Fallout 4 Crafting

Weapons Station

Having the Gun Nut perks (under Intelligence) makes weapons much more powerful, making life in the Commonwealth much easier. Once you get some other types of weapons, you will also want to get the Science perks to upgrade them (and for upgrading armor).

Crafting, itself, is pretty easy. Usually, the further down the list of options you can go, the more powerful/better your weapons become. You can see what Perk levels and components you need. When you get them, upgrade your weapon.

When you have made an upgrade, the old mod you replaced with the new mod will be in the Mods section of your inventory. You could sell these, but you may need them later.

Say that you upgraded the basic barrel of a weapon with a better one. Now say that you come across a better weapon of the same type, but it doesn't have, oh, a Supressor and your old one does.

Bring up the old one, put the basic barrel back on. It will look like it is going to use resources to do that, but if the basic barrel is in your inventory or in the workbench's inventory, it will use it instead. Some basic mods do not use resources, in which case you can revert to the basic level at no cost anyway.

After removing the Supressor from your old weapon, it will appear in your Mod inventory and when you add that to your new weapon, the old one from your inventory will be used instead of building it from resources.

A couple of catches:

• The old and new weapons must be the same type. You can't use the Supressor from a 10mm pistol on a shotgun.

• Say that your old weapon was one you found and that it had a mod on it which you don't have a high enough perk to have built yourself, such as a Supressor. You can take the Supressor mod off your old weapon, but you will not be able to put it on the new one.

When you have finished a session of upgrading, Transfer the Mods to the workbench. There's no point in carrying them around with you. Then check the Mod section of the workbench. If you see duplicates of the same mod, you may as well sell the extras.

Sharing Mods:

If you have set up supply lines among settlements to share supplies, you can also share weapon and armor mods. You will not see them in the workstations of other settlements, but when you upgrade a weapon which can use the stored mod, it will be used rather than rebuilt from components.

Scrap or Sell Extra Weapons?

When you scrap a weapon, you just get basic components like steel and wood. Since you probably already have plenty of steel and wood, you are usually better off selling weapons.

The Scrapper perk lets you get valuable components such as screws and springs, although some basic weapons still only yield steel when you scrap them. Compare what you can get for selling the weapon to what you would have to pay to buy junk with the same components. It would not make sense to scrap a weapon which you could sell for hundreds of caps.

Armor Station

This is used to upgrade regular armor, not Power Armor. Like weapons, armor comes in a lot of flavors: leather, metal, etc., and mods for one type can only be used for armor of the same type.

The options on the Armor Station should be pretty self-explanatory. Like weapons, usually the farther down the list of alternatives you go, the better they are and the more and scarcer the components required, as well as higher the Perk levels.

If you use Power Armor all the time, there is no point in messing with regular armor. You could wear it under Power Armor, but you do not get any benefits from doing so. You might as well be wearing long johns.

Power Armor Station

One important function of the Power Armor Station is repairing power armor. For some reason, in F4 weapons do not wear out and do not need repairing, but power armor does suffer damage. If you do not keep it repaired, you will eventually see parts of it in your inventory, not on you.

When you get to your Power Armor Station, you can repair everything and the parts in your inventory can be equipped to the Power Armor frame again. While in theory you can repair your power armor at any Power Armor Station you come across, you can't unless you carry the steel and any other necessary components with you all the time.

It makes more sense to Fast Travel back to your home base to make repairs and then return to wherever you came from (assuming you were at a named location on the map).

Power armor parts can be mixed and matched. For example, if you are equipped with the basic T-45 power armor and find a Raider Leg that has more Damage resistance than yours, you can change just the T-45 leg to the Raider leg. The types of armor are Raider, T-45, T-51, T-60 and X-01.

Upgrading Power Armor generates a lot of XP.

Chemistry Station

Cooking Station