It was quite a while ago I played Fallout 1 and 2, but I could swear there buying and selling prices where more realistic in those games. Or am I mistaken? I feel like I get almost nothing from trading a rifle, maybe like 10 times as low price as to buy/trade one back. Was the system not more even and realistic before with even trading? Or am I totally out there now?

I get it is done in some games for "balancing", like how you get nothing for selling things in ESO for example. But I would rather be able to carry less things to sell, but sell/trade them for realistic prices then be able to carry a lot and get less for the stuff I sell. It just feels "gamey" and cheap when you clearly see the system is not designed from an immersive perspective, if this is true is there any mods out there to fix this?

Yeah, but there are perks that affect buying and selling prices I believe.

Yeah, if you think about the importance of a gun in those times the prices should be better, but on the other hand there is a huge abundence of loot and the only limit from becoming too rich too fast is your own carry weight limit, so I think it's somwhat balanced. I think the repair by merge weapons system was better to avoid inflation. But I have 4000 caps already and all the ammo I need I find in the world, so I guess, like in every TES game I will become rich and eventually don't have a money sink to spend it.

There's a perk in Charisma, that gives you better prices at vendors.

It is caused by the extreme inflation in firearms, since literally every npc in the commonwealth carries a gun, and through the course of the game you will loot thousands of npc's, you would end up ridiculously rich if traders offered fair prices.

In FO 1 and 2 you fought considerably fewer armed enemies throughout the game, so weapon loot was more rare.

but you get tons of caps for selling pre-war money :/ and there is so much of it ^^

Really? I am such a moron, it all just ends up in my workshop when I press "store all junk" and then I leave it there...

Windfall, here I come!

What's your Charisma set at? Cap Collector may only require 1 Charisma, but the stat itself still has a noticeable effect on prices.

Yeah, get a set of Charisma-boosting apparel, and you'll notice a serious difference in the prices when you equip it.

Not that caps is the most crucial resource in FO 4, you craft better gear from what you loot and the special gear offered by vendors can be replaced by legendary drops. Ammo is basically the main resource you need to purchase occasionally.

After finding that selling an inventory full of gear often netted you about 300 caps, I set up four large water purifiers at Sanctuary. Every day or so, it would drop off 130 cans of purified water in the crafting storage, which I could then sell for 1000 caps.

You're right. It's a balance thing. Since you're killing thousands of enemies, they either have to a) reduce the worth of all the items, or not let you loot all their gear. At least that's the typical solutions. I'd rather have stores pay closer to 60-70% of an items sell-price and start with a very generous amount caps, but once their caps reserves are depleted, it'll stay depleted. They could slowly get it back over a very long period, or from whenever you buy something from them. Longer resupply times is something I'd like as well, but larger amount of things for sale. It would make little more in-game sense to me at least. Yeah, they'll happily take in some armor and guns, but once they've spent their savings on 25 rifles and enough drugs to start a cartell, well they've got to wait until it gets some turnover, which could take months, and won't be all in one go.

I think it's weird that you can buy 2 superglues from a vendor, and they'll be "oh, I'm all out", and then you come back two days later and suddenly they have superglue on display again. And this happens everytime. WTF is this some vault dweller racism where I don't get to buy all your [censored]? Why you holding back on me? You've run this business you whole life but only got 250 caps? You're only paying me 16 caps for a rifle? [censored] this [censored] man... it's racism. Guess that's what you pay for being blue.

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1) Wear +CHR gear before using vendors.

2) Use the "Cap Collector" perk.

3) Sell pre-war money to vendors (it's flagged as "junk")

4) Graqe mentats

5) Sell ammo. Chances are there's anywhere between 1-3 ammo types you virtually never use, and have accumulated several thousands rounds of. Even better if you have the perk that helps you find more ammo everywhere.
6) Who cares about caps anyway? They become plentiful after a while, and if you use the crafting system, you almost never have to buy anything. All of my slotted weapons are legendarys I found in the field, then upgraded to function exactly how I like.

Actually, the number one thing I buy from vendors is junk - typically because I'm at Sanctuary trying to put up power lines or something, and desperately in need of a few more copper/aluminum/ceramic/whatever. I think I bought a legendary plasma rifle from a vendor about 15 hours ago, too.

Vendors are just where I go to drop stuff that isn't "Junk", but also isn't worth breaking down for components. Couldn't care less about the caps.

In past games the complaint was always that caps were so plentiful that they became meaningless. You would be walking around with hundreds of thousands of bottle caps.

Well, they are still meaningless but you don't have as many as you would in FO3 or FONV

At level 50 I have about 20,000 caps but I never have to spend any of it.

If you want more money, boost your carry weight and loot till your pockets bulge but vendors don't have much cash either so you will have to take your payment in ammo.

Reality: if you feel you can't progress in this game because you dont have enough caps (how much is enough you're not gonna be buying items for 15k caps when yur a newb!)...then you are seriously doing something wrong

i've got god knows how many hours in this game, probably around 200 or so under 4 or 5 new restarts, and i literally just went to a trader to actually trade for the first time yesterday...there's so many ways to progress through this game its crazy

i seriously believe that people complaining about being stuck in progression are just using horrible strategy and u can especially tell from the people complaining about 'all i see is pipe guns'...the weapons and armor get better as u level up, if you are still seeing the same stuff its cuz you're doing a horrible job at leveling your character, which i find surprising because leveling is so freaking easy...

also going to add that even having a 'currency' in this world is a stretch, i mean of course unless a decent number of a certain group of people, (insert race here), survived the war and were able to create a currency to manipulate then there most likely wouldn't be one and it would all just be straight up bartering xD

I find I never have that many caps but it doesn't seem to matter that much. I took the "scrounger" level 1 perk and I seem to find more than enough ammunition to keep me in business.

Since I can make or modify most everything else I find there's very little I need to buy.

Unless you've inadvertently turned it into pulp to line your armour with. D'oh!

Just sell excess 38. ammo. Just go to every raider, container, cabinet and one trip from sanctuary to diamond city can net from 200-500 caps. I only carry the 45. pipe revolver, double barrel shotgun and sniper rifle, so the 38., 10mm, 5.56mm... are money for me . The thing is 1 ammo = 1 cap, so in essence every raider is carrying 10-20 caps. You can do the math. My personal advice pick GOLD, SILVER item and pre war money, and sell those. Gold Flip lighers have a good weight/worth ratio.

Gold Bars are worth about 450 caps at full price but even then your netting around 200 caps even if your horrible at trading.

Anything with Gold in it is worth money.

As said earlier Pre-War money weighs nothing but is also usually worth more than 1 cap each, plus it tends to accumulate at the workshop when your dumping off stuff.

Pure Water is easy to produce at Sanctuary when you can build quite a few water purifiers along the River, Heck I built those plus a nice Water Front fort too. Built another Water Fort at another Settlement Location with like 3 more top end Purifiers too just cause it looks cool. Any settlement location with a large standing body of water can potentially earn you quite a lot of tradable water and there are several locations to use for this purpose.

Sanctuary of course is tempting to plant a sizable farm on due to the large amount of dirt on this location for planting crops. The best crop to plant is in fact Melons due to the Abernanthy Farm being so close by and since a certain young lady is willing to buy your melons at about 3-5 caps each. You could plant quite a large amount of Melons on Sanctuary to produce a substantial dailey income if that's your thing.

Not to mention that in general having a large farm is a great way to produce an income if you need to. Having a decent amount of CHA helps due to the settler limit being CHA + 10 more settlers means more farm hands so you want to get as many people farming as you can.

Charisma is a big factor in pricing and I'd bet the usual character build that has 1 CHA is well why even bother trying to make caps or trade for anything...Kinda pointless to even bother doing anything with Traders with 1 CHA.

Just one point of CHA is quite good, consider drinking a Beer before talking to venders and often Trash Can Carla has a few beers to sell so you could buy one, drink it, and then sell your loot. Gotta say though if your into selling and buying loot you probably should invest 6 points into CHA right off the bat.

Magazine Perks there are 10 mags for 10 levels of free perks. A barter perk with 3 levels you can buy at level up.

Altogether though a starting character just isn't that good at bartering and characters that don't invest in barter are not that much better either.

Well actually the economy in Fallout 1 was pretty broken and if you had much skill in Barter at all you could actually sell items for more than you bought them for. I was able to use them to leech every cap away from everyone I saw. It was really easy to sell an NPC a junk item that you didn't want anymore, like say a radscorp tail, then purchase it back for less than they gave you, and repeat the process until they had no caps left. Fallout 2 was more realistic, I never got barter to a point where I could do that. I don't recall exact ratios but it cost considerably more to purchase something than you could sell it for.

In Fallout 4, yeah guns sell for cheap, but they are also pretty cheap to purchase. In my last playthrough I had 6 charisma and 2 ranks in cap collector and I could sell an item for just under 1/3 what I would pay for it. Fusion Cores, for example, sold for a bit over 100 caps and cost about 330 to purchase. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

Yeah the Prices are strange and low, but gladly i never Need to buy stuff because you find so much. All you Need is Luck Perks + Damage Perks + Legendary Modded Weapons. You can nearly kill everything with 1 Bullet.

Plenty of money in the end where you dont even need to bother with every little thing or worry about it but if you didn't worry you wouldn't have accumulated. I'm level 45 with 40,000 caps and 70 fusion cores so smoke em if you got em. Been running around for 72 hours shooting the 10mm and hoarding everything else.

Don't forget to wear Charisma boosting gear when you sell, and pop a graqe mentat for good measure.