Home » Fallout 4 » How to setup water purification to make caps and healing items
You might not consider Purified Water to be such an important item in Fallout 4. We’ll try to convince you otherwise with tips and tricks on water purification and production in your settlement.
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If you are a casual settlement builder in Fallout 4 you might not have considered that some of the things you build can actually help your adventuring greatly. The main thing to remember here is that the amount of water you produce in your settlement, minus the number of settlers equals the number of purified water you will find in your Workshop’s inventory every few days. Purified water can then be used to heal you for 40HP, without any RAD penalty, or you can sell it at vendors for 6 caps per can or more. Lets get into how you can use this resource to make your Fallout 4 gameplay just a bit easier.
Beginners guide to water production
Very early on in the game you will have to build out the Sanctuary settlement and add various resources to make your initial settlers there happy. Part of this is building two water pumps to meet your settler’s needs. If you come back to this quest later (around level 7-10) you should have enough resources to build a Water Purifier facility in the river south of the houses in Sanctuary. This will provide more water than you need for your settlers and all the excess will be stored in your Workshop as Purified Water. You can come by every day or two of in-game time and just pick this up to have as great healing item in the Commonwealth.
Regular Water Purifier requires 2x Oil, 2x Ceramic, 5x Rubber, 2x Copper, 10x Steel, and 2x Cloth. These are fairly commonplace and you can get them by scrapping stuff already in your settlement. You will probably have enough materials to build several, which will make more Purified Water for you (I recommend at least 2). You will also need a Power Generator to power these Purifiers. Don’t forget to connect a power wire between them!
Screenshot shows the materials you need foe the Water Purifier and the map location where you can build one in Sanctuary.
Don’t forget to build a power generator and connect the power line to the purifier.
If you build a large number of water purifiers you will have so much Purified Water that you can sell it at vendors for extra bottlecaps. With perks that increase your barter you can make couple of thousand caps every few days this way. Important thing to note is that you should have your settlement defenses higher than your water+food production or you might get raided a lot.
Advanced water production
You are a dedicated settlement builder and have invested into Charisma heavily to have access to building supply routes and shops for your settlements? You based your build on access to perks that grant the ability to build everything for your settlement? Purified Water production will pay back even more for you. Sanctuary is a great settlement in this regard because it has access to open water, which means you can build an Industrial Water Purifier. You can do this in any settlement with access to open water. It provides 40 water production for 5 power and requires the following materials to build: 4x Oil, 2x Ceramic, 10x rubber, 4x Copper, 20x steel, 4x Cloth and 6x Screw. Most of these materials can be gained from scrapping stuff at Sanctuary, like houses and tires for rubber and steel. You can get Oil from Gas Canisters and Ceramic is scrapped from toilet bowls or coffee mugs. Screws can be salvaged from your unneeded weapons, if you have the Scrapper perk (INT 5), or from scrapping Desk Fans, Globes, Typewriters, Toy Cars and such.
Road to high profits is having two points in the CHA 6 Local Leader perk and building stores in your settlement. Collect Purified Water from your Workshop inventory and sell it to your own vendors. You will get better prices and you will get a small tax bonus for each item you sell. All of the extra bottlecaps from you selling your own settlers purified water will be stored in the Workshop and can be picked up every day or two. This way you maxed out the efficiency of water production’s usefulness.
Use shops in your settlement to make profit from purified water.
We would like to thank jredwards for posting this topic on reddit and sharing the water purification tip as well as Auparo
i personally like the jet farm better for a few reasons A you can use jet in combat since lilkly you will have a ton of it B beinga water dealer sounds much less cooler then a drug dealer and just feels right to be evil and be a drug dealer instead of killing everyone in the wasteland and selling the survivors the water
I have made a HUGE purifier plant that produces around 450 water on sanctuary, do I really need to make a defence over 450? I am with 250 of defense right now
you do not, the defence rating needs to be higher to stop them attacking in the first place but when they attack they die on the defences fast unless a horde of deathclaws attack
The Water Purifier production system is awesome. I’m also working on building an uber farm in Sanctuary. After reading everyone’s questions and advice; I can only say, “Thank you guys”! There’s really a lot of great advice here. Something that helps me is Connie at Abernathy Farms since I can buy bulk supplies from her. What also helps is Abernathy Farm isn’t far from Trudy’s Diner. Trudy also sells lots of other building supplies like copper. So, that’s two really close by places to sell water and rack up building supplies with minimum chance of enemies, (other than the required missions). I’m stalling on Concord although I did get the Power Armor Suit from just outside the Radar Station when chasing down the locket for Blake Abernathy. The reason I’m avoiding Concord right now is to finish building Sanctuary before bringing in settlers. Well, time to go build three more water purifiers on the right side of the bridge but I’m really glad to know I need to start putting up defenses. I wasn’t sure if I would have that problem since it’s back up in the corner.
Where’s my water? I’m not connected to any other settlements and I have 4 industrial water makers putting out 169. There is nothing in my work station. Does anyone know what could have happened? I waited a full 24 hours before checking.
This person is the only person who has actually answered the question good on you mate You were spot on too
I had to wait 3 days away from water producing settlement and sure enough there was 847 purified water
Up to level 30’ish or so, a medium generator set on a shack foundation (buildings/wood/floors) in the river at Sanctuary and the large purifier should meet your needs. That’s only 4 pieces: foundation, power, water, and power line. Big power and two purifiers will of course be even better. You can scale up as you want. After 30 you should have centralized power to protect it, but for the casual builder, easy water supply is real simple. Adding defense to remote water stations doesn’t seem to be necessary at default difficulty.
To each their own play-style in the wasteland, but I chug pure water. By level 50 you can have 500 set aside in a cooler/box at every major settlement you build.
Wish it was this easy. I just built a purifier and a medium generator, with tons and tons of connectors so wires can reach longer than 6 feet, but even with it connected, I hear “this won’t work without power”. Says it requires 2 electricity, and my generator gives 5.
not true, says it requires power, not that it requires “1” power, so 5 through 6 would not go down to -1, same theory as light bulbs, if you was correct no one would have lights on ( most settlements i build have well over 100 lights each in)
One thing that can make it seem like you are not “earning” as much water as you should is having tons of supply lines. I have one line from every settlement back to Sanctuary (my hub), and somwtimes forgot to set up settlements with their own water. If you do not have enough water your supply line will pull the difference from somewhere else (it works the same with food). Your settlement will be just fine, but that is less excess water to sell. I make sure to have 20 water and food at each settlement so that my settlements that produce 400 water each actually give me 380 extra water every cycle. It is the same with food. If you want your settlement to store extra corn, tatos, and muttfruit so that you can make glue you need to have those in addition to what your settlements use, otherwise you are stuck running up and down farms picking crops (which you can of course do anyways, but those are a bonus in my eyes).
Thanks, John! That was exactly my problem! I had supply lines connecting every settlement and they were sucking up all of Sanctuary’s water production.
No plumbing necessary 🙂 Though the whole process can be finicky at some locations. I am producing 130+ units in two locations and when I show up to each, there are only 5-10 waters in the workbench. A third location with similar production yields 50-150 in the same time frame. Now in Sanctuary Hills I have production up to a little over 900 (the river towards the back is IDEAL, both sides of the bridge,) and have picked up as much as 650 units at a time (I travel back frequently.) Now I’ve heard there’s a cap at somewhere around 500, but I’m not seeing it in Sanctuary. It may have something to do with the size of the settlement as Sanctuary is the largest I’ve come across so far. As for selling them back, definitely invest in the biggest store of each type (general, weapon, armor, clothes, and medic,) and while in the barter menu with each, RB to invest 500 (one time on each and the effect lasts,) and their cap…well, cap will be 500 higher. I’m up to 27,000 caps right now without glitching. It’s nice being able to just buy power cores and ammo as I like. Oh, you’ll need high charisma and the perk for Local Leader (think that’s the name of it.) It is WORTH the time and work invested. Oh, and grab the perk to buy lower and sell higher… when dealing with 1000’s of units, the subtle difference in profits becomes huge.
Regular Water Purifier requires 2x Oil, 2x Ceramic, 5x Rubber, 2x Copper, 10x Steel, and 2x Cloth. These are fairly commonplace and you can get them by scrapping stuff already in your settlement. You will probably have enough materials to build several, which will make more Purified Water for you (I recommend at least 2). You will also need a Power Generator to power these Purifiers. Don’t forget to connect a power wire between them!
You are a dedicated settlement builder and have invested into Charisma heavily to have access to building supply routes and shops for your settlements? You based your build on access to perks that grant the ability to build everything for your settlement? Purified Water production will pay back even more for you. Sanctuary is a great settlement in this regard because it has access to open water, which means you can build an Industrial Water Purifier. You can do this in any settlement with access to open water. It provides 40 water production for 5 power and requires the following materials to build: 4x Oil, 2x Ceramic, 10x rubber, 4x Copper, 20x steel, 4x Cloth and 6x Screw. Most of these materials can be gained from scrapping stuff at Sanctuary, like houses and tires for rubber and steel. You can get Oil from Gas Canisters and Ceramic is scrapped from toilet bowls or coffee mugs. Screws can be salvaged from your unneeded weapons, if you have the Scrapper perk (INT 5), or from scrapping Desk Fans, Globes, Typewriters, Toy Cars and such.
i personally like the jet farm better for a few reasons A you can use jet in combat since lilkly you will have a ton of it B beinga water dealer sounds much less cooler then a drug dealer and just feels right to be evil and be a drug dealer instead of killing everyone in the wasteland and selling the survivors the water
I have made a HUGE purifier plant that produces around 450 water on sanctuary, do I really need to make a defence over 450? I am with 250 of defense right now
you do not, the defence rating needs to be higher to stop them attacking in the first place but when they attack they die on the defences fast unless a horde of deathclaws attack
The Water Purifier production system is awesome. I’m also working on building an uber farm in Sanctuary. After reading everyone’s questions and advice; I can only say, “Thank you guys”! There’s really a lot of great advice here. Something that helps me is Connie at Abernathy Farms since I can buy bulk supplies from her. What also helps is Abernathy Farm isn’t far from Trudy’s Diner. Trudy also sells lots of other building supplies like copper. So, that’s two really close by places to sell water and rack up building supplies with minimum chance of enemies, (other than the required missions). I’m stalling on Concord although I did get the Power Armor Suit from just outside the Radar Station when chasing down the locket for Blake Abernathy. The reason I’m avoiding Concord right now is to finish building Sanctuary before bringing in settlers. Well, time to go build three more water purifiers on the right side of the bridge but I’m really glad to know I need to start putting up defenses. I wasn’t sure if I would have that problem since it’s back up in the corner.
I built everything right and went and played leveled 40 to 43 came no water. I slept 8 hours no water? I’m in sanctuary.
Do you have your Purifier connected to a power supply? Is the power supply running?
Where’s my water? I’m not connected to any other settlements and I have 4 industrial water makers putting out 169. There is nothing in my work station. Does anyone know what could have happened? I waited a full 24 hours before checking.
In the latest updates, I think you need to be out of the area and then wait 3 days for the water to refill
This person is the only person who has actually answered the question good on you mate You were spot on too
I had to wait 3 days away from water producing settlement and sure enough there was 847 purified water
I haven’t don’t it yet, but Spectacle Island makes the perfect place for water purification.
Up to level 30’ish or so, a medium generator set on a shack foundation (buildings/wood/floors) in the river at Sanctuary and the large purifier should meet your needs. That’s only 4 pieces: foundation, power, water, and power line. Big power and two purifiers will of course be even better. You can scale up as you want. After 30 you should have centralized power to protect it, but for the casual builder, easy water supply is real simple. Adding defense to remote water stations doesn’t seem to be necessary at default difficulty.
To each their own play-style in the wasteland, but I chug pure water. By level 50 you can have 500 set aside in a cooler/box at every major settlement you build.
Wish it was this easy. I just built a purifier and a medium generator, with tons and tons of connectors so wires can reach longer than 6 feet, but even with it connected, I hear “this won’t work without power”. Says it requires 2 electricity, and my generator gives 5.
Are you using pylons? They consume power, says so in the build menu. By the time the 5 goes through 6 pylons, yer at -1.
not true, says it requires power, not that it requires “1” power, so 5 through 6 would not go down to -1, same theory as light bulbs, if you was correct no one would have lights on ( most settlements i build have well over 100 lights each in)
One thing that can make it seem like you are not “earning” as much water as you should is having tons of supply lines. I have one line from every settlement back to Sanctuary (my hub), and somwtimes forgot to set up settlements with their own water. If you do not have enough water your supply line will pull the difference from somewhere else (it works the same with food). Your settlement will be just fine, but that is less excess water to sell. I make sure to have 20 water and food at each settlement so that my settlements that produce 400 water each actually give me 380 extra water every cycle. It is the same with food. If you want your settlement to store extra corn, tatos, and muttfruit so that you can make glue you need to have those in addition to what your settlements use, otherwise you are stuck running up and down farms picking crops (which you can of course do anyways, but those are a bonus in my eyes).
Thanks, John! That was exactly my problem! I had supply lines connecting every settlement and they were sucking up all of Sanctuary’s water production.
how often will i give out the purified water?/ how often can i collect
Every 24 hours in-game (just sleep in bed and collect)
thx fam
No plumbing necessary 🙂 Though the whole process can be finicky at some locations. I am producing 130+ units in two locations and when I show up to each, there are only 5-10 waters in the workbench. A third location with similar production yields 50-150 in the same time frame. Now in Sanctuary Hills I have production up to a little over 900 (the river towards the back is IDEAL, both sides of the bridge,) and have picked up as much as 650 units at a time (I travel back frequently.) Now I’ve heard there’s a cap at somewhere around 500, but I’m not seeing it in Sanctuary. It may have something to do with the size of the settlement as Sanctuary is the largest I’ve come across so far. As for selling them back, definitely invest in the biggest store of each type (general, weapon, armor, clothes, and medic,) and while in the barter menu with each, RB to invest 500 (one time on each and the effect lasts,) and their cap…well, cap will be 500 higher. I’m up to 27,000 caps right now without glitching. It’s nice being able to just buy power cores and ammo as I like. Oh, you’ll need high charisma and the perk for Local Leader (think that’s the name of it.) It is WORTH the time and work invested. Oh, and grab the perk to buy lower and sell higher… when dealing with 1000’s of units, the subtle difference in profits becomes huge.
Is piping to the house necessary??
EXTREMELY Useful information. Thank you for the article!