By the way, if anyone is trying to get the Benevolent Leader achievement, or wants to experiment or play around with settlements, here's a tip:
- Open the console and target (click) your settlement's Workshop.
- Enter "getav WorkshopRatingHappinessTarget".
- This is the value your happiness will reach after the 'ticks' happen. I'm not sure how long it takes to refresh, and it didn't seem like sleeping or waiting affected it, but happiness seem to grow little by little, like 5 every 'tick'. You want this target to be 100.
This command helps because you can know exactly how much happiness your settlement has potential to achieve. Then you can make changes, and wait for the ticks.
This also helps if you want to experiment how much you lose/gain happiness based on how many stores you have, how much resource production affects happiness, if placing decoration affects happiness at all, how much killing settlers affect potential happiness, and all that sort of stuff.
I decided to find a way to discover how much actual happiness my settlement had and what affected it after I spent too much time with 98 happiness. That frustrated me too much.
Turns out a crap-load of stores really do the job. It still took a lot of caps and resources to make it, though.