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[camwyn]

Fallout 4 has a crafting system. This, I knew. I found a workbench and a cooking station and an armor station and a power armor dock in my startup town the other day, and after some poking around eventually found a chemistry station for making chems and explosives, and that's good. That's all good.

You can build actual houses and structures in the town and apparently electrical generators and other things as well, to attract people to live there (or live wherever, since there's more than one location with a workbench and other stations). That's also good.

Turns out that if you activate workbench mode you can walk around town and set your sights on virtually any of the objects decorating the landscape- I'm talking things you can't even interact with normally, like heaps of tires or dead trees or houses too wrecked to enter- and say 'Scrap that. I want its component parts', and bam, the dead tree or ruined house vanishes and you suddenly have a bunch of wood and metal to work with. This works with objects you pick up or have in your inventory, too, like broken lamps or pipe wrenches or cartons of cigarettes (which have asbestos in them as a component you can retrieve for use) or board games (the one I found had both wood and nuclear material in it). It's weirdly satisfying to sweep an entire neighborhood clean of everything that's too broken to use and leave a couple of moderately intact houses standing with bare foundations on either side.

I'll get around to actual plot stuff eventually, I promise, but c'mon. Burnt-out car too rusted to even explode when you shoot the power plant? BAM! Now it's twenty units of metal suitable for roofing. How do you not get the giggles over something like that?

Comments

[leeshajoy]

So Fallout 4 is Minecraft with better graphics? ;)

[camwyn]

Pretty close to that. But more Venture Brothers-ish 'point the finger and woosh' than Minecraftian 'punch it or hit it with a tool until it falls apart'.

I'll get around to going to Concord for the initial plottery soon enough. Last night I built an actual two-story wooden shack and put a functional bed in it. I am inordinately proud of that.

[autographedcat]

So I finally got play for just a little bit last night. How do you collect things like the car, you mentioned? I mean, I've hoovered up pretty much anything that can be picked up and dumped it into the workbench, but I don't see how to interact with the rusted out autos. :)

[camwyn]

You don't have to pick them up. You don't even have to be at the workbench so long as you're within its active radius. Go into workbench mode- on the PS4 I do this by holding down the big rectangular panel in the middle of the controller- and once you see the options to build things, turn and focus your crosshairs on an object. If it glows green or if it's alive, it's probably usable as-is and shouldn't be scrapped. If it glows yellow, you'll have the option to scrap it for parts.

[autographedcat]

Thanks! Fairly obvious once you know the trick, but they didn't go out of their way to make it clear how it worked :)

I need to go read some guides, obviously.

[ymfaery]

....is this the game where the trailer had a guy and a dog exploring a nuked area? Cause now I'm mildly tempted just because of the (literal!) world-building aspect.

[camwyn]

That's the one, yep. The game's more than a little het-oriented, at least at the start; you start off by creating both members of a married couple with a child, and then select one to play for the rest of the game. You pick up the dog later, when you reach a particular nearby area.