I quickly learned to avoid crafting in Skyrim, because it made the game a little boring when I stopped looking forward to finding chests. While the weapon crafting system in FO4 seems really cool, I'm loathe to repeat the same mistake.

Only way I can see it not being a problem is if the materials for some of the better components are themselves fairly difficult to find. For instance, a laser long barrel requires fiber optics, which I imagine is not exactly an abundant resource. It would be kinda neat to hunt for relatively rare materials in places where you'd expect to find them, such as MIT in the case of fiber optics.

Even then, once you've got your Plasma Boomstick of Doom assembled, what else is there to look forward to? One cool thing in Dead Space 3, which has a similar crafting system, is the circuits, which are little chips you can insert in your weapons to boost certain attributes. You find increasingly more powerful chips as you progress through the game, so even though you're still using the same weapon you crafted relatively early in the game, you can still improve it.

Well that's the beauty of choice, don't want to out craft what ya loot, don't get into the moding mechanic.

As a side not Pete did mention that indeed some crafting materials are rare and hard to find, so it's not just perks that will limit the rate you mod things.

Im worried about this too.

Once I created the ebony axe of leech health and lightning damage or the legendary flaming shock bow there was no reason to pick anything else up. I had the single two best weapons in the game made by me and could ignore every other weapon in the game.


I hope that crafting is much more difficult than shown in the video. I also hope unique weapons return.

For modding anything more than very basic things, you need perks. And certain mods need higher ranks in that perk. The crafting part of the trailer shows modding of an Assault rifle and for certain mods the player needed Rank 4 Gun Nut.

Modding Laser weapons i've seen it go up to Rank 2 Science! and for Plasma weapons i've seen it go to Rank 3 Science! There could very well be mods for both that require an even higher rank than what has been seen, but this much has been confirmed.

So you need to have the right amount of SPECIALs to have access to the perks, so you can invest perks to unlock these modding options. And higher perk ranks come with higher level requirement.

You won't be able to rush like you could in Skyrim and focus heavily on Blacksmithing early on. Now you need to hit level requirements before you can even start investing into perks that allow you to mod/craft.

Also i don't think weapons are going to scale anything like they did in Skyrim, where a high skill in Blacksmith and Enchanting let you make god-tier weapons because of all the improvements you could stack. Here you add a new Barrel that makes it a bit more accurate, but as a trade-off you lose in fire rate. Skyrim had no trade-off, the end product of enchanting and sharpening was always superior without losing out in any possible aspect.

As far as we know you cannot sharpen that barrel into a Legendary barrel and enchant it with +massive lighting AND fire damage.

With so many variations of each base weapon I don't think its going to be an issue of getting bored. For me I think I will finally be able to limit myself to just three weapons and not have to carry spares of each just to keep them maintained. I plan to build and keep as many of the choices the game allows us to build, but plan only to use 3, long, mid and close range.

If you are not as concerned about "realism" and more interest in "The Game" then for Fallout, it would be possible for a mod or the DEV to DYNAMICALLY limit the amount of ammo you can get for your guns (game detects how much you are using one gun) so that you are forced to rotate their use. This happen to me inadvertently in FA NV. My best gun ran out of the ammo and I had a hell of a time finding /buying more for it so this forced me to use my other guns.

Personally I do not like the game secretly doing things like that but then I never have the problem the OP has with looting and crafting. For me it always seem like sooner or later I could both out craft and out FIND all my weapons except for this one handed sword I keep from level 1 to when I stopped playing the actor. But because of my combat mod (I made) different situations called for different weapons. It was not always bets just to use your 1h sword no matter if it did do twice the damage of my other weapons.

I guess that is what the weapon health was trying to do in a way as well, but I dislike how the guns unrealistically deteriorate so fast, so for me that would not be a feature I keep in the game.

Skyrim's crafting system was extremely primitive. Anything you produced just meant an increase in stats as there was no discernible drawback between using an ebony warhammer or a steel warhammer, just more damage.

The other issue was, as you mentioned, the huge disconnect between looting and crafting. Why bother dungeon diving or looting a master chest when crafted weapons are significantly better? Even unique weapons tapered off because of crafting (the leveled loot really [censored] over unique weapons as well).

Fallout's system is more robust, though - i.e. modifications actually have certain pros and cons. Not only that, the crafting system is tied in with looting new objects and materials. You can't make that scope without finding a tin can, a toy car, a glass bottle, and some other junk - everything has some sort of purpose which is great. Guns themselves can be scrapped for materials - something you couldn't do in Skyrim with weapons you found (only for disenchanting and even enchanting struggled with the same issue - no drawbacks).

I really think you're going to have to work to getting your plasma boomstick of doom this time around.

You still have to find the base weapons to mod them. When did we first get a plasma rifle in Fallout 3? It wasn't for a while into the game. I don't think we'll have everything available to us right away. And with Level requirements on some ranks of perks we might even see a good amount of high end mods locked out until we reach later levels.

Yes I completely forgot about the level reqs on the crafting perks. But this has introduced another worry: will low level weapons have poor accuracy? I'm fine with having lower damage, or lower RoF, or a low capacity magazine, but I'm not happy with constantly missing what I'm aiming at (ie. the dreaded cone of fire).

I assume every type you craft will be the same. Like, if you craft 100 Combat shotguns, all of them will be the same. The only difference might be the quality of the shotgun, which means you simply need to repair it.

Well this will be dictated by other perks right? Crafting and mods shouldn't have a ton to do with accuracy in terms of will this pistol hit this guy 50 feet away

wut?...... the same how? cuz they've mentioned there being a JUNKLOAD of weapon combinations with different mods.

Let's say you build a combat shotgun. That's all you build. If you want mods, you'll have to build each individual mod (or buy them, or take them from another weapon). I don't think you can build a weapon with mods at the same time.

All the weapon-specific perks we know about just increase damage.

You won't be able to just "build" a weapon like that. Junk weapons sure but a combat shotgun? Nah. Mods will change an existing gun into another kind of gun. We won't be weapon smithing entire shotguns out of steel tubes. All of the 100% crafted weapons looked exactly like that, just crafted silly weapons.

I really don't get why so many people are comparing the crafting system to Skyrim's. Skyrim's was all about stat increases, and the level of improvement was based on the stats of the person doing the upgrade. If anything, this is like a more complex version of KotoR II's crafting: you can craft different upgrades depending on your skill level; you take an item and then modify it with the crafted or found upgrades; the main difference is that instead of the generic 'components' used to craft all upgrades (except for lightsaber crystals) in Kotor II, upgrades in Fallout 4 require many different varieties of components.

So far I have not seen anything that suggests that upgrading a weapon doesn't increase its stats.

Yes I am aware that some "upgrades" are not upgrades at all but totally change how the weapon behaves in that it might not be a laser pistol after the upgrade...In that case what is it called.

There doesn't appear too be any "to hit chance" good thing too.

I don't plan on doing much crafting if there are unique weapons about.
I'll still pack-rat all components, just in case, but it's not a feature that i see myself putting too much time and effort into.

I don't think it will be as bad as Skyrim; we won't be able to craft items that boost our crafting abilities in a loop and then improve our Laser Pistol's damage to ridiculous levels at a grindstone.

It's hard to balance loot with crafting, but if I'm going to invest a ton of levels into my crafting perks I don't want loot to be better than what I can craft, you know? But since we can break down items for components, including weapon and armor, I think it will always be worthwhile to loot.

If they allow for weapon degradation then you would constantly be on the lookout for new stuff to keep your gear in tip top shape.........or at least functional in the early part of the game. If they removed it then yeah...........once you can make your won stuff there isn't any need to do anything else at all. Skyrim really [censored] up by removing repair considering that they had smithies and crafting stations all over the game world and in dungeons and it could have been perfect for a repair/maintenance system. Instead we got a [censored] crafting system that let you create OVER 9000! damage daggers.

I don't think you'll have to worry too much as we've seen that some perks are level locked. Meaning, to build that Plasma Boomstick of Doom you might have to be level 50 to unlock the perk that allows you to do so.

hmmm i wonder if we can end up turning a shotgun into a minigun that fires shotgun rounds

A twisted part of Me wants a Pew-Pew that shoots more than twice between reloads, I am also hoping to have an MPLX Novasurge replacer created by Crafting with SCIENCE! I am having flashbacks of another Game with Mechanised Armor and weapon crafting that would create weaker weapons out of more expensive and rarer parts, but criticizing Arcanum may be an act of heresy