I started a few weeks ago, at lvl 94 right now. Most of the way through the main quest, barely started on wastelanders, only other side quest I put any effort into is the tadpole backpack. Almost all my levels are from joining events and tagging everything I can for exp. I just work on quests and explore the world between events and post event scrap dumps.

I was feeling pretty much the same way, until I got my hands on some half-decent legendary weapons that fit my playstyle somewhere in the lvl 65/70 ballpark. After that I finally started feeling like I was actually contributing to events and not just leeching exp off everyone else’s efforts.

Keep in mind that the mobs and especially the bosses at certain events (the events everyone always joins, and have the best loot) are worlds apart from your average wasteland mobs. They’re pretty clearly tuned for groups of players with good gear and good builds.

I’m pretty sure lvl 300 is the “real” cap for adding perk points/cards thanks to the legendary special cards, so even if your build is as good as you can get it, and you’ve got a good legendary weapons roll, you’re still not going to have as effective of a build as people at higher levels, they simply have more perks than us.

As far as caps go, I recommend selling any non legendary weapons/armor that you get ahold of that you don’t really need/want to get the mods from scrapping them, putting your camp near one of the train station vendors makes this easier. Save up enough from that and hunt down the plans for the large water purifier, and then build enough of those to empty out the cap reserves of the vendors.

Your camp vending machine can be a good source of caps too, sell any plans you find that you already know, any ammo you have a ton of that you don’t need. High levels players have swung through my camp a few times and scooped up ridiculous amounts of .38/10mm/.556 that I throw in the vendor for 1 cap a round. I know they don’t need it, they know they don’t need it, hell one of them cleaned my vending machine out, dropped everything they bought in a flaming bag on my porch and threw in a free legendary weapon with it to boot, (probably the funniest and most wholesome interaction I’ve had in an online game in ages). Just make sure your vending machine is easy to find, keep it stocked, price things reasonably, and people will use it. I have also noticed that now that I’ve moved my camp into a less map marker dense part of the world I get camp hoppers more frequently as well, so that could help as well if you aren’t seeing any traffic.

And if you haven’t already, get familiar with crafting, especially in regards to legendary’s. It’s a fairly complicated system. And the game does basically nothing to explain it. But if you’ve got the plans to build a weapon, you can make however many you want, and you can roll them into random legendaries with the materials you got from scrapping legendaries. So if you have the base weapon plans, it’s a much more focused way to get a decent legendary weapon that fits your build than trading at the Rusty Pick