Ben Gibson

Ben Gibson is a former member of the Minutemen wandering the Commonwealth . He is intended to appear as part of the Preston's Friend random encounter, which may be prevented from occurring due to bugs (see below).
==Background==
Ben was a member of the Commonwealth Minutemen and friend of Preston Garvey before the Quincy Massacre happened. Though he wanted to help his friend and Colonel Hollis at Quincy, he was not ranked high enough in his Minuteman group to make the call of sending aid to their fellow soldiers.
==Interactions with the player character==
===Other interactions===
* Preston's Friend: Ben only appears in this random encounter, which requires a number of conditions to be met in order to be eligible to occur:
** Preston must be the active companion and must be currently following the player and be fully loaded in on-screen.
** At least one Minutemen settlement recruitment quest must be completed (in practice, either The First Step or Returning the Favor).
** At least four settlements must be allied with the Minutemen.
** In the encounter, the Sole Survivor and Preston meet Ben battling four raiders. If Ben survives and is seen by Preston, Preston will walk over to him and start a conversation; Ben will express awareness of the Sole Survivor's efforts to revive the Minutemen, and Preston will ask the player character to give Ben a chance to rejoin. If the player character agrees, Ben will become a settler and can be sent to any allied settlement. Otherwise, he will be disabled after leaving the area and will not appear in subsequent encounters.
==Inventory==
==Notes==
The quest which implements Ben's random encounter is "Preston - companion RE" (Editor ID: REAssaultKMK_COMPreston).
==Appearances==
Ben Gibson appears only in Fallout 4.
==Bugs==
* It is possible that Ben's random encounter does not occur due to an engine-level bug involving reference aliases in event conditions. Unlike other random encounters, Ben's event has three conditions which use Preston as the subject (specifically, selecting his Reference ID to fill the condition alias) to check that he is currently following the player, and all three must succeed for the event to be eligible for selection. This bug means that the Story Manager (the system which selects random events) does not fill the alias with Preston's reference, so the condition never passes and the random encounter is never made eligible to be selected.YouTube - Bug explained in comments
** The "Raiders recognize Nick" random encounter similarly uses Nick Valentine's reference to fill a condition alias, but this encounter has been widely recorded as occurring without issue in-game. It is possible that reference alias conditions are not always broken, but the high number of conditions required for Ben's encounter raises the chance of failure.
** It is also possible that, in the low chances where Ben's encounter is selected to happen, he is simply killed by the raiders or other enemies, or Preston is either too far away or does not see Ben (both of which are required conditions for the dialogue scene).
==See also==
* Dolly Madison
==References==
Category:Fallout 4 human characters
Category:Commonwealth Minutemen characters