How do I get the warnings that a settlement is under attack? Right now I'm still early game but focusing heavily on just building up settlements.

Primary is just Sanctuary, which has 16 Pop, 35 Food, 40 Water and 75 DEF. No attacks of any kind that I'm aware of.

The smaller farms however keep getting hit but I never know it until I see the " ! " by their name looking in the Pipboy. I go there and some of the turrets will be broken, some of the crops messed up, some water pumps broken, etc. So I fix the places up, add a few more turrets, but I never know when they are being attacked so I can actually help them.

Is there something I'm supposed to do to get notified? I'm about scared to even start more settlements since I can't seem to manage just a couple without issues.

Conquering the castle provides the communications tower. Before that you probably don't get messages.

Ok. I've been holding off on setting up the beacon at the drive-in and I using get the castle quest after that.

I guess I could set up the beacon at the drive-in ... turn it off, and then go turn that in to get the castle quest.

I do want to do something with the drive-in eventually. Especially after seeing what some players have done there, but not until I'm higher level and can really make the place up right.

The warning is subtle- it pops up briefly in the upper right and becomes a misc quest. Just fwi, attack frequency seems to be based on your defense to resources ratio- aka if you have more defense then food+water, attacks seem to be less likely.

Yeah it's easy to miss. I've been known to miss it as well quite often. A better warning system would be in order. Like one of those emergency weather broadcasts, except for settlements lol.

You can actually get those if you reclaim the Castle and then set up some radios in all of your settlements tuned to the Minutemen station. (They're under Misc Decorations)

However, I've run into a problem where the radios won't play unless I play that station on my Pip Boy while standing near them, which sort of defeats the purpose. Hopefully it's an easy bug to patch.

I can't stand using Minutemen radio as it generated a never-ending stream of radiant quests. It seems to generate a new quest between each song until I have 3 active quests. If I complete one, it generates a new one. I suppose I could just not turn-in a quest though... like I do with Preston's radiant quests.

As far as settlement attack quests though, I've just gotten into the habit of checking my misc quests once per game-day to look for attacks.