Has anyone done a cost benefits anolysis of crafting your own items, vs buying?

How about crafting to sell and the profit per item?

Obviously if you scavenge all of your supplies then that is going to make it even cheaper.

My current play through has about 7 charisma, and is 2nd level on the cap collector perk.

example: Cost of a stimpack pre-made 67 caps

Cost for DIY stimpack: steel (1.5 caps from a bucket) Blood pack (14 caps) Antiseptic (1.5 caps from a tube of toothpaste)

Total Cost for DIY Stimpack: 17 caps.

The only items I ever buy from anyone is ammo and very occasionally a shipment of building materials.

Stimpaks, radaway and chems are so common I don't have to buy or make them, aside from the combo chems like psycho jet.

The shipments don't seem to be cap-saving so much as time-saving. For instance, 1 Steel costs 1 cap, but a shipment of 50 or 100 Steel can cost much more per unit.


I used to set aside my smokables and Pre-War Money to sell as-is (they sell for much more than their component scrap items), but now I just buy everything from the general merchants and eat the negligible savings to save time.

I found that with buying fertilizer I still saved money on what it costs to buy a single dose of jet

True, but time is more valuable than caps. The only shipments I ever buy is ballistic fiber and once I got a shipment of oil because I had quite a few turrets to build and didn't want to waste time trying to collect it.

Oh, absolutely - I agree. I buy shipments all the time. But I also loot a lot and buy as much as I can from merchants.

I have brahmin at almost all settlements, so I seem to get plenty of Fertilizer. Combine that with all the Plastic I seem to have accumulated, and I am positioned to make enough Jet to be the Walter White of the Commonwealth. Jet plus Purified Water are my two cashflow sources.

Wait so the number of brahmin at my settlement actually make me fertilizer?

"If you are a brahmin, you make fertilizer. It's what you do. If you want to save 15% or more on Power Armor insurance, you call Geico. It's what you do."

Even if you buy bags of fertilizer and junk plastic, you should be able to make a profit on jet. lol that's the only craftable item I have figured out that can turn a profit even if you buy the raw ingredients.

Right, I buy it from the farmers that I helped who give me a discount, one of them has 2 shipments of it I believe. I have almost every farm and settlement equipped with a chem lab to run as a "cover" or not a cover, since I have all my settlements armed up in both man power, heavy turrets, and missile turrets so anyone trying to mess with my labs gets blasted.

I had noticed the shipments cost a lot more too, circuitry for example, you can buy a ton of phones for cheaper if your patient and get a better deal/save like 500+ dollars for the same 25 amt.

I mostly make the jet and variants of jet to sell, with grabbing any fertilizer I see anywhere.

That's hilarious. And super good to know !

They have to be. I am *not* buying or scavenging as much fertilizer as seems to exist in my reserves... multiple thousand units.


Wikia seems to confirm my suspicion:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fertilizer

" Then why am I not swimming in fertalizer? all of my settlements have 1-4 brahmin in it.

Wiki (Brahmin page) says - One can only have one brahmin producing fertilizer per settlement, so one only needs one trough.

devonapple must have a seriously sick cow !

LOL!

Forgot to mention: I do have the settlements set up with supply routes, so that's 1 brahmin at each of 22+ settlements making fertilizer over time, counting towards a combined storehouse, not just 1 productive brahmin making hundreds of units. But that would be a case of "The Brahmin who Laid the Stinky Eggs".


That said: I have never encountered in-game the merchant who sells brahmin. I did use console commands to discover she was in one of those waiting rooms with a bunch of other NPC merchants. But all of our brahmin showed up without any action from me. Sure, some were synth spies, but they were just as productive as normal brahmin.

....how on earth do I get a brahmin at a settlement? I have one at the Castle (no idea how) and it doesn't have all that trader gear so im wondering this is the sort of brahmin that produces fertilizer...and how do I get them to produce these fertilizers?

So is there a way that I can move my brahmin that are in one settlement to another?

I've never seen that as an option.


There is a brahmin merchant who deploys Brahmin the way Gene deploys Junkayrd Dogs: you do get to tell her where to send the Brahmin. But the rando Brahmin that showed up? I can't seem to affect them in Build Mode.

I do have the full set of Strong Back perks: it would be interesting to completely empty a settlement's storeroom and then see what starts appearing there.

Just set up a brahmin feeder. They will show up.

Exactly the same here. I don't even buy unique weapons. With the proper perks everything dies almost instantly, even at Very Hard.

I only buy unique legendaries from vendors, like General Chao Revenge, honestly nothing else is worth buying. You can scavenge whatever you want. If you buy it, it's only for convenience, not because it can't be found anywhere else. (except the uniques as mentioned)

Doesn't anybody like to make their own purely for a role play perspective? Like being a large-scale Jet manufacturing lab

Yeah, I produce about 60 Jet at a time and use them to buy ammo and crafting supplies.