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Unloaded Settlements consistently show negative food rating.

Azuraal

New Member
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15
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Over the last few days I've been trying to track down the cause and fix it but I come up empty. I tried Buffout 4, Baka scrap heap, ini tweaks and so on to help with script stability. I tried switching from SS2 caravan plot to IDEK's logistics station with and without that mod's redistribution system. I tried disabling food and water sharing in workshop framework, and lastly I got rid of caravan connections all together an the same; Negative food in many unloaded settlements, and only food.
(To be clear whenever things didn't help I loaded the save from before changing things)

The one thing I didn't try is if the issue would occur on a new save. But I don't have the patience for that, at least not now, and I'm not starting a new game anyway.
The only mod in my load order that I could imagine conflicting would be Damn Apocalypse overhaul as it changes the levelled list for items produced by the settlement and dumped into the workshop, though I doubt that would be a problem, correct me if I'm wrong.

# Automatically generated by Vortex
Fallout4.esm
DLCRobot.esm
DLCworkshop01.esm
DLCCoast.esm
DLCworkshop02.esm
DLCworkshop03.esm
DLCNukaWorld.esm
Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch.esp
DamnApocalypse_CORE.esm
XDI.esm
CanarySaveFileMonitor.esl
HUDFramework.esm
LWIS-INNRs-Full.esl
WorkshopFramework.esm
SS2.esm
NQAS - Automatron.esl
Realistic Weapons Weight - UFO4 Patch.esl
plasmaproject.esp
instituteproject2k.esp
laserproject2k.esp
huntingrifleset2k.esp
ballisticproject2k.esp
DamnApocalypse_Loot.esp
DamnApocalypse_CombatTweaks.esp
SS2_XDI Patch.esp
advancedAITweaks.esp
Vivid Weathers - FO4.esp
Vivid Weathers - Nuka World.esp
Vivid Weathers - FO4 - Far Harbor.esp
Vivid Weathers - FO4 - Autumn.esp
DX_Predator.esp
FPVGunnerFix.esp
LWIS-Overrides-Full.esp
Far Harbor Ballistic Weaver.esp
Ballistic Weaver NW.esp
BallisticWeaver.esp
Better Landscape Grass.esp
ImmersiveCleaning.esp
DamnApocalypse_PowerArmor.esp
Better Vertibird.esp
M8rDisablePipboyEffects.esp
Faster Terminal Displays (20x).esp
JTC.esp
LevelCap.esp
LooksMenu.esp
disablelegendaryspawns.esp
Realistic Survival Damage.esp
RealNightVision.esp
SS2_CityPlanPack_RiseOfTheCommonwealth.esp
SS2Extended.esp
SimpleSurvivalConsole.esp
Sneak Rank 5 Perk - Subtle Effect.esp
SCM.esp
The Eyes Of Beauty.esp
TrueInvisibility.esp
VAFS Redux.esp
VAFS Redux DLC Patch.esp
Vivid Fallout - All in One - Best Choice.esp
LWIS-Tweaks.esp
Vivid Waters.esp
FPVertibird.esp
LWIS-Patch.esp
 
. What's the point in having dedicated farms if every settlement has to grow their own food to not bug out?
Your settlements should have grow at least enough food to survive if something happens to you caravan. Same with water. I'm not saying all settlements should live in a bubble. But should have their own backups
 
Your settlements should have grow at least enough food to survive if something happens to you caravan. Same with water. I'm not saying all settlements should live in a bubble. But should have their own backups
one of the reasons IDEK is sold on is running dedicated centers for different commodities, like a real economy. All of the settlements 4294'ing on food randomly are (should be) producing a surplus anyways.

I'm going to try this. I have already replaced all the caravan plots with IDEK LS2 plots, but I'm jerked away ever so often to fix drop in food values. Never thought of the WSFW setting.

I'm still confused though... I thought all these tools are designed to work together to make the settlement gameplay a viable roleplaying option. I avoid the Minutemen quest-line like a glowing molerat (if Preston is going to try one more "man-to-man" conversation with me again.....), and SS2's questline is a definite alternative. But that's only true if it works as intended. For instance, lately my settlers reassign themselves every time I fast travel to a settlement (it only happens where my settler count are above 10 settlers) - It would be ok if I was not trying to "develop" my settlements. Need 3 gifted endurance settlers to work a high-tech farm, easy - just assign them to an endurance building recreational plot..... only to discover 5 game days later they have reassigned themselves to charisma training, and the merchants you are trying to train are pumping iron..... go figure that out....
I know right
 
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I had this happen on my moderately-modded game, negative values and food numbers in settlements jumping up and down constantly. I'm playing a new test game with a minimal load order (SS2, its requirements, and a few recommended mods like Place Anywhere). I just finished Hub of the Problem and have 8 settlements in the network. So far, no weird behavior in the PipBoy or settlements at all, with one exception that in Tenpines the Beds and Jobs status meters show 0 even though the HUD shows all is well.
 
I had this happen on my moderately-modded game, negative values and food numbers in settlements jumping up and down constantly. I'm playing a new test game with a minimal load order (SS2, its requirements, and a few recommended mods like Place Anywhere). I just finished Hub of the Problem and have 8 settlements in the network. So far, no weird behavior in the PipBoy or settlements at all, with one exception that in Tenpines the Beds and Jobs status meters show 0 even though the HUD shows all is well.
I started a new game so I could monitor instances of food black holes occurring and so far have had less trouble with them. This run i'm not using IDEK to share food resources across settlements, I also have sharing turned off in workshop extensions. I've got every settlement food independent for now. I'm not mixing vanilla and ss2 food production, ss2 plots only. I have also been growing very slowly, and have only 5-6 settlements (but fully built up), zx I rushed to complete ss2 so i could have access to all plots before really building up my settlements.

One issue I have noticed is that occasionally, some of the ss2 plots will report 0 production after I got to about 6 built up settlements, and I'm sure this is not water related as i have surplus water and generally no issues with water surpluses. I will also see that reflected in the pipboy, until i refresh the plot and then its working fine again. Its not a default ss2 plot, I'm using walled gardens from an ss2 extension, so it could be ss2 or it could be just certain extended plots. (not really liking the default plots aesthetically as I'm pretty sure apocalypse survivors know how to not leave gaps in their roofs and walls) However it seems to be specifically Abernathy farms having a problem with them, as the ones in my Starlight capital seem to be working fine. I'm wondering if the black holes might be caused by some ss2 plots stopping production randomly and then in a shared resources across settlements situation a bunch of suddenly not working ss2 plots result in huge deficits. I'm also wondering if script lag is an issue, whether or not plots are only seen as producing food after they get checked for upgrades or water shortages, which could mean the more built up plots you have, the more food deficits you will get as all these plots need to be checked before actually producing food numbers, which would be annoying. Better to have food unless otherwise and be wrong than have the checks first and take so long it creates situations where script lag starves your peasants but you end up with accurate numbers :P
 
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I started a new game so I could monitor instances of food black holes occurring and so far have had less trouble with them. This run i'm not using IDEK to share food resources across settlements, I also have sharing turned off in workshop extensions. I've got every settlement food independent for now. I'm not mixing vanilla and ss2 food production, ss2 plots only. I have also been growing very slowly, and have only 5-6 settlements (but fully built up), zx I rushed to complete ss2 so i could have access to all plots before really building up my settlements.

One issue I have noticed is that occasionally, some of the ss2 plots will report 0 production after I got to about 6 built up settlements, and I'm sure this is not water related as i have surplus water and generally no issues with water surpluses. I will also see that reflected in the pipboy, until i refresh the plot and then its working fine again. Its not a default ss2 plot, I'm using walled gardens from an ss2 extension, so it could be ss2 or it could be just certain extended plots. (not really liking the default plots aesthetically as I'm pretty sure apocalypse survivors know how to not leave gaps in their roofs and walls) However it seems to be specifically Abernathy farms having a problem with them, as the ones in my Starlight capital seem to be working fine. I'm wondering if the black holes might be caused by some ss2 plots stopping production randomly and then in a shared resources across settlements situation a bunch of suddenly not working ss2 plots result in huge deficits. I'm also wondering if script lag is an issue, whether or not plots are only seen as producing food after they get checked for upgrades or water shortages, which could mean the more built up plots you have, the more food deficits you will get as all these plots need to be checked before actually producing food numbers, which would be annoying. Better to have food unless otherwise and be wrong than have the checks first and take so long it creates situations where script lag starves your peasants but you end up with accurate numbers :P
I've got to the point of 8 settlements now, and two of my towns are now reporting negative constantly: Starlight and Sunshine Tidings. Sanctuary is set as my "main" settlement for SS2. I have city plans in Starlight (Basic SS2 plan for the quest with Old Paul as the leader), and Tenpines (Karvoc's excellent Fort Tenpines). Everywhere else is manually built up. I first started noticing the Negative bug when I expanded to 8 settlements, the 8th being Starlight using the city plan. While standing in Starlight I've noticed the food number jumping up and down a bit. 8 to 11 to 18 back to 8. I am using the SS2 Caravan's only, no IDEKs.

I wonder does this same thing occur for people who don't use any city plans?
 
I've got to the point of 8 settlements now, and two of my towns are now reporting negative constantly: Starlight and Sunshine Tidings. Sanctuary is set as my "main" settlement for SS2. I have city plans in Starlight (Basic SS2 plan for the quest with Old Paul as the leader), and Tenpines (Karvoc's excellent Fort Tenpines). Everywhere else is manually built up. I first started noticing the Negative bug when I expanded to 8 settlements, the 8th being Starlight using the city plan. While standing in Starlight I've noticed the food number jumping up and down a bit. 8 to 11 to 18 back to 8. I am using the SS2 Caravan's only, no IDEKs.

I wonder does this same thing occur for people who don't use any city plans?
Well, I don't use any city plans, and its pretty frequent, though I am told its a vanilla bug, i never had this problem with vanilla or ss1. Try turning off surplus resource sharing across settlements in workshop extensions if you haven't already and watch your food numbers, I'm curious how that turns out without idek present.
 
Well, I don't use any city plans, and its pretty frequent, though I am told its a vanilla bug, i never had this problem with vanilla or ss1. Try turning off surplus resource sharing across settlements in workshop extensions if you haven't already and watch your food numbers, I'm curious how that turns out without idek present.
Got it turned off now. I'm still seeing weird food behavior though. I'll give it some time to propagate throughout the network and I'll visit each settlement at least once, check for script lag, etc.
 
Well, I don't use any city plans, and its pretty frequent, though I am told its a vanilla bug, i never had this problem with vanilla or ss1. Try turning off surplus resource sharing across settlements in workshop extensions if you haven't already and watch your food numbers, I'm curious how that turns out without idek present.
Got it turned off now. I'm still seeing weird food behavior though. I'll give it some time to propagate throughout the network and I'll visit each settlement at least once, check for script lag, etc.
I have turned off Sharing through Workshop Framework, this playthrough hasn't had IDEK installed at all, and I've visited my settlements multiple times since turning off sharing. I have these settlements:

Sanctuary
Red Rocket (empty to avoid Triangle of Death problems)
Abernathy
Tenpines (Fort Tenpines city plan)
Starlight (SS2 basic City plan for Quest)
Sunshine Tidings
Graygarden
Oberland
Greentop Nursery (just unlocked, haven't built)

All the built settlements have Caravan services.

What I'm seeing: Sunshine and Starlight both go negative soon after I leave those settlements. While standing in them, they'll update and show Food production, but as soon as I leave they'll go back to the 4294... number. Some of the other settlements seem to try and compensate by giving up some of their food. Several of them drop to 3 or 5 food, despite producing like 30+ each.

While visiting Sunshine-
20210918092025_1.jpg


After leaving Sunshine:
20210918092344_1.jpg

Graygarden, Sanctuary, and Starlight are all showing very low numbers on food as well, I assume to make up for the negative Settlements. When I visit them the number matches what's on the screen, though sometimes it will update and show a higher number after a little waiting.
 
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OK, so far we're seeing the same things with some different loads. In my mind this leads to a certain number of facts.

1. IDEK is not the problem, though having its sharing and workshop frameworks sharing together exacerbates the situation.

2. Running without IDEK shows a similar issue cropping up after a number of settlements are built.

3. I've run a settlement system only using IDEK and one only using caravans, and a mix. I've mixed vanilla resources and ss2 resources. Same problem in all cases.

4. This issue did not plague me on a huge maxed mod load running ss1 and script heavy mods.

5. looking at the historical record though, other people had issues with ss1 and negative food situations which can be found on the forum going back to like 2018

Therefore, I'm concluding this is just bullshit :P bethesda bugs exacerbated by modding and if it crops up we'll have to find ways to play around it, like keeping surplus crops in separate storage containers so we don't suddenly lose all our mirelurk queen omelets. I'd turn off the ability to lose settlements from low happiness in the framework, because if a sudden dip from starvation is out of your control you might as well not punish yourself with the tediousness of having to try and reclaim the settlement.

Although, If sharing between settlements is turned off, the numbers should not be dipping across the board except in cases where you aren't producing enough water for the crops, or if food is drawn off to pay for plot maintenance with dynamic needs on, as some plots require food to run, not just settlers. One last couple things you can try to do is isolate sunshine from the caravan network, check how much food is being used for plots there and not settlers, or maybe turn off dynamic needs and see what happens. with ss2 and dynamic needs and crops requiring water there is a whole sub system of tracking you need to do manually outside of the pipboy to make sure you are producing enough resources for your settlements, though despite starting a new game and trying to make damn sure i was producing massive surpluses to avoid problems due to a bunch of upgrades to plots suddenly ganking away food production, I'm still seeing issues.
 
As far as the exact cause, I don't think anyone definitively figured out what is going on to cause this - but I believe the theory was something to do with having travelled within the game world close enough for the game to only load part of a settlement (the game only keeps an amount of gameworld "active" based on a radius around the player), causing it to get confused about what was actually there.
In terms of "fixes", similar thing there - can't really fix something if you don't even know what the root cause is. Only temporary solution I've ever found myself is to physically go to each settlement and then just sit there next to the Workbench object for a while to let it properly recalculate, but that's kind of a pain in the posterior.
Created an account here just to say "I had the exact problem in this question (food went to negative 9999) and this advice perfectly solved it when nothing else would".

Just stood my character in front of my workshop for 30 maybe 45 minutes, came back to my PC and went into workshop mode to discover it had fixed itself. Just in case, I'd also wandered along the borders of my settlement (and above) just to make sure the cells all loaded in, which may or may not have contributed to the fix. But this definitely works. Thank you!
 
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