with wood planks, concrete bags, and other construction materials, or gore and mushrooms for organics, or circuit boards for rare resources, etc. (if playing with components, it should obviously only provide one components, but the models can be based on class of resource. i'm not a monster).