Enemies and loot do reset after a while. There will always be fresh bodies.

When's the reset time?

72 hours if I recall correctly. Not all places will respawn however. Special encounters do not, and I am guessing special locations might not either. But your generic raider camps and stuff should respawn every 3 ingame days or so. If you have a look around on the forums you should be able to find a decent list of loot pinatas to help stock up.

Your talking about the ones in the middle of the streets with wooden planks as gaurd rails right? I end them really quickly. How about the gunners? They got some nice things.

Some of that could be difficulty based. Survival mode (I think it was) supposedly becomes so punishing to some re: bullet sponging that ammo becomes pretty scarce and you're spending most of your caps buying ammo all the time, because what you find isn't anywhere near enough.

But yeah, if in Normal diff., over time caps are plentiful unless you....well...sell nothing.

Water purifiers are the best bet for a cycle, I'd think. You can put them in settlements and it works even if there are no settlers in the place, so it doesn't have to mean more babysitting, outside of some turrets for a minimum defense of the purifiers themselves. Just have to visit their workbenches every day to few days to collect the water. Outside of that and huge farms to sell the vegies or something, imo caps is largely about looting and selling vs. looting and hoarding.

My 2 cents:

Produce Jet

...and lots of it.

Plastic and fertilizer are easy to find scavenging and build up in excess as they are not nearly as in demand as many of the other building materials for building, mods, and such.

First week I was playing i was doing my trade fairly linear--- kill, loot corpse, sell all arms and armor taken, repeat.

My cap-flow fluctuated and the overall increase was grinding and gradual.

Then I asked myself who in real life makes tons of money with little effort?

Drug dealers.

Had totally overlooked that jet is made from 2 fertilizer & 1 plastic... and is worth 50 caps a pop, and will get you a good 40 if you have decent charisma and charisma boosting clothes.

Next 2-3 days playing my caps soared exponentially and continue to. I'm over 100,000 caps buying [censored] i don't need or use and holding all my favorite things from ammo to chems in 100s.

All I have done differently is

1. Commit all plastic hauled into junk over a certain reserve amount (1,000 in my case) to pump out jet

2. Think of jet as the primary tool for clearing expenditure costs... then taking all the caps the vendors got.

3. To further this end I scrap all synth armor and laser guns and rifles I do not plan on keeping as these two categories of items are big sources of plastic when scrapped.

If you are skeptical then I'd invite you to do the math.

Bring home 100 plastic, make 100 Jet, sell 100 for 35 per. 3,500 for a negligible amount of effort.

Sure, laser rifles and pistols can fetch a decent amount of coin... On the surface it may even look more lucrative to keep the gun that would yield 5 plastic thus 200 caps when made into jet but the gun sells for 300.

Crucial difference is I can't carry around 120 laser rifles without even noticing I'm carrying a heavier than usual load... As I can with Jet.

I became obscenely rich on FO4 in a matter of days--- no cheats, no glitches, no tricks.

Just selling drugs.

However its limited how much overflow is stored. I have around 10 purifiers at sanctuary they give 190-210 water each day, being away for many days don't increase the amount so I collect them each time I dump loot and put in another container for trade items, sell to visiting traders bring them with to go shopping

If you have set up shops in your settlement you can sell to them.

Go to your workbench and look under the "Aid" section, when transferring items. You will find purified water there, which you can sell. Collect all the water from your settlements this way.

There is so much ammo and so many stimpacks out there, I NEVER buy stimpacks. I actually use Stimpacks as my currency and barter with them. I hardly ever use a stimpack, only in emergencies. Water heals just as well. And I sell all the ammo that I don't need and make lots of money that way.

Are you actually going to play the game or just sit around waiting for water purify? Caps are easy to get. Scavenge while on missions and sell chems, ammo and pre-war money. Setting up water farms is boring and a waste of time.

Has to buy some ammo, mostly the higher tires ones, early game it was .308 and cells, now its railgun rounds.

I tend to use plenty of food and mostly stimpacks in emergencies.

And the water purifier tricks is hardly any works, just remove it while dumping loot. harvesting for vegetable stash is more work.

I heard about the fruit vegetable farming method. Heard it's extremely effective

Four things, water farming as been said. That once you get it going will be steady income.

Second, ammo, not talking about plasma, or such. .38, .45, 5mm I have thousands of rounds of those. .38's and 5mm will bring in 1 cap each. .45, high a 4 each depending on your chrisma. Just look at what weapons you use and sell the ammo you don't. But, keep about 50-100 rounds for arming settlers.

Third, pre-war money, don't use this for cloth, you can sell the for 4 caps each. And its an easy find and builds up. Warning...Don't store it in your workbench, if you make something needing cloth. It seems to use your money first.

Forth, multifruit, plant and harvest, each fruit again about 4 caps.

Remember, what you see in the workbench is what you have there. So, water, fruit are in your workbenchs, so you'll need to go to your other settlements and clean them out.

Multifruits on my end at diamond city sell about 6-7 caps each. Might as well start doing that. That would be a full cycle. Also I just need those for stimpacks and ammo.44 other ammo. Including fusion cells, I have over 2k.

I have about 5k in cells, got to love syn's.

I don't mess with synth that much. They run up in hordes. Makes it a it difficult on my end

Yes the mini gun is not very efficient on ammo and it's damage per shot ratio is horrid. In any event, making money is one thing, but it's also about conserving money as well. For example, what is your charisma at? The higher it is when you start up a trade session, the more you can sell your junk loot for and the cheaper you can buy what you need. Make sure you put on every piece of charisma gear you can Muster. If you rescued rex and strong from trinity tower you should have a suit of clothes that gives +3, now find a hat or pompadour wig to give you +1 like the Militia hat you get when first running into preston garvey (on the corpse of the minuteman outside of the history museum) Fashionable glasses also give +1, can find a pair of those in Backstreet Apparel.

For a bigger boost, drink a beer before trading, another +1 and eat graqe mentats for a nice juicy +5 charisma along with 10 percent better buying and selling prices. You can make those by combining mentats, a couple of hubflowers which can be found randomly in fields, such as near the abernathy farm. and some whiskey. All of this combined will give a generous boost even to low charisma focused characters, enough to offset the price gouging that NPCs like to impose a bit. I have a character with a base charisma of about 5 and when employing the above mentioned items, she can sell junk at almost full price (maybe 15-20 percent shy) I don't really need to farm myself, I just sell whatever falls off legendary creatures that I don't personally need, many drop missile launchers or other guns and weapons that can go for 500-1200+ caps each. I keep my veggies and purified water for cooking vegetable starch as I need adhesive way more than the ton of ammo I am sitting on.

I have maxed out charisma

so you have 10 charisma and somehow aren't swimming in caps? My mind is blown. With the above mentioned items, you should be rolling in it every time you sell.

I normally go around killing Raiders and wait until respawn and clear them out again. I get about 2-5 stimpacks per run and about 200-600 caps worth in arsenal. In the meantime. Taking damage in the process I start to eat multifruits, mutated super Mongrel meat, Mongrel meat, mirelurk, red roach meat. Etc. Anything I can get my hands on. To substitute. Once in awhile I take damage from the food from not cooking it. But that's fine tiny damage ain't nothing.

Well I'm starting to gain more caps now not from farming methods but straight raiding. Make about 500 caps per raid run. And a few stimpacks. Sometimes none at all. But I love that respawn set up. Gives me convenience. But most likely I'm probably going to just scavenge around for items. Special rocket launchers so I've heard can sell up to 1000 caps. I think I basically taught myself the scavenging ways.

Pre-war money! Weighs nothing but worth 4 caps. Just don't use it (cloth) when building. Hit all cash registers. Sell mines too. They're plentiful.

But you're going to have my problem soon. Too many caps. There's nothing really to spend them on. Just a few shipments here and there.

I totally understand you. Fallout is more fun when your struggling a bit. When you can buy everything it's no fun.

Personally, I've had success getting more caps that I'll ever need doing all of the following:

- Industrial Water Purifiers. As many as I can reasonably build at each settlement that can support them.

-- Building tons of turrets to keep my defense above my food/water ratio. (Which means keeping a look out for junk that can be scrapped into turret parts.)

- Having one of each type of merchant at my a main hub settlement. (Merchants of the same type at the same settlement share inventories and caps, so it doesn't make sense to have more than 1 of each.) You can further supplement by adding a Trading Post to attract the traveling merchants.

- Keep a set of Charisma boosting clothes handy. Destroyers Helm, Black Rimmed Glasses, Tuxedo/Red Dress, etc.

- Put on the Charisma boosting clothes and sell the water. First to my merchants and, when they run out of caps, to city merchants.

As long as you keep your settlement defense high (which takes a lot of screws, oil, and gears,) you don't have to worry about too much going wrong with this plan.

Despite my above post, I also agree with this. I kind of like the early game challenge of not having enough ammo for my good guns and having to make do with whatever crappy bits of armor and clothing I can scraqe up are. Also the lack of medical supplies forcing you to cook food and watch your radiation level.

Once the caps start flowing, you can buy whatever you're lacking too easily. In most cases, at least with ammo and healing supplies, you don't even need to buy all that often as long as you explore thoroughly. For instance, I haven't bought a single Stimpack, Rad X, or Radaway with my current character, and I still have more than I could ever reasonably use.

I used to use power armor alot. Talking about that.... I have 188 unused fusion cores....