UPDATE: This awesome Settler mamangement feature is now CONFIRMED for Xbox One and PS4. YAY!
Your prayers have not gone unanswered, Fallout 4 players. In response to the heartfelt pleas from players enamored of Fallout 4 ’s endlessly entertaining settlement system but less than satisfied with the guesswork that involved managing your settlers’ jobs, the new patch for Fallout 4 on PC offers a small status menu when you select a settler that contains an icon demonstrating what job your new settler has.
For example, the icon for a settler assigned to scavenging duty is…
A hieroglyph? Some kind of Egyptian bird-god (played, presumably, by Nikolaj Coster-Waldeau)? I honestly thought it was a polar bear surfing around on an ice floe and wondered what that had to do with scavenging. Can’t scavenge your way out of global warming, bear!
But it is, lo and behold, a visually distinct icon indicating that your settler is not only assigned, but what duty they are assigned. In a scavenger’s case, that icon is a vulture. Makes sense.
This simple feature -- selecting a settler and knowing whether or not they are assigned to a job, and if they are assigned to a job, which job they are assigned to -- has been on the wishlist of many a Fallout 4 player. We talked about it in our Fallout 4 Report podcast ; we talked about it when we were supposed to be talking about Fallout 4 companions ; in fact, we harped on the point every chance we got .
This simple settler management status menu made our mod wishlist ; odds are good it made yours too. The community desire for settler management was so strong, one of our most-trafficked guides this year had to provide ingenious work-around tips that involved meticulously collecting clothes and equipping them on your settlers in an orderly way. Farmers in fedoras, scavengers in lab coats, storekeepers in trenches: the work-around worked, and was pretty cool-looking too, but it was scarcely ideal.
In a post- Sims landscape, where examples of UI for things analagous to settlements abound, it was unimaginable to have so much difficulty on such a simple task. There’s still no way to see a list of your settlers and what jobs they have, nor any kind of information panel that easily tells you how many people you have assigned to each duty; that may be the province of modders to program in, perhaps as an extension to terminal abilities.
At least this simple status menu makes seeing what your settler is up to easy and convenient, even if you still need to track them down in person to change their job. At least you know what clothes to change them into. Can’t farm the wasteland if you ain’t cute.
There’s a lot more to the patch: read all about it here .
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story suggested that there were no confirmed plans to bring this update to consoles. However, Bethesda made it clear that they would bring updates first to PCs as a beta, then a PC release and then consoles. iDigitalTimes regrets the error.
