I can't be the first person to have figured this out, but since I have, I wanted to share it with the other slowpokes who didn't get the memo.

Very simple way to generate lots of purified water.

-Claim and clear the starlight drive in. Especially, scrap the barrels from the pool in the middle to remove the radiation hazard.

-Set up an industrial water purifier in the pool, and a medium generator.

-Surround the pool with fences and whatever defense you feel you need. I used 9 turrets on platforms inside the fence. (I'm not sure if this is necessary, since as far as I've seen, settlements with no people do not get attacked. If anyone knows better, feel free to tell me.)

-A day later, go pick up the 29 purified water at the workbench- at least that's what I found there.

-Do NOT set up a beacon or any beds. Keep the population at 0. Since there's no one there to drink it, all of the output of the purifier goes into the workbench. I haven't yet worked out whether it stacks, or if you have to empty it daily, or any of that sort of thing.

It's a well-known money-making method since the release day of the game or so. There are players with entire purifier farms, and I'm talking about dozens of them. A cheap way to make sure money will never be an issue, but it's a single-player game after all... Still, I'm sure there's people who appreciate your effort. Also, it'd be worth to add Supply Lines are also to be avoided there as if I'm not mistaken such resources are shared with other settlements. So Settlers from other places might consume the purified water.

Don't you have a warning triangle in your Pip-Boy near the settlement's name? I've never used the Red Rocket (read: zero's all over the place), then I bough a Junkyard Dog and sent him there. After that, the already buggy Settlement display went nuts. Not only falsely registered the dog as a person (who then whined about the lack of Water and thus lowered the Happiness), but it didn't display the +5 Defence either. After travelling there the situation seemed to normalize, although I got warnings to Happiness. What can you do to make a dog happier? Built a house for him. Done. As I couldn't even dress him like Dogmeat, there was nothing left to do to improve the morale. Now everything is displayed correctly, but he triangle next to Red Rocket seems to be constant.

I was wondering about that since I was considering setting up totally automated water farms on my next playthrough, since I'm planning to have only a few settlements with populations to cut down on the Recruitment Beacon Bug I've been running into.

I have experienced two attacks at Outpost Zimonja after I cleared out the raiders there. I have not built the settlers recruitment beacon to complete that Minuteman mission, but I have been building / fortifying the settlement there. It is almost complete, but I am having issues with putting up walls around corners (Bethesda needs to fix that issue). I suppose I am a bit of a perfectionist... I will not build the beacon until the settlement is built to my satifaction.

Anywaste... I am not sure if the attacks are just random encounters or if they were actually raiders set upon attacking my settlement simply because I was there scraping stuff and working on the settlement.

As for Starlight Drive... I came up with the same idea a few days ago.

thanks for the tip. i did not know you could make purify water and make money with it. plus i did not know to remove barrels to get rid of the rads . i think i missed that memo.

Actually, a way that I like
Set up 2 purifiers in Sanctuary, Castle, Starlight and any other place you can. My needs are met by visiting just two places. While the others are still producing, so I never run out off water.

And what do I spend all the water on
Material shipments. Plus whatever caps the vendor has, in order to built stores in my settlements. Bars always go up first.

With a average chrisma, you'll get about 10 caps a bottle. But add clothing, and graqe mentats, I'm getting 16 caps per. And right now, have over 500 bottles waiting for me in sanctuary.

I have a lot of purifiers at sanctuary. they give me around 200 water each time I visit, I have two at the castle and it gives 25.

If you remove the water and put in another container it will produce more at next visit but it has an cap who looks like depend on number of purifiers.

Best to place them at an location who is your main base and you visit often, nice to do this early to buy legendary weapons.

The Castle and Sanctuary are better for the amount of purifiers you can place.

But at Starlight I packed as many as I could into the watering hole, giving 100 water and then built a building around it.

As yet unfinished but it's 3 storeys so far.

Several generators on the ground level.

Turret positions on level 3.

Walled off the perimeter with a few gaps to bottleneck attackers.

Probably the best water purifier location is the Warwick Homestead way down in the south, since you can place the purifiers around the outside (in the surrounding water) and within two large water filled containers....I connected the two ruined walkways so that I could use the other buildings as well. There is also the swamp one down south as well since its mostly water.

The best one is Spectacle Island,you can place the largest purifiers basically around the whole island,atleast a couple dozen

I've got Sanctuary producing about 900 Water which translates to about 675 for me every day. It's a nice little income at 10 caps a pop, especially since Trashcan Carla has decided to make Sanctuary her semi-permanent home (I don't know if it's a bug, or what, but she is just always there, like all the time now).

I get red "0" indicators at the empty settlements, but since no one's actually there, I figure the low happiness rating doesn't matter. But I do have a phantom living at Outpost Zimonja- the display shows 1, but there's no one there when I look.

I've wondered the same thing about attacks that happen while I'm at a settlement, or just as I'm showing up. Are they the same as the "defend the settlement" bits that pop up from time to time, or do they trigger because the player is there?

I didn't realize water production would stack directly like that- to be honest, just haven't been interested enough in the settlements to experiment that much. But aren't you inviting attacks by making that much of a resource? Or do you just make massive defenses to scare them off?