Real Talk: Benevolent Leader is ridiculous

4:03 PM on 12.07.2015 (server time)0

Originally I was going to write an article about how Fallout 4 has kind of lost it's way, but overall I still really enjoy the game. However, something happened that I kind of want to rant about, also I think it's kind of a funny story.

There I was sitting in front of the glow of my television contemplating what to do with the void of freetime that was left by Fallout 4. Having just beaten the game I had a trophy notification. So I decided to check them. Scrolling through I had noticed that there was only a handful left. Now, I'm not one for achievement hunting, but I was just itching for a reason to keep playing. So I looked at the list of those trophies that were left. None of them seemed all that hard. So I decided to complete the, "level up to 50 trophy" which was only a few levels away. It took a bit, doing those horribly repetitive Minuteman quests but eventually I got the trophy. Sweet. Next, I went for Benevolent Leader seemed like the simplest one. Get 100 Happiness in a large settlement. Seems like a basic achievement, shouldn't take me too long. Oh God, how wrong I was... How horribly mistaken I had been. I was so naive, so innocent back then... I miss those days.

I had made Sanctuary my home base during my playthough and decided to just upgrade that settlement. I had a pretty good headstart... or so I thought. So, first thing I did was make sure to meet peoples needs. Eventually my happiness meter stopped going up, at about 75. Stuck, I Naturally then went online to look up a guide for building a settlement. What I saw was what I thought were merely guides to getting the achievement quickly (Here's the best one, I recommend watching just to get a point of reference). 16 shops? That seems silly for a settlement with 20 people. Some said Don't start at sanctuary but I was already so far, I had thought I could make it work. No sense in switching settlements now, I'll be able to get it. I began to follow the rest of the guide. I began to sell all of my stuff. However I was far from the amount of caps required to buy the shops. So I had to go out into the wasteland. Which was fine as my character still needed the "caps collector" perks so I was going to need to level up anyways. Thus I began the grind.

I had finally got the perks required. So I headed back to Sanctuary. When I had left to go and grind levels Sanctuary had a happiness of 87 and all of the needs of the settlers were being more than fulfilled. When I had returned happiness had dropped to 69. Apparently there's some kind of glitch when you leave a settlement where it may be despawning beds and things. "Whatever", I thought "I can just get it back up real quick anyways". So I spent the next 10 hours doing everything humanly possible to raise that happiness. I couldn't. Despite opening up 7 shops, I couldn't even get happiness to 80. I was now probably about 20-24 hours into trying to get this achievement. Eventually I found an article or video or something explaining why it was impossible to use Sanctuary. Apparently it's due to NPC's who can't actually do jobs. Mamma Murphy, Companions, Sturges, etc. The game counts them as Settlers but that can't contribute to happiness or something to that effect. So I said, "Effit" and decided to start over at the "Starlight Drive-in" settlement. Problem was, I had no caps. I thought there was a possibility that destroying my current shops would return some caps to me. So I hit the scrap button and what do you know, it does... or rather the game says it does.

So I scraped some of my shops. I opened up my menu to see what I was going to have to work with at Starlight. Only... I had the same amount of caps as before I had scrapped the shops. The game never actually gave me the caps. "Strange" thought I. Being wise to Fallout's Shenanigans I had been wise enough to save beforehand. So I reloaded figuring it was some strange glitch, and repeated the process. Same results. I then restarted Fallout 4. Same results. Being disheartened I decided that it was time for some karmaic justice. If Bethesda can't make a game that doesn't have a glitched out achievement with glitched out scrapping than I'll just use some glitches to my advantage. Infinite caps glitch here I come! So I started building at Starlight. Got some caps by cheating. Build a shop, empty shop of junk and caps, and repeat. Meanwhile building things to meet my ever growing populous. Things were going swell. slow, but swell. Finally I had 26 settlers, 17 shops, 155 defense,36 food, and 40 water, a metric butt-ton of nuka cola machines and the swankiest bar of all time. My happiness was at 92, slowly rising... but then it hit 93. The up arrow next to the happiness, which indicates it's raising... disappeared. "Whatever I'll just build another shop" and build another shop I did. So I clicked on a farmer and let him know that he's been promoted to shop keeper! Except he just kept on Farming. "No seriously dude go and be a shop keeper" I thought slightly frustrated. 5 attempts later I figured it must've been some pathing issue.So I took things into my own hands and I finally goated him by spamming GO to spots slightly closer to the shop. Then I clicked the shop. Huzzah...erm... "Why is my Food dropping to Zero?! Whatever the game will figure it out" I thought, because anyone without a job automatically becomes a farmer. So I sat in a chair and skipped an hour ahead. Food was still at Zero and my happiness had a red downward arrow. I then walked outside only to see the entire village huddled together. Everyone except Johnny the Ghoul who was the one I had to drag by his collar to the shop. So I walked towards his shop but on my way I had noticed that one of the shops now was unassigned. Being the Detective that I am I began to check every other shop. All the same. Unassigned. No workers. "Whatever I'll just reassign them" I thought. With everyone huddled it would be a very easy task right? No. I basically had to drag everyone back to their shops as they ignored me. One by One though, I got them re-assigned. Skip forward one hour. Still a red arrow, I walk out side. Everyone is once again huddled. I checked the shops. All unassigned. I had apparently somehow caused a coup glitch where everyone decided they didn't want to work anymore. The last save I had before the glitch was 30 minutes ago. It was late, I had to work in the morning. I threw my hands in the air and said "Screw it!" and never returned to the save file.

TLDR; The achievement is ridiculous to get as is. You're talking requiring the player to have at least 20-30,000 caps. And it takes a ridiculous amount of time. Also for whatever reason requires an absurd amount of shops. In fact the requirements as is seem to be a little much. Even worse is that even IF you manage to fulfill all of the achievement's ridiculous requirements, you're game can still just glitch out on you and screw you over. BTW the second run took me at least 10 hours to get to and that's with the infinite caps glitch. Why Bethesda? Why you do this to meh?!

From what I've seen all players are struggling to get this Trophy/Achievement. I imagine that there's going to be a patch to fix all this ridiculousness. Or at least I hope so. I really, really hope so. Much Cred to anyone whose managed to actually get the achievement. :D Anyways How have your adventures in Fallout 4 been going guys? Have you also felt the pain of this Achievement? Lemme know.