Covenant is a really great place to set up your main base. All the pre-war assets make it look so much nicer than other settlements, it comes with enough beds for all your followers, it has plenty of space for crafting stations, and the concrete walls and 10 heavy turrets make it secure enough to feel safe leaving your followers there. Unfortunately, the town is so unique from other settlements that when you aquire it, the game doesn't recognize its unique assets as settlement parts, and doesn't change the ownership of everything over to you. This is frustrating, especially if you took the quest path that led to you killing everyone in town, so there's no one to even own these things anymore. Even worse, none of the turrets show up as providing defense!

After posting about these problems in the forums, some people suggested messing around with console commands and I ended up figuring out some pretty good fixes for everything that was going wrong here. I know a lot of other people have been having the same problems, so I figured I'd put these solutions out where more people could find them without having to dig through the thread. Let me know if you find better fixes (especially for the turrets and doors) or if anything didn't work for you.

For the record, I know many of these console fixes can be used on other things in the game to cheat and steal without consequence, but I don't consider it cheating to use them here. If you're fixing a bug and making it like it was intended to be in the first place, it's justified as far as I'm concerned. And for those of you worried about achievements getting locked out, I'm 90% sure this game doesn't have that implimented, but if you're paranoid, just save and reload after using the console. I've definitely gotten achievements after using the console in the same session that way.

Turrets were the biggest problem for me when moving into Covenant. The town came equipped with all those pre-built turrets, and yet none of them counted towards overall defense! This seems to be a problem with all settlements with pre-built turrets, where ownership doesn't properly transfer over. Unfortunately, as of right now the only way to fix this problem is to remove the original turrets entirely and build new ones on the platforms, since the setownership command doesn't fix the recognition issue.

You can either manually destroy them with weapons or use the markfordelete command to remove them. I don't reccomend destroying them, since nothing ever despawns at settlements and you'll have to hide the exploded turret shards somewhere. And with 10 turrets to destroy, that's a lot of junk you're stuck with. Your best bet is to just delete them with the console. The markfordelete command is very simple to use; just open the console, click on the turret you want to delete, type markfordelete, hit enter, and the next time you reload the area, the turret will be gone without a trace.

I've head people say that it's not a big deal to just keep the original turrets since they still shoot at enemies, but it's really not worth it. There's a multitude of problems that arise from having zero defense at a settlement, and there's also been reports of original turrets randomly shooting at deezer or dora or even each other. It doesn't cost a whole lot of resources to build new heavy turrets, they don't need electricity, it's just better overall to make new ones.

Another big problem for a lot of people was that the beds and containers were still owned, making them impossible to use. Fortunately, this has a very simple fix. Just open the console, click on the bed/container/item that shows up as owned by someone else, type setownership, hit enter, and it's yours. Beds can be used by followers, containers can be used properly, and any loose items you wanted to take won't count as stealing. Alternatively, small items can be broken down when targeted in the workshop menu without any penalties. If you really really like a certain prop then use the console to make it yours, but personaly I wanted to clear out all the other junk to make room for my own stuff.

As a side note, you can't fix the bunk beds in the console. I know modders have done it, but in vanilla they can only be used by one person at a time despite counting as two beds in the settlemet stats. If you're using covenant as a follower base, it doesn't make much difference, since as far as I know only 6 of your companions actually sleep in beds, and there's more than enough space for them as is.

Doors aren't quite so easy to fix, though. Even if you make them, and their locks, owned by you, they're still scripted to lock themselves. Unless someone goes through the trouble to mod that script out, the best way to fix it from within the game itself is just to take the doors off and scrap them. To my knowledge you can't add them back in the doorframes for whatever reason. (I suspect it's becuase the pre-war houses aren't classified as settlement structures and don't have points where doors can snap to them) This solution isn't ideal but it's the best I've been able to come up with. At the very least, you can keep the main gate, which is all that really matters. Who needs doors, we're all friends here, right?

This one's more of a personal preference, but it's still specific to covenant. The town has a lot of pre-war assets that aren't recognized by the workshop, so they can't be removed that way. It's your settlement, you should have complete control over the furniture, right? Just use the previously mentioned markfordelete command on any shelf or bureau that's getting in the way of your remodeling. just be careful not to accidentally click the wall, or you might delete the entire house!

As for the furniture that can be highlighted but not scrapped or stored (like the fancy beds in one of the houses) the solution is actually to highlight it and hold down e for a while, then it'll let you move it, but you still can't delete it without the console. Be warned: I've found that after you move something like this once, the game won't let you pick it back up after you put it down. I'm not sure if that's just a glitch on my end, but I'd say if you plan to move something, make sure you can do it in one go, just in case.

This is an issue that extends to all settlements, but since Covenant specifically has a quest that may lead to large amounts of npc corpses in the vicinity, I thought I'd bring it up anyway.

From what I can tell, it would appear that anyone killed within the bounds of a settlement has their corpse marked to never despawn. I suspect this is a side effect of whatever makes it so that small decorative physics objects don't despawn at settlements. Whatever the case, if you do the Covenant quest on the pro-synth route, you're going to have a lot of corpses - or lots and lots of little bits of corpses - that never despawn from your otherwise idyllic hideout. (don't worry about raider attacks: I don't think those stay as long as you kill them outside the little green lines)

After some testing, I've discovered that marking any part of a corpse, no matter how exploded it is, will delete the entirety of it when you reload. However, doing this with many corpses at once (or maybe just one...? haven't tested) causes a qtd when you try to save and reload to force the deletion, but when you start the game back up there's no problems that I've seen.

The order that I've tested: click corpse in the console, markfordelete, repeat for as many corpses as you need to get rid of, save, attempt to reload, qtd, restart game, corpses are gone. Please let me know in the comments if this messes up your game in some way, since I haven't really done extensive testing beyond just messing with my own corpse pile, and that consistent qtd is a bit concerning.