Hey guys and girls, just wanted to get your opinions on this and see if any of you feel the same way I do.

Like many of you, I've always been one to go out of my way to avoid fast travelling, but it's much harder for me to avoid it in Fallout 4. I don't know if it's the fact that real-life me has a full-time job now, I'm older, or what. But I do know that "junk items" have a huge impact on it. I collect everything now, and I'm sure a lot of you do the same. But because of that, I reach my weight capacity so quickly. I started fast travelling to Sanctuary, would drop off my things, do my settlement stuff, and fast travel back to wherever I left off. Then I realized, after getting a bunch of other settlements established, gathering crops from all of them became a thing. So I decided to allow myself to fast travel to settlements as well. Started making these house rules, but it's still a love and hate kinda dilemma, simply because I never used fast travel before (with the exception of Morrowind's multiple built-in systems, and Skyrim's carriages, which were brilliant). But I can't even imagine the amount of time I would have spent up until now walking back and forth to Sanctuary if I hadn't started fast travelling.

It's just so much harder for me to avoid it in this game compared to previous titles (which, to their credit, usually never gave you a reason to pick up turpentine or battered clipboards, or every last box of Abraxo that you came across).

It's certainly not causing me to enjoy the game any less though. Just wanted to see if there was anyone out there that felt the same.

I'm pragmatic about it. I'm on a full-time job with family obligations, so using fast travel is simply an economic way to play with regards to my spare time. All the more so now, where making simple haul trips to previously cleared locations becomes a thing, now that scavenging is actually meaningful.

When I set out do do a mission, I fast travel to a settlement in the vicinity and then continue on foot.

Establishing supply routes so you can drop it off at the nearest settlement is what I do. All of your "junk" is usable at any linked settlement. My last two play throughs I've used hangman's alley as my primary base as it's much more central. I also roleplay that there are boats so i can fast travel from places like Taffington boathouse up the cost and to the fort.

I have a rule, i fast travel from a location when I am overburdened and only to the nearest settlement and I WALK back to the location i was at. Because I have settlements in most parts of the map it usually isn't a long walk. The only exception i made was in the glowing sea I have zero desire to take the long way around in this zone if i don't have to.

Because i do a LOT of scavenging i have invested perks in salvage, finding more caps and better deals from vendors so I can buy shipments for my settlements AND found myself investing in strength just to increase my carry capacity. And when your settlements are linked by supply lines it doesn't matter what workbench you drop off junk to. Supply lines can provide food and water to settlements as well so your first settler can and should be assigned to your supply lines. Just makes sure other settlements are making and producing extra food and water. Specialized settlements make things so much easier. Sanctuary with ALL that water is a brilliant place to put down over 10 industrial sized water purification plants. having 400 water as base line means almost all of your water needs are taken care of from one settlement. And sanctuary can support MORE than 10 purification plants!

I concur that it's really difficult in Fallout 4 to avoid fast travel. It's not only the need to loot junk but also the design of many of the quests. I'm not against fast travel, I'm against the possibility to fast travel to every single location. I would have appreciated a more zonal approach and fixed fast travel points in certain locations. Ideal for me is a mod like Better Fast Travel in Skyrim. In my current playthrough I will try to simulate that.

I avoided using it at first, but I've found that I get a lot more enjoyment out of the game when I use it. I'm a full time college student. I already spend too much of my time playing Fallout 4. I don't want half of that time to be spent carting a load of hunk back to a settlement, then walking back to where I left off, grabbing another load and carting it back again. I have my Strength almost maxed out. I have the Strong Back perk maxed out so I can both run using my AP and fast travel while overburdened. I'll suffer through the rapidly draining and slowly recharging AP points when I'm done clearing an area out. I'll try to collect all of the junk in one go whenever possible. But there's no way in hell I'm going to travel all the way back to one of my settlements like that. I have a busy life, and I don't want my game time to be eaten up by alternately running and slowly walking back to my settlement with 800 pounds of guns, armor, tin cans, toy cars, desk fans, and mops.

I have big industrial water purifiers set up at a few of my settlements that have access to large bodies of water. Sanctuary, The Castle, the Finch Farm, Nordhagen Beach, Taffington Boathouse, and others with smaller setups as well. Selling purified water is one of my biggest sources of income. I like to periodically empty all the purified water out of my settlements and go around to all of the various merchants of the Commonwealth to sell it off. This is a great way to make tons of caps. With my charisma outfit and some graqe mentats I can get 16 or more caps for 1 purified water. I typically end up with about 300 total purified waters when I make one of these runs. You can do the math to see how many caps that adds up to. Point being, it's totally worth doing this. If I were to do this without fast travel, it would take up my entire night of gaming. I could set up something of a strategic route where I'd be passing merchants on the way to my next settlements so I wouldn't have to just collect it all first. But there would still be a ton of criss-crossing around the map. When I've got settlements to build and a log full of quests to complete, I don't want to burn up my limited gaming time with hauling junk back to my settlements to build and hauling water out of my settlements to sell.

I can totally understand not wanting to use fast travel. If I had an unlimited amount of time to play I probably wouldn't be using it, or I at least wouldn't be using it as much. But if my options are to either burn up my time by packmuling myself back and forth between locations and settlements, or to simply collect the junk, fast travel back, drop it off, and start on a new objective, there isn't even really much of a decision process for me. I can totally respect the people who are dedicated enough to never use fast travel though.

I think a more zoned approach to fast travel could be cool. Perhaps there could be several established locations that you could fast travel to. For instance, allow fast travel to Diamond City, but not all of the individual locations in the immediate vicinity of Diamond City. Or perhaps the map could be subdivided into 8-10 regions that allow fast travel to an established location in that region.

I've made journeys from one end of the map to the other, and while it is perfectly doable, it quickly becomes very repetitive because the same enemies respawn everywhere and I don't find combat against supermutants, gunners and raiders in the exact same place all that interesting the third and fourth time around. So then I would take roundabouts around locations to avoid these battles and then I just thought to myself. why the hell am I spending game time actively avoiding encounters when I can just do the exact same thing in a second by hitting fast travel?

Understandable. It's only that fast travel makes the world so small and takes all the dangers out of it. It's more the tedious settlement building and inventory administration that make fast travel vital. If fast travel would be restricted to fixed places (in a mod, I don't ask Beth to do it) you should be able to build fast travel points in a settlement with a certain tier of development. And in my opinion vendors should also have more money anyway.

I have a rule too and it may sound callous to those who refuse to FT, but...

It's a game, I do whatever I want when I want, I simply don't care. Fast travel or not has no effect on immersion.

I mean, if you're not going to FT, then why not continue that logic and let your character die when killed, no reloads. And why save that game or even turn it off for the night, isn't that immersion breaking as well? Again, I don't mean to be as controversial as I must sound, but I've just never understood why using FT or not is an issue at all. To me it's like changing game settings or saving and reloading, it's just another feature of the game.

In Skyrim I used an mod who added carriages to all the settlements not only the major cities, this made fast travel redundant outside of the vampire castle and that area.
It also included your heartfire houses then you got an carriage for it.

@ pkleiss: it depends of what you want from your game. If you like the actual quests and want to get to them as easy as possible, fast travel is great. The same when you have tedious work to do in the game (which for me is settlements or selling/buying at vendors). Having much unpleasant work in a game is a little bit of a contradiction, a reason I no longer play MMOs. If walking through the world is tedious for you, use fast travel. If you like fights in the world, surprises on the road and want the feeling of wandering a dangerous post-nuclear world, fast travelling everywhere can make your experience worse.

Respawning enemies can of course grow old after some time. Walking the same way again and again is boring, a waste of time. I have a partly tedious job with difficult tasks and I don't want tedious time in a game. The game needs to be designed that fast travel is not necessary everywhere. And Fallout 4 is not designed that way, so I understand your point. It's however all a question of the dose and nothing is absolute. From a certain time and level in the world I don't feel any longer to be in a wasteland. It's just a beaming to a task and back, could also be on planet B or in Alice's wonderland.

It's better to use fast travel, the game doesn't have that much to offer in terms of variety, after a while of not using fast traveling you get deja vu way too often.

I just don't use it excessively, I can just walk for few hours straight without using it, but when I see a place just reseted and doesn't offer anything interesting I will just skip that boring part.

I use FT, but I can also see the desire not to use it, so you can explore more and immerse yourself into the game.

However, many of the missions don't allow for it because they make no sense. Mostly its the settlements. Raiders, ghouls, whatever are a danger to us

Then they give you the location, across the map, with 3 other settlements closer
Same with the kidnapping, your in sanctuary, the kidnappers came from south boston.

This and others like it are the main reason I do FT, the designers don't allow for not using it.

I sometimes use fast travel if I'm pressed for time and know for example I have to leave for Uni or Work in x amount of time but otherwise I use the Vertibird fast travel system.

As far as I know only Brotherhood members can use this form of travelling but it does mean you can 'fast travel' without fast travelling and it also makes you keep an eye on the amount of Vertibird Signal Grenades you have meaning you have to keep spending caps in them to gain access to it and I find my fun and non-fast travelling through that route plus you can be picked up even when you are over encumbered

Pretty much. Fast travel would have been out of the question in New Vegas: those wide, open spaces led to uniquely designed locations each time. Here, however, there is so much redundancy in area design that, with the exception of a handful of set pieces, roaming around on foot gets repetitive. Fast travelling, whether to my destination or to nearby waypoints, keeps the game from getting stale fast.

Well that's well within your right. I used to use it a lot in the older games; now I don't.

I enjoy experiencing every moment my character does (one of the things I love about Half-Life 2 and it's Episodes). The only time that time passes and I don't experience every moment is if they sleep or are frozen. I also like the dilemmas that come up; "I'm in the middle of nowhere, no weight capacity left, but I really want that rifle. What do I drop?". If I wanted to pick up everything without issue I'd probably cut out the middleman of fast-travelling to dump loads and just mod an infinite carry weight. I also find it becomes largely unsatisfying to just appear where you want. Sure, I've walked that trip from Sanctuary to Diamond City many, many times, but every now and then something happens out of the ordinary.

Different strokes and all that .

I'm fast-traveling more than I normally would for a few reasons.

1. Loot. Like everyone, I'm now constantly overburdened with desk fans and hot plates (I've pretty much stopped taking junk weapons and armour, though--they're just too heavy for the amount of components you can get from them, unless they have a mod I want). I'm not playing a Charisma-focused character, so I don't have Local Leader, and thus no supply lines. I FT back to Red Rocket to drop off junk, but I usually go straight back to where I was so I can continue to explore from there.

2. Settlements. Because I have no supply lines, I find sometimes I just don't have what I need to deal with a new settlement, whether it's crops, or components to build turrets. It usually necessitates a trip or two back to my main base to grab some junk, then back again to grab the one thing I didn't get enough of the first time.

3. Fusion cores. If I'm taking my Power Armour out for a mission, I don't want to waste half a fusion core getting there. It's kind of a cheat, but fast-traveling across the map in PA doesn't burn up any fuel. I'll also often FT back to base to drop off a new set of PA if I find one while I'm out and about.

nah, even when i am scavenging for all of the junk, I still travel at the slow walk speed (if it is a role play character), it doesn't get boring for me since I see enough random encounters and regular enemies along my travels.

This. I haven't fast traveled yet and I'm going to try and never do it.

With my second go around I dont fast travel even when Im pressed for time I just simply save and come back later I enjoy walking everywhere in fallout 4

I tend to use more resources walking than I gain, I tend to gain more after clearing buildings than walking around outside.

What I did was string all of my settlements together in a network. Settlement A establishes a supply line with B, B with C, C with D, etc. That way only one person from each settlement is tied up with supply lines and all my workbenches are connected. When I am loaded with junk, I don't travel all the way back to a particular settlement, just the closest one where I scrap all the junk.

Since junk breaks down to raw materials and since raw materials are available anywhere on the entire supply network, I have access to all my building materials in any settlement. I also built a power armor station everywhere that didn't have one. This way I always had a fairly close place with resources and the equipment to repair my armor on the fly.

If you have settlments all over the map, then there is always some place fairly close to walk to without having to fast travel in order to unload.

I've specced my character towards carrying capacity for this very reason. With sole survivor, strong back and +3 strength bonuses my carry weight is 480. I can put 2 armour mods on to make it 500. Still carrying my 9 favorite weapons and my weight is only 135. Enough to carry hordes of items. Then factor in that you can break down found weapons and armour in the field when you stumble across the workbenches. So you can explore for many hours and have carrying space. No need to cheat.

I already FT'd all the time in Beth games. I love exploring.... but I'm also a major klepto/loot-hound, so I'd rather be able to spend my time exploring, rather than spending all of it walking back & forth to a town/base/house/etc.

It's taken me around 100-110 hours to get to lv52 and finally bother with finishing the MQ (with plenty of other stuff left to see). I don't need to pad out my game time with extra filler. I do plenty of walking around as it is.

Eh, all the "break down in the field" thing lets me do is maybe search two locations between trips back instead of one. But my carrying capacity is only ~420.