Covenant: A Promise Broken

**Warning: Potential Fo4 Spoilers**

In fo4 there is a town called Covenant. It's a town that can become a settlement. It's a great site to make a settlement, the town is completely walled and there are seven turrets along the wall. The build space is small but it has several intact buildings that can be used for bunk houses and such.

All the townspeople act very strangely. There's obviously a deep dark secret that they're keeping. Peyton Place like. There is a Mister Handy robot there named Deezer. He want's to give you lemonade - his special recipe. (Maybe a drinking the Kool-Aid reference or something more perverse?) While I was hesitant to take it, the drink has pretty good restorative properties. As you go along the quest to unlock the workshop (unlocking a workshop at a location allows you to make it a settlement), you find that the townspeople are involved in some pretty nasty stuff. At the end of the quest you are give a decision to side with the townspeople, accepting their evil doings, or not.

Covenant in Fallout 4

I didn't side with the town so I'm not exactly sure how that choice plays out. I'm sure you can Google it. Not siding with the town results in the townspeople getting all aggro with you. When you return to the town they start attacking. Strangely, the turrets don't attack you. All the NPCs are pretty low level so killing them off is not a big effort especially if you have a companion. I accidentally killed the town cat, Dora. I'm so sorry Dora, but you were right in the middle of the fight. At least you gave me a tasty chunk of cat meat. I didn't kill Deezer though.

Now you have the town and now things get strange and frustrating. First problem is that you have all these dead bodies. After the normal looting of the bodies, you would think that the game engine would clean them up in a few in-game days. But no (strangely, Dora gets cleaned up). These bodies remain. I, like many others, dumped the bodies in some bushes so that I don't have to relive my sins every time I travel to Covenant. An additional strangeness with the bodies is that they sometimes respawn loot (clearly a glitch). Weird but not unwelcome.

Each settlement you build requires defenses so that raiders, super mutants and other nasties don't kill your settlers and destroy town resources. With seven turrets you would think you're set. But no (again). The existing turrets don't count as defense. WTF? Some players destroy them but then you're left with un-removable, smoldering, turret stumps and you can't place new turrets in those tactical locations. Ok, you figure, I'll just put up my own turrets and let the existing turrets add some, unaccounted for, defense (they will shoot at hostiles). You pop a new turret up and then all hell breaks loose. Your turret thinks the existing turrets are hostiles resulting in a huge shootout which only stops when there are no more turrets to shoot or your turret gets destroyed. Nice.

You can move the turrets while in workshop mode. It's not obvious, but they do highlight and if you hold the action button you can grab them.  I figured there must be a way to take advantage of these turrets. They are heavy turrets so they have some value. I took them all and put them in one of the buildings. If you do so, make sure none of them are in view of the new turrets you put up or the whole shootout starts again.

There's another glitch with these turrets. If you try to pick them up and they are too close to another crafted object, both objects get picked up. I'm playing on PS4 so I don't know if this is unique to that platform or not. By moving crafted objects around and a little finesse you can shake them loose. If you're fed up with the turrets and just want them gone (the existing turrets can't be scraped or stored in the workbench) someone found a workaround for PS4 and Xbone (if you're playing on PC you can use console commands to remove objects). You can place them on a crafted shack floor and then store the shack floor in the workbench. The turrets vanish into the aether while the floor is duly returned to storage (another glitch?). By the way, this doesn't work with the bodies.

Having all the existing turrets collected, I took them to places where my new turrets couldn't "see" them. I hid them in corners and put up walls to give them cover. There was a bit of trial and error. You don't know for sure if they're actually hidden until you place them and all the turrets complete a scan of their view. There were number of quick saves made to work it all out. Ultimately, I did get several of the existing turrets in usable locations. Since then I don't know if it was really worth the effort. The only attacks I've seen so far are by a few raiders, nothing my new turrets couldn't take care of. The existing turrets ended up in vulnerable locations so I've had a couple of them destroyed by attackers. Meh, it was a fun puzzle.

There are other weird glitches with Covenant. Doors remaining locked, having to steal items from yourself, Deezer... I didn't kill Deezer. He now hides in a corner, is cheery and continues to offer his special lemonade (wink).