What this?

Don't you hate it when you're trying to play and enjoy your game progressively, and then any of those random settlement recruitment quests is sending you all across the map, with a timer enabled? I mean, what logic is behind Preston's plan of expansion? Having a closer look at the inner mechanics in CK, I quickly realized that the only reason for this is the somewhat "lackluster" implementation. While the whole idea of saving settlements for your cause is considerably splendid, I did not really enjoy what I've seen in regards to developing it in a "sophisticated" way. I mean, who gives you a mission like this if you were appointed General just minutes ago?:

"Hey, you're a level 12 General now, with hardcore modded game on Survival mode. Why don't you just go on a voyage to that bazillion kilometer distant location, to safe a grandpa and his daughter from an army of 10.000 Raiders? Of course, there's no perimeter safety, and no local outposts for you to drop your most precious loot. And I guess your 25 dmg Pipegun is going to show those Deathclaws who's the boss, on your way to the red zone! Oh, and btw., if you're not done with that thingy in less than two weeks, you're no longer a friend of mine, and Grandpa Jackson. And that settlement will be lost for us forever. Wait. I'll show you my future plan, given to me by the Great General Becker."



And you wonder why your gang got owned by Gunners Preston? Really?

However, enough about the silliness of it all.

What do we need?

F4SE, and MCM. DLC should be covered as well, since all of the DLC workshops rely on special "non radiant" questing, and use the same variables as the base game workshops. Which means you actually only need the base game installed.

How did you do it?

The timer interval for quest fail delay is pre existing(set to default 14 aka two weeks), and used inside the "minrecruitquestscript" as property. Which in return means you can easily reconfigure it at any time. There's also the "MinutemenMaxActiveRecruitmentQuests" global variable that you can change as well, if you remove the constant flag on it. That was the easy part.

To exclude some of the settlements from the radiant quest engine to be picked, I initially had plans to use a custom form list, to add and remove settlements and/or settlement locations. I would then try to use conditions on any of the dialogues, or inside the scripts that handle the whole radiant Minutemen aspect. That's when I figured that everything was spread all across the place. Standard Bethesda "it just works" kind of approach. Long story short, doing it with the initial idea was way to intrusive, and would have created all sorts of fuckery and certainly at one point drove me completely mad.

Lucky me I then found the MinRecruitmentProhibitRandom bool property inside the "WorkshopScript", and yeah, it actually does exactly what it says. It will exclude certain workshops from ever being considered as radiant targets. This bool is for example used by all workshops and their locations, that are attached to the main Minutemen quest line, or have custom start up quests, like for example the Abernathy Farm, or The Slog.

What I then did was just using a while loop to catch the WorkshopParent.GetWorkshop(index) ObjectReferences as WorkshopScript, and performing an already existing OwnedByPlayer bool check, to exclude settlements already owned by the player. After that I just had to change the MinRecruitmentProhibitRandom bool property in the WorkshopScript for that specific workshop to true, so they are locked away from the radiant quests eyes. In the MCM menu you can just use a switch to set any of the settlements locked or unlocked.

The settlements that have been implemented in version 0.2 have a custom global condition added to their quest nodes. So basically it works the same way as all the other settlements, only the actual "hack" happens at dialogue event level, rather than the background condition event.

In order to make all random Commonwealth quests consider only the Commonwealth, you basically just edit the quest node conditions to not consider any Far Harbor and/or Nuka World locations.

Is it compatible with other mods?

It is. It is in fact perfectly well. I'm not editing any of the vanilla variables, except that tiny little global to be non constant, which I could have probably prevented, but I got lazy, and it's a global you can easily fix in xEdit. I'm not editing any quests. I'm not editing any scripts. I'm just hooking into pre existing variables, which will be used by any of the mods I was testing against. The only conflicting mod I've found when checking in xEdit was We are the Minutemen, which conveniently edits the same global to exactly the same change I do(to 1.0 from 3.0), only I also made that global non constant to allow editing. So basically loading my mod after WATM will do pretty much exactly what WATM intended with that changed global.

Since 0.2 the org info is obsolete. This doesn't mean compatibility is gone all together. It just asks you to use xEdit to forward comparisons to analyze any conflicts. I will do the same for the mods I am using. Lucky me non of the mods I'm using conflict with my node edits. The only conflict I've yet found is with "We are the Minutemen". W.A.T edits one global I edit myself, and the difference is W.A.T does not remove its "constant" state, and reconfigures the global to 25.0(%), while I remove the "const" flag and set the global to 50.0(%). So it's perfectly save to just load RC after W.A.T.

How I am supposed to use it?

The time delay and max quest amount are sliders that will update at runtime. The maximum is 100 for both. There's also a button that will fire a notification on menu exit, to show you how much days are left on the last accepted quest.

The settlements are treated individually with a simple toggle(Locked/Unlocked). If you lock them, they will not be considered by the radiant quest logic. If you unlock them, they will be considered, but are still addressed by the player ownership. So if you already own a settlement, and set it to unlocked, it doesn't magically show up on the radiant plate. But it will if you f'ed up your relations with the settlers, and they removed you from their settlement aka "NotPlayerOwned". Only you will be given the chance to unlock said settlement again by other factions.

If you install this on an already existing save game, I recommend going to the MCM, and manually setting all of the settlements you own to unlocked, and leaving those locked that you don't own. From there you can just customize the list at will. Having all settlements locked will never give you a radiant settlement recruitment quest until you've unlocked at least one settlement in the list.

Will this affect Settlement attacks, and other radiant quest types?

Only partially. Only the Minutemen settlement recruitment radiant quests are configurable. Preston will still send you all across the map to safe hostages, kill a pack of Super Mutants, or pick flowers for Mama Murphy. The Broship will still want you to commit genocide on any other faction, and the Institute will still be cavernous weirdos. The only difference to base game in regard to "non recruitment" radiant quests, is they will stay in the Commonwealth.

I only see 24 settlements in the list, but the base game has 30?

The missing settlements are The Castle, The Airport, Homestead, Bunker Hill, Covenant, and Egret Tours Marina. Those settlements are related to main quests or their own recruitment quest, and are never addressed by any radiant means. I see no reason to mess around with them, as I've yet to experience any "forced" states to recruit those settlements.

Known Bugs?

Indeed:

- Preston might act weird on starting dialogue when certain settlements are locked, try pressing the activate key and/or unlocking one of the settlements...to my current knowledge this should only happen on one particular quest(Min00), but you never know
- an owned settlement may only no longer be listed in the MCM once you restart/reload the game, or left the location of said settlement...this is because even though the vanilla game does set a settlement to owned once you unlock a workshop, the internal flag transporting that info to all the other connected scripts and fragments, will only be switched once you left the area or restart/reload the game...I guess this happens because Bethesda doesn't use a property or global for that info, so it is very hard to trace that variable...but I promise this will be fixed in future updates

I want to report a bug!

Use the comment section.