Is having the right provisioner-type vital?

I read all across the communities, that people use sentry robots for some routes and ghouls for others. Or a Mr. Handy for spectacle island.

Provisioners can ONLY die by your hand afaik and according to the wiki. Is this an 'RPG' thing, or is there an actual reason to send in robots as provisioners? I don't care if my provisioner gets knocked down every 5 seconds, as long as I have my junk and mods available over all my settlements.

Solution 1:

Robots can't equip miniguns so I don't see why you'd want to. The only reason I can guess is if "settlers" of different ethnicities have different stats (which afaik, is either unknown or a confirmed no). But if say ghouls have the highest endurance, why would you use anyone else unless you're trying to send some 'humans', who might have higher strength, off with melee weapons.

It's vital to role play only. It looks kinda funny (anyway) when anything other than a robot surfaces from the water at the island.

If all you care about is the supply line, it doesn't matter in the slightest. As soon as you assign them and until you ever attack them, you have a supply line. I was going to equip all of mine with miniguns basically patrolling the waste, but I got lazy.

Solution 2:

It is kind of important. If the provisioner gets knocked down, the supply line will be temporarily broken. Annoyingly, this can bug up provision lines quite a bit.

However, provisioners mostly (only?) get knocked down when you personally come across them in the wasteland and thereby spawn all kinds of nasties near them. If you are aware and go kill whatever is attacking the provisioner, they will get up again when the danger is gone.

Also, avoid assigning them to very long routes. Instead try to connect each settlement to the closest one, so you get a network of short routes. Having more than one route might also be wise for key settlements in dangerous areas, depending on how many settlers you can spare.

So it is a good idea to hand them some armor and decent weapons.

Using your own robot companions from the DLC as provisioners is perhaps a bit overkill, as they are extremely powerful but also costly. Unless you like building lots of robots :) You can also use companions, preferably those that you don't like and don't intend to take with you.

Solution 3:

As far as I know, it is always nice to find one or your twin laser gatling equipped provisionner, while wandering. A little help is always good to have.