Automatron (companion)

The Automatron is a craftable companion for the Sole Survivor.

Background
Automatrons are specially crafted companions designed by the Sole Survivor to suit their own personal needs. They can be created, upgraded, and renamed at a Robot workbench, provided the resource requirements are met. They start with protectron parts without any armor, but individual parts from other robots can be scavenged and attached, and upgraded further with quality armor attachments to meet (or exceed) factory quality.

Created automatrons can have 1 of 9 different voices, many with similar functionalities. All automatrons start with the male voice selected.

The first 4 similar voices are the male, female and the relative processed variants of each. The voices all sound like well spoken servants, with the normal variation sounding like well recorded voices and the processed variants sounding more mechanical and modified. This voice type has personality subroutines that can be activated by selecting yes when requested when the robot is first created or by navigating through dialogue when the automatron is your current follower. These voice types are the only voice types that allow you to command your robot to self destruct, this is accomplished by navigating to the self destruct dialogue and giving the requested secondary confirmation, the unit will then begin the self destruct sequence and count down from ten, then it will explode.

Another set of similar Voices are the Assaultron and Sentry bot voices, both have the same voice lines, and they both mimic the voices of the respective robots. When asked to initiate personality subroutines both voices also respond with "ERROR, command not recognized", although there are cases of both Sentry bots and especially Assaultrons with personalities; they respond the same when asked to self destruct.

The last 3 voices are different sounding beeps and clicks (beep-click, beep-dark and beep-bright), robots with these voices appear to exhibit emotion, but have no programmed personality subroutines in game, other robots may be heard exclaiming something along the lines of "your personality appears to be an error in your program, have you considered having it purged". Robots with this voice type will respond with a (negative beep) when asked to self destruct.

Automatrons will almost always fight on the side of the Sole Survivor, but may turn against them if they attack a settlement that the robot is a part of or was recently part of, even if they are the Sole Survivor's current companion.

Other interactions

 * Automatrons will regularly give the Sole Survivor 2-3 junk items when talked to while they're the active companion.
 * Automatrons can be ordered to self-destruct if the Sole Survivor desires.

Range of interests
Automatrons are unconditional companions and their affinity cannot be changed.

Bugs

 * Any automatron may turn hostile upon encountering robots in other locations, causing other NPCs in the same faction to also turn hostile. This has been known to apply to the following locations, with the exact conditions remaining unknown.
 * Old Rusty in Vault 81
 * The Mister Handies at Graygarden
 * KL-E-0 in Goodneighbor
 * Brotherhood of Steel Vertibirds
 * Ada will quickly float around after the player character's first encounter with her.
 * If building an automatron with a sentry bot build (Torso, arms, legs and head) and shoot it in the head, it might turn into a protectron. (Protection animations and AI on the sentry body.)
 * The same thing may happen if sending an automatron to a settlement on The Island.
 * Automatrons with a robobrain head will occasionally fire their mesmetron at the Sole Survivor instead of hostile targets.
 * After using Kellogg's terminal, all named automatrons' names will revert back to "Automatron" once interacted with and cannot be changed back to anything else.
 * When selecting an automatron companion in workshop edit mode, it will prevent you from dismissing them. To fix this edit one item on the automatron, then use the dismiss dialog.
 * When assigning an automatron to a vendor position they will not initiate the vendor dialogue when talked to.

Автоматрон