Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch

That's actually not a bug because Ronnie has the bCommandable flag on her WorkshopNPCScript set to false, which simply means that she was never intended to get assigned or unassigned by the player (and this flag has apparently not been altered in your game because you still can't assign her). The workshop scripts (even the pure vanilla ones) never unassign any actors that are not commandable. Thus, you cannot blame the game for missing code to handle situations that are not expected to occur.

The actual bug is that she got unassigned at all, but it's not a vanilla bug because this requires scripting and I see no way for the vanilla scripts to screw this. Also, all settlers being unassigned at once is extremely unusual (I've never seen this happen in my game) and indicares that there is something fundamentally broken in your game. If you were not on PS4, I'd bet that this is the result of a mod conflict or of the uninstallation of a mod on a running playthrough.

Can you remember anything specific you did with/in your game before this happened ?

Thanks for the response. I agree and it makes sense that she was never intended to be assigned/reassigned to begin with, apart from her default role as a special merchant. I also agree that the likely cause of this problem was the mass unassigning situation.

Based on my experience, and what seems to be outlined in the wiki link (which says it is a confirmed bug for all PS4, xbox and PC; additionally, the video I linked to is an xbox version of what happened to me in my PS4 version). Wiki link above was broken because of the period, here it is again https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Ronnie_Shaw

Specifically in my game I tried to assign an unassigned generic settler to a defensive post that already had someone else assigned to that post. The game then subsequently unassigned each settler from every job, meaning all food collection and defense went to 0. Along with this in the castle, Ronnie got unassigned, and the radio freedom minuteman got unassigned. However, the latter reassigned himself after a couple of minutes as I couldn't manually do it.

This same bug (settlers mass unassigning themselves) happened to me at Sanctuary as well. I don't recall the circumstance that initiated the sequence as it was the first time that happened to me and I just thought it was odd, not a bug I'd see again.

So likely the underlying issue is that bug with the side effect that Ronnie doesn't reassign herself because it wasn't expected for her to get unassigned in the first place.

Here are some posts of people describing what happened to me, although the platform isn't frequently mentioned. I think some are PC in origin as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/40nyvi/settlements_unassigning_all_settlers_from_their/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/6uf03u/help_all_my_settlers_unassigned_themselves/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/4cfahk/why_the_hell_do_my_settlers_keep_unassigning/ (This one actually happened at the castle and the person describes Ronnie as being unassigned in the process)
https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/350541595116238603/
https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/5137750-settlers-get-randomly-unassigned-all-at-ones-bug/
https://bethesda.net/community/topic/78468/settlers-unassigning-themselves-bug

It certainly is curious to say the least.

Although it probably is a bug and is annoying to manually reassign each settler, would there be anyway to fix/add a script for ronnie to re-assign herself if something were to happen? The real disruptor in gameplay is the loss of her as a merchant due to the bug.

Thanks for your time

As I've looked into it, I've recreated the situation that unassigns all settlers in a situational manner in my game. Perhaps you (or someone else) can try to recreate it as well.

Here is what I did:

Tried to assign a settler to an unassigned object. Most recently it was a store, in my Castle situation per above it was a guard post
Assignment didn't immediately take effect, so I find a different settler to assign to the same object that is still marked unassigned. (mainly because of impatience)
I then enter workshop mode and select the object that is unassigned to move and place quickly

After these happen, all settlers in the settlement start becoming unassigned, usually first with food, than defense, then stores.