It seems if I don't pump water from the pumps I put next to crops, the plants die.

I have people assigned to take care of the plants but you can't assign someone to man the water pumps.

I have to make sure to go pump water wherever I have crops in a settlement because it seems the attendants I assign don't take care of watering.

WHY NOT?

That needs to be fixed.

Also on guard towers I can't put a gun emplacement on top of any of them.

Again

WHY NOT?

There doesn't seem to be enough room to put a gun on a guard tower.

That seems broken to me.

what? I didn't know I was expected to water the plants! I knew if a plant was not assigned, it would eventually die, so I never planted more than I had ratio of settler to farm them.

hmmm...not sure how to handle this one.

A.) Are you sure you are playing Fallout 4?

B.) Water is only necessary for crops...only settlers happiness. Also, build your own guard tower. The one for settlers is...for settlers.

C.) My brain...wat the wat...please be a troll or a cia misinformation agent

Pick one.

Err no the water is needed for settlers not the crops, if you don't have enough settlers assigned to the crops the excess will die off and the guard towers are for guards, if you want a tower for your turrets you have to build your own.........concrete foundation behind a junk wall should give you something similar to a guard tower with space to mount turrets.

1) You don't need to pump water to keep your plants alive. You may think they're dying because you can't access them through the workshop and they don't say harvest, but, give it a day or so, they'll be back! If they're dead, especially through an attack, they'll say repair (which doesn't make any sense to me, but, hey, whatcha gonna do). That has been my experience. That's probably why you don't assign settlers to do it. My pumps are always over by the bathrooms. Makes more sense to me.

2) My trick with guard towers is to place them with walls on either side and then use the high platform to put a gun on one or both sides of it. I mean, after all, you're guards need to use the guard tower. Can you imagine the lack of room!

Now that my internet is finally back on I'm going to start posting settlement pics and videos for people to see. I don't experience nearly as many issues as, apparently, others do with attacks and destruction so, apparently I'm doing something right.

Tip from me though: Be sure your defense is equal to or greater than your water + your food and you'll be fine. Also: Arm your guards well! I don't find that armor does all that much good (thus the men are in harnesses and the women in Road Leathers), but, if you arm them well, most threats are not that big a deal.

Oh! And learn where your spawn points are. That's one of the reasons why, I'll use Sanctuary as an example, I only build in a certain area and put up walls and gates with funneling points. There are 4 that I've discovered at Sanctuary although I suspect there's a 5th somewhere that I haven't discovered yet. Even SuperMutants and Deathclaws can be funneled. With the right combo of turrets and defenders, they don't stand a chance.

I like this suggestion. Has the OP considered putting up a dual concrete foundation at maximum height and putting both a Guard Tower and turrets on it?

I have a couple of those at Red Rocket.

A big thing to remember is to protect those turrets! They are easy for your enemy to destroy if they're out in the open. I usually place mine behind walls on a high platform.

Let me tell you, repairing the heavy guns on the pylons at Sanctuary has practically become a hobby. They are the only ones I don't particularly protect.

You only need the 3 L's. Love, labor and LOADS OF FRICKEN BUG FIXES!!

Well... It is a Bethesda game, after all.

Thanks for the suggestion to build my own towers.

Wonder why they put guard towers in the build menu and didn't give us enough room to give the people assigned to the tower a gun turret so they had some firepower.

In real life, guard towers < would > have guns.

They do if they are manned. You settlers have guns...so...the guard towers have guns...just sayen.

Do your settlers not have guns? Therefore your guard tower would have guns (or at least the person manning it.

Definitely posting some picture on my FB to share this evening. Came up with a neat design that incorporated a turret in to the tower using regular walls and the platform. It protects the turret yet allows the settler to fire over the turret and keeps in in front of them for support. Works very well.

It's not a bad idea for a mod. Add a gun emplacement structure that replicates the Vertibird mounted minigun, and have it require a minigun and 500 5mm rounds as part of its construction components. Make it snap into place on any waist-high fence.

Just imagine if we could do that and have sandbags too... ultimate guard posts

Hmm...

My crops do not require any Settler interaction.

They absolutely do not die.

They don't produce much of anything, only rarely bearing fruit (or, you know, vegetable), but they live.

They just won't be Harvested. If I want that fruit, then I need to pluck it myself.

I have over 100 of each and every crop type at Spectacle Island alone tended by 7 settlers (so far, I will bump the population to around 30ish eventually) and they are still alive. The only "dead" crops I've ever seen have been the casualties from Attacks. Sometimes you can get an attack that you missed or a wild animal attack from a creature that just wandered by rather than a specifically spawned event. Those can cause some crop chaos.

Your posts are amusing, please post more often

Are you over assigning people? There is a maximum tasks that each settler can take on (can't remember how many from the top of my head. I think it is 6 or 8). If you go over this number, it will unassign the previous tasks. It sounds as though you have things unassigned. Hence the crops dying.

1. Build guard tower.

2. Equip a settler assigned to the guard tower an Assault Rifle or Minigun, make sure one compatible round is in their inventory. I like putting mine in either cage/spike armor or a military/army fatigue, army helmet, and buttressed raider armor to help them stand out. I haven't actually tried commanding one into Power armor now that I think about it... I always have plenty lying around.

3. Enjoy your new NPC-manned MG nest. One settler can patrol up to three. Turrets are still more efficient, just not as cool as a minigun toting NPC. Nor as mobile. But at least they don't eat valuable population.

As for crops, they don't die on their own. They're "destroyed" often through an attack on the settlement. The weirdness of "repairing" them is only so that we don't have to remember where we placed them. Game play before lore... or in this case base-line common expectations.

I have plenty dead crops at my Santuary and it has never been attacked. It has been mentioned in previous threads that the crop will die if it is left unattended. The crop will then stay the same in appearance, but it will not be workable. You are also not able to get rid of them. When I first started building up Sanctuary, I was planting crops left, right & centre thinking it would put my food stats up. I then realised I had to allocate the crop to a setler, but had soon got confused who was tending what. As a result I have as many dead crops (if not more) than I have workable ones.

sometimes its beneficial to have turret next to guard post, sometimes not, just depends on the terrain and strategy. The guard posts act more as waypoints for guard patrols unless there's a particular terrain or an elevated guard post in the middle of a wall (for example) where it's the only possible defense point for an attack from that side.

Here's an example of a turret mounted on a bridge platform behind wall, next to elevated guard posts:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=580901632

I try to give my guards miniguns and modified for the full auto mode. They are killers with the miniguns. If not a minigun some sort of automatic gun. I usually give my caravans miniguns as well or fatmans. I do not use fatmans so why not give it to them.

edit

At sanctuary I like to post turrets on the river bank wall posts

Ah, THAT is what you are talking about!

Those are not "dead crops".

That is a bug.

It just happens randomly sometimes, although a great deal less these days after the patches.

It's better to place them around the front of the roof overhang as they will shoot over the junk fence and can hit the super mutants in their spawn spot from there.

Not the point here but just saying

My Sanctuary has more dead crops than good ones ??

All of this is meaningless, since all the game does is number crunching. As soon as the numbers on top of your screen are yellow and not red, you're good.

And, as has been said in different threads. defenses are useless if you're not there for the attack. So, if you're not into building defenses for the sheer enjoyment, the actual placement of turrets doesn't matter. Since this is the no spoiler section, I have one settlement that's only accessable through one door. My turrets are aimed at that, but raiders somehow materialized smack in the middle of said settlement. Probably airlifted there.

Here's a link to a discussion thread of the bug with a couple of workarounds for the problem:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1558146-cant-move-food-plants-any-advice/?hl=%2Bcrop+%2Bbug#entry24566502