Thanks for all the responses.

I had thought we needed the water pumps in order to grow crops. I have 3 pumps for each row of crops -- and I assigned settlers to take care of them.

It's strange they will tend the plants but they will not harvest them.

We have to do that manually.

It isn't a bug, necessarily, but rather a deficiency. The settlers who tend the crops should harvest them and put the results in the workshop.

It takes way too much time to go to each settlement and harvest your crops every day.

I've got about 4 settlements and it takes all morning just going back and forth harvesting and making adhesive because you can't do anything to armor or guns without adhesive. THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH ADHESIVE.

Have to keep adding shacks and beds to keep the people happy. I do turn off the recruitment beacons when I think there are enough settlers but it seems some just wander in and sometimes I decide I need more tato plants and have to turn it back on and get more settlers or create another settlement and those take too much time away from questing.

It's like you have to choose being being a Sim City wannabe and spend your time building and enhancing settlements ( which is ok if you like that type of game ) or questing to achieve the games objectives.

Difficult to do both.

But apparently I could scrap most of those water pumps. At Sanctuary I have a couple of them in the river -- big ones but other places aren't close enough to the water so I need a few of those hand pumps but they don't need to be where the crops are. I suppose the settlers haul water to the plants as part of tending them.

No matter how hard I pumped it nothing ever seem to come out. I saw nothing grow so I thought it was broken or a glitch.


Then I built a clinic and what do you know everything started working again.

The gun turrets that you can build are automated. They're not operated by people.

The settlers have their own guns. Putting a gun turret on a guard tower doesn't leave any room for the guard to stand there. This isn't an oversight...it's how it's intended to be.

And as others have mentioned, you definitely don't need to water your crops. You simply need to assign settlers to tending the crops.

You also don't need to harvest the crops manually. The settlers will tend to that as well. If you pay attention to the numbers of a given crop in your workbench, it will change.

I agree that settlers will harvest crops, but not necessarily as soon as they're back up. I have found through my runthroughs, that, if I take the 30 seconds it takes to harvest the crops and drop them myself, there isn't the downtime or wait time getting them in to inventory. It's kind of like the scavenging station. Great idea, but the scavenging is nominally better than just leaving a settler unassigned since they're going to scavenge anyhow.

no spoilers but the solution to adhesives is closely linked to the biggest reason people farm in the first place


also, your settlers eat crops. they only harvest and store excess crops. Its always beneficial to farm more yourself and you have to at the very least collect the excess crops in storage before they add more.