True I can play FO3 and never eat ... never. Just drink some purified water once in a while. Course I'm not sure I really want to start taking care of my PC like some SIMS character either. It's good to assume some things are just being taken care of.

But yeah, if food was actually useful in some way then crafting it would be nice. Similar situation in Skyrim with the cooking, except there are a couple items, like Venison Stew, which are actually overpowered as far as abilities given. Being able to perform power attacks over and over again after eating stew is a hell of a bonus. We just need more items that are in between being useless and overpowered.

The description on the official site says craftable weapons, armor, food, and chemicals(chems)... Also in a E3 anolysis video someone pointed out what looked to be a home chemestry set. Which we no doubt will also have to craft.

I installed a Needs mod in Skyrim simply to get rid of those OP dishes. I think with Hearthfire they should have implemented a Needs system so cooking food actually became a necessity. There were plenty of potions, especially with crafting, that food just became a thing that was fun to do if you liked to play house.

In the wasteland I feel that food and drink becomes more of a center-piece topic. It's survival and food and drink should be part of that. Of course not to a point where you find it a tedious chore, but like you actually felt like taking the time to buy food at vendors. There were so many food vendors and inns in Skyrim, but I never bought a single thing from them, which is really a shame. It was so nice to arrive at an inn after a long day of Dragonborning, but it also felt kinda pointless since I didn't need food or sleep. A Needs mod will be my no.1 priority in FO4 unless vanilla comes with one.

You have some pretty high standards if you found Skyrim's crafting to be lacking... It is far and beyond literally any other game...

I thought the Witcher 3 went overboard with crafting. I think I have over a thousand ingredients, and probably need most of those for exactly one recipe. Fallout 4 looks like the perfect balance - a ton of options to craft, but not so many raw materials that it's a trash-sifting simulator (as I've heard some detractors put it). Roughly speaking: weapon/settlement crafting = smithing, cooking/chems = alchemy, weapon/armor modification = enchantment.

FO3 didn't have deep crafting, but it was there... it's suicide to explore deathclaw country without your dart gun. NV was more expansive, but I found that most of the recipes didn't have much point.

OMG, I am wishing that FO4's crafting is as deep as New Vegas. Take a look at the wiki sometime. You can literally craft hundreds of items in NV. There were 5 crafting interfaces and hundreds of recipes...which were incredibly useful on hardcoe. Not to mention, you could breakdown virtually every round of ammo in your inventory and reload it into whatever your preferred calibers were...there was a hull and casing drop systems, with powder, primers and lead to feed the system; not to mention handloads that were game changing in their effects from magnums to wad cutters to coin shot. You could recycle your energy ammo empty cells as well as flamer fuel cells and even convert them to more powerful ammo.

You could craft weapon repair kits and doctor bags. You could craft your own booze and stims, to include auto-stims, and auto inject antivenom. Each DLC add new useful recipes that were specific to their region. You could craft explosives to include satchel charges and MFC Clusters that would annihilate enemies.

To name a few, you could craft the following in New Vegas (not including ammo):

10 chem
14 drinks
4 types of armor
20+ meals
14 medicine items
8 poisons
20 or so weapons
10-12 items from hides
Ghost sight
All skill books

Hell, the ingredient and shopping list itself in NV is well over a hundred items. Oh, you could even clone foods.

You could craft what(?) 6 or seven very forgettable weapons other than Nuka Nades and bottlecap mines in FO3.

No crafting in New Vegas? Did we play the same game? I can only hope FO4 system is as deep as New Vegas' and is something beyond the Minecraft-like gimmicky stuff we've been shown thus far.

But the fat hobbit RUINS the fish by cooking it!!!

HAHAHAHAHAH!!!

I wouldn't call the crafting in vanilla Skyrim "deep"....it had a number of systems that had extensive material lists but it was still quite simple in design and more time consuming than challenging.

Now there are definatley some mods that alter many of the vanilla crafting systems to make them "deeper", but even with those, the basic systems were still pretty simple to follow.

It definitely looks as if the crafting in FO4 may be a bit more challenging (at least from a character development standpoint) but I speculate it will be less expansive (less materials and potentially no "tiers" of materials) than many of Skyrims crafting systems. I could certainly be wrong and nobody here can say beyond the few seconds of gameplay footage everyone has seen on the subject.

I mean, with any of Skyrim's crafting recipes it ultimately broke down to putting the ingredients in and getting a pre-fabricated item out, or improving the stats of the item. Which, I mean, isn't that much different from most other games. But in Fallout 4 we can do that on a component level for weapons; I could switch around a few parts on a Plasma Rifle to turn it into a Plasma Sniper Rifle, a Plasma Scattergun, a Plasma Thrower, a Plasma Assault Rifle, you get the idea. And beyond that I can tweak things like accuracy, recoil, magazine capacity, etc.

I imagine most other craftables still have the basic input:output we saw in Skyrim, but with a layered armor system and dynamic crafting that still opens it up a lot.

From the current s.p.e.c.i.a.l. video and Strength it looks like your crafting is also linked to your s.p.e.c.i.a.l. stats, armor and strength might be somehow linked to power armor's higher tier crafting i would guess, and science might be linked to lasers and such just guess work but i think crafting this time around is going to require a good deal of work not just parts and a workbench.

In the E3 footage, when the Sole Survivor meets the dog and is issuing commands, he quickly looks over a "Cooking Station." This suggests that cooking food is in the game.