Yeah, yeah, I pick up everything I find, and I know all about the vegetable paste, and farming mutfruit, corn, and tatos out the wazoo, and scooping up purified water wherever you find it. But I like to tinker and experiment, and do extra stuff, for display and such, and that just doesn't cut it.

I don't think it makes much of a difference in game play, but I like the idea of decking out all of my settlers in the best armor and weapons I can find or make, basically a uniform for my people. (Yeah, that's also as tedious as it sounds. FO4 is NOT friendly to doing item mods in batches.)

I often run short of this or that, but the one constant grind, head and shoulders above all others, is the adhesives. And in theory, I can make all of them that I want to, but I've had it with the endless rounds of scooping up the aforementioned ingredients to grind out more of the stuff.

I still play the game honest for everything else, but I finally broke down and consoled myself 1000 of the @#$! adhesive. Anyone else feel the same way?

Not really, I find wonderglue and/or duct tape in pretty much every tool box or lying around somewhere. Then again, I haven't come around modding weapons too much since I've finished my .50 Sniper Rifle, so I have like 500 units of adhesive in my workbench. I also pick up every weapon with a long name and scrap it in my settlement, gives quite a bit of junk as well.

If farming and water production isn't enough to keep you in adhesive you must be doing a lot of tinkering.

Honestly by producing water and cleaning out my own junk dealers I haven't run short on anything in a long time.

it depends on your playing habits, I think. If you like to tinker around at the mod benches much, you'll go through that 500 adhesives FAST. I know, I've done it more than once.

Wouldn't be any fun if it was too easy.

I have no issues with the design. I have oil/adhesive/aluminum/bones (for makin cutting fluid) highlighted for search and go though large urban areas just looking for these things. When I barter with people I buy tons of small junk items with rare parts in them. Highlighted search is your friend.

I planted a massive farm just so I could make adhesive soup. Once you have a big enough farm adhesive is pretty easy. It's part of the game. It also makes you consider what mods you really want to try - you might stick with a mod a bit longer and learn something about it. Alternatively you could build up shops/water purifiers and sell that off and purchase shipments of adhesives with the profits.

If you want to cheat that's your choice.

You're not wrong, and that's what I've been doing. And though I haven't made a mutfruit plantation like I've seen some do, I HAVE got a good portion of sanctuary set up for production of the three plants that matter. It's just that I've gotten bloody sick of endless rounds of harvesting and water scrounging. Had 'nuff. What to go play the game instead.

Here's the thing about "donating" yourself a bunch of adhesive: it might offend a purist but it's not really any different from what I'm doing.

Here's what I do:

1) purify water

2) use water to clean out general store

3) deposit all junk in workbench

4) repeat as needed

Here's what you're doing:

1) open console and type a command

Neither one of us is taking any risk at all. Neither approach affects the story in any way. My way just takes more time. Really, if I wasn't playing on a PS4 I'd probably do it your way.

You could just save before you tinker and only use up resources for the results you like.

Except that your way you had to scrap/ collect enough junk to build generators and water purifiers and keep them repaired. It's still slightly exploitive but it's not outright cheating.

I was always running out of adhesive. In fact, at one point, I was more excited about finding duct tape than an legendary item. I solved that by planing craploads of mutafruit, corn and tato and installing water purifiers in settlements that could have it. Make sure there is excess food and water in every settlement and you have yourself plenty of materials for the starch that breaks down into adhesive.

I got chr up for the local leader perk so I could link settlement and now all the materials I need are put right into the supply chain. Even with my constant manual harvesting I stopped by yesterday and made something like 40 vegatable paste which breaks down to 200 or so adhesives. That'll last me a bit.

EDIT: You do not have to harvest anything. As long as there is excess food it will be put into your crafting station. Same with water.

There's no right or wrong. it's your game so not really applicable to say you are doing something wrong.

But as a rough guide, I will say that you're missing out on the potential of adhesive farming if you think you are limited. Using a handful of large settlements that are well suited for being water and open land farms (sanctuary, sunshine coop, castle, spectacle island), I produce over 1k water per day, and enough corn, tato, mut fruit to feed my 14 settlements + enough adhesives to essentially my unlimited.

Every settler in my 18-23 pop per settlement is decked out in fully modded armor and weapons. So I can't say it is infinite, but it is 'essentially' unlimited in the sense that with only 20-23 settlers per settlement, that will be the cap that throttles my adhesive output.

If you want to try your hand at adhesive farming, I run 4 settlements with 360 water at each, and each settlement I plant 30 corn, 30 tato, and 30 mut fruit - requiring 15 workers for farm duties. The other ~6 workers I assign to happiness stores.

I think the definition of exploit is getting pretty whacky. What is slightly exploitative (with connotation of mild cheating) about obeying the game mechanics of get enough seeds, plant seeds, harvest crops, craft adhesives using the exact formula the vanilla game gives you?

Selling mass amounts of purified water to your own shops that refresh caps every 24hrs feels slightly exploitative. I still do it too.

I admit, it IS bugging me to do a cheat like this. I still feel a nagging urge to build a great big adhesives farm. There are in game ways to produce all of the adhesives you might need, just like you can do without Local Leader if you don't mind schlepping your stuff from site to site yourself. But for me, it comes down to playing time. Even if I had no life, and nothing else I wanted to do, I would not have an infinite amount of time to spend on computer games.

So it matters to a player like me, that I CAN do these things, but I don't want to take the RL time to do them. Either way, it's going to bug me.

I did have an issue with it, and oil (which you can also cook something up for on the Chem bench). But ... I started a farm and that wasn't a problem anymore.

It become a real problem when some of the higher level weapon and armor mods needed tons of the stuff, but I got past it. I'm on the PC but I never considered using the console to cheat me some. Heck if I'm going to do that I might as well cheat me the best weapon and armor in the game and go crazy.

I don't know if everyone understand that the OP is equipping and dressing all of his settlers.

• Plant nothing but corn in one settlement (1 person can harvest 12 stalks of corn)
  
• Plant nothing but Mutfruit in another settlement (1 person can harvest 6, so put these in settlements with very little room.)
  
• Plant nothing but Tatos in another settlement (1 person can harvest 12)
  
• Repeat the above in the other settlements
  
• Set up water purifier mining in sanctuary and/or the castle or nordhagan. Keep adding industrial purifiers untill you have 999 water production in each.
  
• ???
  
• PROFIT!!!

Adhesives are what limits my crafting. My T60ds took a while, my various overpowered weapon mods just use that stuff wholesale. On the other hand I ran into a regular Deathclaw inside a building, among the few I've seen on Survival, yesterday. Killed it quite quickly, I knew all this crafting would come in handy. This at level 22 now.

I have Sanctuary up and running, A couple more just beginning, I guess I''ll have to farm the sticky.

Well you can't actually make armor anyway and I get tons of the stuff just looting corpses. I guess you could upgrade every piece of armor and then put it on the settler, but that's certainly overkill.

But I still like modding everything I can just for the EXP if nothing else, then give it to a settler or sell it.

I don't think it's exploitative at all, I think it makes sense in game terms. Clean water is essential to healthy living, and it looks to be in short supply in the wasteland. All of sudden this industrious fellow starts churning the stuff out and selling it. I have no problem believing my vendors could sell out of it in 24 hours, thereby generating enough caps for me to repeat the process.

As a game mechanic it works well and encourages building settlements. As an economic model it's a lot less unrealistic than most of the combat.

I am not sure how much I want to get into decking out my settlers with armor and weapons.

What I have been doing so far is just picking up armor from raiders and giving them to my settlers. The same can be said of weapons as well. I have not built any recruitment beacons yet so I simply give good armor and weapon loot to the default settlers in Sanctuary, Tenpines and Abernathy Farm. Giving them weapons is easy, giving them armor seems a bit tedious to me. I guess it is because I am trying to give them a specific look and I am more picky about armor than I am about weapons.

However, last night I decided increase the difficulty to Survivor so I might actually start crafting custom armor and weapons, but as of now a lot of my time has been focused on scavenging / buying resources to build up my 5 settlements. I actually ignored the main quest for a long time (currently level 50). I suppose I'll get around to picking it up again by speaking to Nick Valentine before 2015 is over...

I have accumulated a lot of Power Armors. I will be distributing them, with cores, when I can build em' all back to unbroken, to my settlements. I have already started giving nice weapons and ammo to a few of the people in them. I plan to have at least 2 in every settlement.

As for adhesives... I have not really felt the need to create veggie starch. Sure I made some just to try it out, but I do not go crazy modding weapons and I have not modded any armor yet. I actually find a lot by simply scavenging. I think I am sitting on around 600 adhesives at the moment. Sounds like a lot, but mods can use up to 5 adhesives I think.

I don't have a single perk in any weapon/armor/mod crafting skill.

All i do is take mods from weapons/equipment i loot, and equip myself that way.

I'm lv 79 now and i've never felt the need to build mods myself.

I have alot adhesive... cause i never need it. xD

Really?

The grind for adhesive ended after I found out about vegetable starch.