Fallout 4 Food and Water in Settlements

Like any living thing, you and your settlers need food and water to survive (and to be happy).

However, ways to optimize your water and food production may not appear obvious at first, so we will cover your options in this guide.

(Check out our Fallout 4 Settlements Guide for a full guide on everything you need to put together a settlement and keep things running and under control.)

Harvesting Food for Your Settlement

The most common ways to obtain food are harvesting fruits and vegetables from plants found throughout the wasteland, or simply purchasing them from a vendor.

You do not need to assign a settler to each plant manually. If you assign them to a plant, they will become a gardener, automatically assigned to some plants picked at random in addition to the one you picked.

Maximizing Your Food Production

When planting the food in workshop mode, it will display the amount of food points it will give. You will see the same information when you hover over the plants you already have in your garden.

Starting out, most plants you’ll come across will give 0.5 of food. When building in Sanctuary, there will be some plants by default around the neighborhood you can harvest.

This is important: 6 units of food is the maximum that can be produced by one settler assigned to food production.

In case of most crops, like corn, carrot, melon, and tatos, each settler will be assigned to 12 plants at random. To get the best results, plant crops like these in multiples of 12.

If you are farming mutfruit, each one of your plants can produce 1 unit of food: each one of your settlers will be assigned to 6 of mutfruit plants as a result. You should plan your mutfruit garden in multiples of 6.

Remember that you can take advantage of trade lines you set between settlements: surplus crops from one can be delivered to another. This can become especially important if one of your settlements gets raided, since crops can be damaged during raids.

Producing Water for the Settlement

In order to obtain water for your settlement, you’ll need a water purifier. Like food, water purifiers give different amounts of water points.

While you do not need any settlers assigned to them, these machines require power, so make sure to build a strong enough generator to handle whichever size you build.

In order to place the purifier, you need to find a water source around the settlement. in the case of Sanctuary, there is a river that flows beneath the bridge at the entrance of the settlement.

In the event of a settlement having no water source to place a purifier, the alternative solution is to build water pumps. These pumps can be placed on dirt surfaces and require no power or water source to work.

However, keep in mind that water pumps produce only 3 water each, compared to the purifier’s output of 40. You need 13-14 of these pumps to match the production of a single purifier.