General information about settlement resources in Fallout 4. How your settlement resources define your settlement, how they interact with each other, and how to manage them.

The wellbeing and production capabilities of your settlements are described by eight resources: [People], [Food], [Water], [Power], [Defense], [Beds], [Happiness] and [Size]. Most of these resources are, either directly or indirectly, used to determine Happiness, which is the one metric that represents the wellbeing of your settlement, and even then, only at the absolute extremes (if your Happiness is too low, the settlement may revolt). As a rule of thumb, you need one Food, Water, Defense and Bed for each settler at your settlement (one settler = one People), with Power only being necessary if you need it to provide electricity to some other resource-providing object like a Water Purifier or Laser Turret.

While Happiness rates the average contentment of your settlers, you need settlers to generate some of the resources that in turn keep them happy. Namely, one settler can cultivate a number of crops amounting to up to six Food, and while it’s not very efficient, some objects that create Defense require settlers assigned. Aside from Food, however, your settlers are generally free to be assigned as you see fit - expect to assign the first two settlers in every settlement to Food, after which you can diversify. People are the production factor in your settlement, and their number determines and assignments determine what, and how much a settlement produces.

Food, Water and Beds all contribute directly to your settlement’s Happiness rating - as mentioned earlier, you need one for each settler a settlement has. Any excess Food and Water production will result in said resources being stored in your Workbench, where they’ll be used as reserves for your settlement in lean times, or, better yet, you can harvest them for your own personal use.

You also need one Defense per settler in your settlement, but this is merely the soft minimum to avoid losing Happiness - excess Defense will reduce the frequency of raids on your settlement, and, depending on the actual source of the Defense, contribute directly to combat.

Finally, there’s Size. Size isn’t a descriptive rating, it’s a proscriptive one: the fuller the Size meter, the less you can build at that settlement.

All of these resources will be discussed in further detail on their own pages, but generally as long as you have one Food, Water and Bed per settler (People), and as much Defense as you can fit (Size) in a settlement, you should be fine. Anything exceeding that is pure profit.