Fallout 4 Settlement Supply Lines Guide: Provisioners and Shared Resources

Supply lines fix Fallout 4's most annoying chore: hauling junk. Normally every settlement keeps its own pile of steel, adhesive and concrete, so building up a new spot means fast traveling back to your main base over and over like a pack mule. One perk and one settler change all that. Send that settler walking between two towns and every linked workshop shares its materials from then on. Here's how the whole thing works, from the perk chart to the stuff that still won't share no matter what you do.

Unlocking Local Leader

Everything about supply lines sits behind one perk: Local Leader, in the Charisma column of your perk chart. Rank 1 gives you the ability to set up supply lines between your workshop settlements. That's the whole gate. Rank 2 exists too, but it's about shops, not supply lines.

| Rank | What you need | What you get | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | Charisma 6 | Set up supply lines between your settlements | | 2 | Charisma 6, level 14 | Build stores and workstations in settlements |

Getting to Charisma 6

The only requirement for rank 1 is Charisma 6, and there's no level floor on it. If you know you want settlements, put 6 points into Charisma on the registration form at the start of the game, and you can grab the perk as soon as your first perk point shows up. (Yes, you fill out your own stats at birth. It's that kind of game.)

Started with less Charisma? You can still get there. The Charisma bobblehead bumps the stat by one, the "You're SPECIAL!" book you can grab early on adds a point to any stat you like, and every level-up lets you drop a perk point straight into a SPECIAL stat instead of a perk. Going from 4 to 6 takes a couple of level-ups. Not the end of the world.

So who should bother? If you like base building, take this perk early, because supply lines change the whole game. If you couldn't care less about settlements, skip it and spend the points on guns instead. Your call.

Rank 2 can wait

Rank 2 shows up at level 14 and lets you build stores and workstations: trading posts, armor and weapons shops, bars, clinics, plus crafting benches in settlements that don't already have them. Some of the bigger shops want even more perks on top. The emporium-grade stores need Cap Collector 2, clinics need Medic 1, and power armor stations need Armorer 1.

None of that touches supply lines. Rank 1 alone hooks your towns together. Rank 2 is for when you want shops cranking out caps, which is nice side income but a separate project.

Assigning a Provisioner

A provisioner is just a settler with a walking job. You pick someone, point them at another settlement, and they spend their life strolling back and forth between the two. The game renames them from "Settler" to "Provisioner" so you can tell them apart at a glance.

Four things need to be true first:

• You own at least two settlements, meaning you've claimed their workshops.
• You have at least one spare settler, meaning one who isn't currently assigned to a crop, guard post or shop.
• You have Local Leader rank 1.
• The two settlements aren't already directly connected by a line.

Then it's a few seconds of work:

1. Open the workshop menu in the settlement you're sending from.
2. Highlight an unassigned settler.
3. Press Q on PC, RB on Xbox, or R1 on PlayStation. A list of your owned settlements pops up.
4. Pick the destination. Done.

The new provisioner grabs a pack, often with a pack brahmin tagging along, and heads out. Sharing kicks in pretty much right away too, so you don't sit around waiting for them to physically walk there. The walking is mostly for looks and the occasional fight. If the numbers seem slow to update, wait or sleep an hour and check again. The interface gets lazy about refreshing.

Picking who to send

Any unassigned adult settler can run a route, named characters included. Robots built with the Automatron add-on work too, and they're a popular pick since you can build them exactly how you want.

Do yourself a favor and gear them up. Talk to a provisioner and you can trade with them like a companion, so hand off a decent gun and some armor. They'll fight raiders, mutants and whatever else blocks the road, and a well-armed courier usually wins that fight. The nice part: provisioners can't be killed by enemies. They drop to a knee when hurt, then get back up, same as companions. The not-nice part: your own mines will finish them off for real. Keep mines away from roads your caravans use.

Cutting or changing a line

To kill a supply line, reassign the provisioner to any normal job, like a crop, a guard post or a shop counter. The route vanishes. The catch is finding them, since they spend all day somewhere between two towns. Pop open the world map and press C on PC, LB on Xbox, or L1 on PlayStation to see every line you've got. If you own the Vault-Tec Workshop add-on, its Population Management System lets you reassign people without chasing anyone across the map.

What Settlements Share

The craft pool

This is the big one. While you're building at a workshop or crafting at any bench inside a linked settlement, you can pull from the junk, aid and misc items in every linked settlement's workbench, not just the local one. Junk gets used automatically too, so that duct tape in Sanctuary counts as adhesive when you're building a chair at Red Rocket. You never have to scrap anything by hand first.

Food and drink work as shared ingredients the same way. Razorgrain stored at Sanctuary plus dirty water stored at Abernathy Farm means you can cook noodle cups at Red Rocket. The ingredients travel as numbers, not as items. That distinction matters more than you'd think, and it's coming up in a second, because it's the part that trips people up.

Food and water totals

Surplus food and water production feeds the whole network. You don't need every town growing its own food. One serious farm settlement can cover half the map, and one place stacked with water purifiers can top up everyone's drink. This is the mechanic that lets you specialize towns instead of planting the same boring mutfruit patch everywhere.

Heads up on the Pip-Boy, though. The workshop menu under Data only lists each settlement's own local production, so a town can look short on food and still be perfectly fed. Green text means the network is covering the gap. A warning triangle next to the resource means there's a real shortage in that settlement, and that's the one to fix.

What stays put

Plenty of stuff does not share, and it's better to know before you build plans around it:

| Shared across the network | Stays where you left it | | --- | --- | | Junk and the components inside it | Weapons and apparel | | Aid items, as crafting ingredients | Ammo and fusion cores | | Misc items, as crafting ingredients | Power armor pieces | | Food and water production totals | Store income and vendor stock |

The big gotcha: you can't withdraw a physical item from another settlement's workbench. Sharing only happens while you're crafting or building. So you can cook with that razorgrain in Sanctuary from anywhere on the network, but you can't walk up to Red Rocket's workbench and pull the raw razorgrain out to sell it. If you want a specific stimpak, gun or outfit for your next trip, it stays wherever you stashed it.

One more thing: store income from shops lands in that settlement's own workbench, so you still have to walk around collecting it by hand.

One network, not pairs

Sharing spreads through the whole chain. Connect A to B, B to C, and C to D, and all four settlements share with each other even though A and D have no direct line. You never need to connect every pair of towns, which saves you a ton of settlers.

The network even crosses maps. The Commonwealth, the Island from Far Harbor, and Nuka-World can all join one shared pool, which is handy when you're building up Far Harbor outposts with mainland materials.

Building a Useful Supply Network

Pick a hub

There are 37 settlements in the game with the standard add-ons: 30 in the base game, plus one in Automatron, four in Far Harbor, one in Vault-Tec Workshop and one in Nuka-World. You do not want 37 lines to manage.

The usual answer is a hub. Pick one centrally located settlement and run a single line from every other town to it. Ten settlements hooked to a hub costs nine provisioners, and everyone shares with everyone, because of how the chain rule works. Starlight Drive In is the classic hub pick. It sits pretty central on the map, the build area is huge, and it's flat, which saves you a fight with the terrain editor.

Daisy chains (A to B to C) work exactly the same for sharing, so don't stress about the shape early on. They're just more of a pain to untangle later when one courier goes missing and you're tracing which link broke. Hub layouts keep every line easy to find.

An example early network

Say you're around level 8, sitting on Sanctuary Hills, Red Rocket Truck Stop and Abernathy Farm, plus a freshly cleared Starlight Drive In. Open the workshop at each of the three small settlements and send one spare settler each over to Starlight. Three provisioners, three lines, one network. Everything at all four places now builds from one shared pile, your Sanctuary stash included. Starlight becomes the natural main base from there, since it has the room. Every settlement you claim later just needs one more settler pointed at Starlight and it's in the club.

Specialize your towns

Once materials are shared, stop making every settlement do everything. Let places lean into what they're good at. A few common splits:

• Farm town: fill it with mutfruit, corn and tatos. Cook those three plus purified water into vegetable starch at any cooking station, then scrap the starch into adhesive. Adhesive is the glue (literally) that half the crafting menu wants, and farms make it basically free.
• Water town: any coastal settlement with industrial purifiers pumps out way more water than its people drink, and the surplus spreads through the network.
• Main base: keep your armor bench, weapons bench, stash and shops here, and let the little outposts stay small.

The point of all this is you can build anywhere with everything. A fresh settlement with three settlers can still throw up concrete walls and turrets on day one, because the steel and concrete live in the shared pile back home.

Watch your people math

Here's the small print: a provisioner still counts toward their home settlement's population limit and its food and water needs, even though they're almost never there. If you start every single line from your hub, your hub suddenly "owns" nine or ten wandering couriers, all eating its food budget.

Early on, when population caps are tight, spread the starting points around. Have the spokes send lines to the hub instead of the hub sending lines out. Same network either way, but the headcount and food numbers land on settlements that can handle them. Your Charisma also nudges how many settlers a town can hold, so a Local Leader build raises its own ceiling a little.

Free guards, free hauling

Two side perks come with a fat network. First, provisioners patrol the roads between their towns and will fight anything hostile they bump into while you're in the area, so a kitted-out courier doubles as a free caravan guard. Some routes run past nasty spots. The road around Medford Memorial Hospital and Malden Center is a known meat grinder, and the stretch by Scrap Palace isn't much better. That free gun you handed them matters.

Second, provisioners work as personal movers. Meet one out in the wasteland, trade your junk to them, and they'll carry it to the settlement they're walking toward. Overloaded on a loot run? Hand the heavy stuff to the nearest courier and fast travel home light.

Troubleshooting Missing Resources

It's usually not actually broken

Two things account for most "my supply lines don't work" reports, and neither is a bug.

First, the Pip-Boy numbers only show local production. A settlement showing 0 food can be fed fine by the network. Look for the warning triangle, not the number. Green category, no triangle, you're covered.

Second, shared items can't be withdrawn. People open the workbench transfer screen, don't see their aluminum from another town, and assume the line died. It didn't. The shared pool only shows up while you're crafting or building. That's also why weapons, armor and ammo never seem to travel. They don't, period.

If a line genuinely seems dead, run this list:

1. Confirm you actually took Local Leader rank 1.
2. Confirm both settlements are owned, meaning both workshops are claimed.
3. Open the world map and press C, LB or L1 to view your lines. Is the route actually there?
4. Wait or sleep an hour in game. Slow refreshes are common.
5. Try building something small at the "broken" settlement. If it pulls materials from elsewhere, the line works and the display was lying to you.

Real bugs and their fixes

The overlapping loop bug. Build a network with two overlapping loops (A to B to C to D and back to A, plus a shortcut from A to C) and some settlements can have their food and water zeroed out. The fix is to remove one of the loops, then go activate the workshop at each affected settlement to force its numbers to update.

The vanished provisioner. Caravans can get stuck on their route or disappear while the Pip-Boy still shows the line as connected. A lot of the time the courier is just pinned down in combat somewhere. Go find them, help them win, and the line recovers on its own. For a truly gone provisioner, the wiki's workaround is to move a new settler to the affected settlement, immediately assign them the broken route, then reassign them to a chore, which resets the link. PC players can also dig out missing provisioners with console commands, and there are provisioner manager mods on the Nexus for people running huge networks.

The missing destination. If a settlement doesn't show up in the list when you press the supply line button, either it's already directly connected to where you're standing (duplicate lines aren't allowed), or its population is at the cap. The game only lists targets sitting at least one settler under their limit, even though a provisioner heading there doesn't actually join that settlement. It's a display quirk more than a rule.

Ghost lines. Reassigning a provisioner while they're visiting some third settlement can leave the old route active on the map, still sharing resources like nothing happened. Mostly harmless, just confusing when you're reading the map later.

Before you tear anything down and rebuild, open the map, hit C, and trace your lines end to end. Nine times out of ten the whole fix is one reassignment at the far end, not a total redo.