A Beginner’s Guide to Crafting in Fallout 4 – How to Get Started

In an RPG you get a lot of scope with what direction you want your character to go in, but if you want to get ahead in Fallout 4 you’re going to have to do at least some crafting. We’ve got a few handy hints and shortcuts to get you started.

Pick Up Everything You Find

Anything you can break down into crafting components is useful, and anything you can pick up you can break down. If you’re worried about carrying too much then you can tag items you need from specific crafting recipes, and these will be flagged up as you come across them. You can also dump stuff with your companion if you’re really weighed down; just don’t forget that they’re carrying it.

Give Yourself Deep Pockets

On that note, one of the more useful adjustments you can make to your armour is to add pockets. These increase your carrying capacity, which you’ll need for all the extra junk you pick up in order to, er, add pockets to your armour. You can phase these out once you’re getting to the higher level modifications and know specifically what you need, but they’re quick and easy to add early on.

Invest Carefully in Perks

While the base crafting recipes are open to everyone, the higher tier ones are gated by Perks. Armour and melee weapon modifications are based on your Strength, while guns and chemicals are under Intelligence, and explosive crafting depends on Perception. If you want to get really into your crafting then be aware of where you’re spending your points when you level up. There’s also a great Perk under Intelligence called Scrapper which gives you the ability to salvage rare components when you scrap weapons and armour.

Farming for Adhesive

Adhesive is a really useful crafting resource, but rather than scavenge for duct tape and wonderglue in the wilderness you can set up your own production line. Pick a settlement and plant a good crop of mutfruit, tato, and corn, and build a water purifier. This will give you all the ingredients you need to cook up vegetable starch at a cooking station, which gives you 5 adhesive a pop.

Keep a Healthy, Balanced Diet

Don’t be tempted to neglect the cooking station. Chances are you’ll be carrying around chunks of whatever you last killed, but they’re way more useful once you’ve cooked them- they’ll give you more health and no rads when you eat them, and some give additional bonuses to your stats. Mirelurks, mutant hounds, and radstags all roast up into useful meals, not to mention bigger baddies like deathclaws, and never underestimate the fortifying power of a good vegetable soup.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

So you’ve added a bunch of modifications to your favourite pistol and you’re busy busting raiders’ heads, but then one of them drops a better pistol right at your feet. Surely all those upgrades haven’t been a waste of time? Nope, as long as they apply to your new weapon of choice you can strip them off the old one at the weapons workbench and transfer them over. This is also true for your armour. After all, there’s no need to pay for upgrades twice if you’re changing your gear up.

Pay Attention to the Stats

Look, we don’t want to teach grandmother to suck giant radscorpion eggs, but just because a crafting recipe is harder to make or needs more Perks to unlock, that doesn’t necessarily make it better for the kind of character you’re playing. A modification might increase an armour’s physical damage resistance, but it also makes it a lot heavier, and that’s a pain if you’ve gone for a low-Strength character build. If you find out what works best for you then you’ll have a much better time. That probably applies to your real life as well, but hey, that’s none of our business.