As the title says, I can't recruit him. I got him to Sancuatry after saving him and the others like normal. Did the Sturges task and went back to Preston. He gave me the quest to go help a settlement and I started to head off and a few seconds after I was given it, I get a notification it failed. In hindsight, I should have reloaded a save, but I just went with console commands to start up the next quest. Went to the potential settlement area and set up a beacon. I reported back to him and then he asked me to help retake the Castle. I took over the Castle, but no option to recruit him showed up. Every time I tried talking to him, I'd just get the generic talk with no dialogue options. He just wanders around Sanctuary. Can't recruit him, can't move him, can't assign him to anything.

I tried the "resetfac" command that people suggested in some forums, but it didn't work.
I tried doing "resetquest" to try to bring back the first steps quest, but it didn't work,
I tried completing the quest with a command and it registered as completed, but I still couldn't recruit him.

I have no idea what to do next. I don't really want him as a follower, but I want to be able to assign him to something so he's not just wandering around like an idiot.

Honestly, reload save time.

If it failed, it had to fail for a reason, and maybe talking to Preston after it failed might have avoided this issue.

Though saying that, is it always 100% Tenpine's Bluff for the first mission he gives, I've seen someone mention they got Oberland Station as their first one.

How would it fail though? I wasn't anywhere near Tenpines and in a different cell so nobody there could die. It failed about 3 seconds after I got it. Went to Tenpines anyways and they were both alive and told me to clear sunshine tidings. It's gotta be a bug that made it do that because I didn't do anything. I highly doubt any mod affected it either. I figure it was just a random occurrence.

I've built too much to roll back all that way. Was hoping there was some solution to this. As of right now, all I do is shoot him in the face with my shotgun every time I pass him and he ragdolls a bit. Neither he or the settlers care so at least I got that going for me.

Man, not having to be bothered by the worst companion in fallout history, what a tragedy!

Must be some sort of weird mod conflict, I never seem to have heard of this happening to anybody else. Did you happen to wait a while before doing the concord quest? Most likely explanation to me is that somehow, you got added as an enemy to the "Concord Survivor" faction, or generic settle faction, or whatever, I don't think there are any other triggers for failing these missions, unless you kill the settlers, obviously.

I don't like Preston, but I don't want him wandering around like an idiot. I could at least put him to use as a guard, but I can''t even do that. That's all I ever do with him on any playthrough. Do his initial quests and get the Castle and then put him on guard duty so I never have to deal with him again.

I went straight to Concord talking to Codsworth. I didn't kill the settlers either as I had not even been there yet. It just told me I failed about 3 seconds after I got it. I feel like it's just some random hiccup in the game as I've pretty much been using the same mods for different playthroughs(only changing textures and weapons).

@Wertologist Curious, which quest exactly did you fail? And you say that you can't even order him to do something for you? I have a similar case with my automatron bots, in certain settlements, they cannot be ordered to do anything in my settlements. I would check what mods effect concord, preston, or sanctuary/castle or settlements in general. Use F4edit, you would be surprised with what you find sometimes

Regardless, I would restart the game, and see if the same thing happens again if you rescue preston. Make a save in sanctuary, and repeat the quest over and over, first with no mods enabled, then, enabling mods one by one, or by batches, until you find a culprit. That's what I did when my game started crashing by the bazoo, and it turned out that for some reason, a mod that changed how some terminals looked made them often crash my game, until a certain save file in an interior with one would crash the game 100% of the time it was loaded in

Basically what I was going to say as well, the only time I had that was with a random Raider overhaul mod that I tried before going back to the actual Raider Overhaul.

Only thing about the insta-fail could be something changed the way that the raiders are handled.

Odd question, but do you have Sim Settlements Conqueror installed and told it to build up Tenpines?

@Sonichu_fanboy First Steps failed immediately. Only mods affecting concord and the castle is the Boston Interiors mod which I'm sure isn't the culprit and a mod that rebuilds the Castle wall. Can't imagine either would have any affect. No mods for Preston as I never cared for him.

@McKaby I don't use Sim Settlements. 90% of the reason I even play the game is to build kickass settlements so a mod that automates the one thing I want to do would be counter-productive.

I'll try starting a new file to see if the same thing happens, but I really don't want to have to test every mod out as I hate staring at loading screens and seeing the same lengthy intro over and over again.

@McKaby I have raider overhaul as well and everything was fine for me. As a matter of fact, I got bored of preston, and became the overboss, now the castle is a drug den and his naked corpse is forevermore staying inside that shack outside the castle, where he was waiting for me. Raider overhaul should't effect anything, as it mostly just adds gear, unless we're thinking of a different mod

@Wertologist Part and parcel of playing this game, I am afraid, if you want to get the real "Fallout 4" experience, you should get used to it. Fallout 4 is much more stable than F3 and NV, but when it breaks, oh boy, it breaks everything

@"Sonichu_fanboy" I said it was another mod and then went back to ROWIP.

I can't remember the name, but it did similar to ROWIP with Raider level scaling and such.

It's possible that a script misfired and he's been put in the "unable to recruit temporarily" faction. Happens but it's rare.

Try this instead of resetfac:

Open the console, click on him
removefac 00075d56

@Sensenmann That's the command I tried. No effect.

Have you tried force dismissing/recruiting him via the console?

setplayerteammate 0 or 1

If that doesn't work I'm pretty sure that your save is corrupted beyond help. What mods are you using anyways? Posting them might help diagnosing things.