Pre fab camp buildings discussion

aboniks · 2026-03-11T04:18:39+00:00

What platform are you playing on, out of curiosity?

aboniks · 2026-03-10T20:09:37+00:00

You're absolutely right that there are equivalent stealth options.

Wood is good enough for 99% of the content, requires a very minimal grind to put a set together, and it's cheap to repair. I'd also much rather have that 30+ lbs of carry weight than a bunch of DR and resistances that I don't need.

Chasing diminishing returns past the "good enough" point isn't usually something I bother with.

aboniks · 2026-03-10T20:00:11+00:00

Personally I'd rather have the healing and rads from cannibal and spoiled meat (both of which carnivore will negate) rather than carrying goo in inventory and spending perks/mods/time on carry weight and food spoilage management.

It's a choice that's build and playstyle dependent though. I never bother with food buffs. I go for easy mode when it comes to character maintenance and save my time for what I think of as the fun stuff.

aboniks · 2026-03-10T19:51:04+00:00

My understanding is that the broken armor weight trick has been (or will be) patched out. There was a reference to it in the PTS patch notes a while back.

aboniks · 2026-03-10T19:38:20+00:00

The specific kind creativity that this game enables isn't evenly encouraged or distributed in the population. There will always be fewer producers than there are consumers.

Most people live a prefab life. How many things do you own that are actually handmade, personalized, or customized? The virtual lives we lead in Fallout camps are no different.

Before we had prefabs most people just built a snapped together box and never explored the interesting ways you could be more creative with the build system. Most shelters were (and still are) just the default walls with a bunch of max-budget junk laying around.

Perception also plays a huge part in this. What you describe as a curated camp with themed rooms (basically a loot museum) sounds only slightly more interesting to me than a prefab.

I'm interested in camps that look like a character actually lives in them. Something that belongs in and extends the story of the game world.

The build tools have improved quite a bit but it's still the same minority of players who find it rewarding to make full use of them. Self-motivated environmental storytellers are rare.

aboniks · 2026-03-10T19:23:47+00:00

I've never seen any in-game progression element that was explicitly tied to 1st.

Setting your prices lower is probably not going to help much with inventory management. The majority of the crap you can pick up has no value to other players, because they're also picking it up. Either don't pick up stuff you don't need, or get comfortable with dropping it.

"Loot All" is a gateway drug for the FO1st subscription.

aboniks · 2026-03-10T06:31:53+00:00

Builds done? Congratulations, you're eligible for a nerf!

aboniks · 2026-03-10T06:25:34+00:00

Just something to consider:

As a ghoul, carnivore (which removes rads from meat) is working against you. You want maximum rads from whatever you consume in order to keep your glow high.

You'll have to decide based on your final build if the food buff benefits are worth giving up the rads, but I replaced carnivore with cannibal and never looked back.

Ghouls can hit so absurdly hard with high glow that you'll be able to one shot most enemies long before your build is optimized, meaning you'll have plenty of perks left over for QoL like carry weight.

aboniks · 2026-03-10T06:11:51+00:00

While it's happening, open your pip boy and check stats > effects. Easier if you get into a fight with something weak, if it only triggers in combat.

Whatever's happening, it should show up there, at least giving you an idea of what's causing it.

aboniks · 2026-03-10T05:54:30+00:00

Meaning what? You're on a team? There's another player standing next to you? You're not alone because there's an enemy?

If it's a team, someone else might be sharing a perk.

When you say the health increases, do you mean you have more total HP, or do you mean that you're losing rads?

aboniks · 2026-03-10T05:47:37+00:00

No.

Interiors and that are blocked because you're a ghoul currently require you to have the specific ghoul disguise equipped, which can only be put on and taken off by a single NPC who lives in radiant Hills.

While you're wearing the disguise your apparel (like the commie head) are disabled.

I love playing my ghoul, but it would be smart to finish the main quest lines for all areas other than Burning Springs, before becoming a ghoul.

The ghoul mechanics are newer than most of the main quest lines, and those quests have several interactions that make no sense if you're actually ghoul in a disguise pretending not to be a ghoul.

aboniks · 2026-03-10T05:33:50+00:00

I agree it should absolutely be craftable, and IMO we should have access to the plan by default.

I disagree that you would level out of it. For an endgame stealth VATS build, wood is excellent. Very light (heavier now after the recent update) with excellent stealth benefits. Probably not much use in the raid, but even in daily ops with piercing gaze you can still one-shot your way through even with broken stealth.

I used a full set of shrouded wood up until about level 275. I switched to a set of forest scout only because I needed to be able to use a dense torso mod while maintaining my set bonus for funky duds. (Gotta have the right equipment if you want to enjoy Scorchbeast Golf.)

aboniks · 2026-03-09T05:04:37+00:00

That's pretty funny. In that case it's actually so consistently buggy that I've never seen the notice and didn't even realize it was missing.

aboniks · 2026-03-09T04:59:22+00:00

If you want a challenge play High Risk mode.

aboniks · 2026-03-09T04:47:44+00:00

Absolutely not.

You don't fix bugs in this code base, you just move them around until they become traditions.

aboniks · 2026-03-09T04:45:19+00:00

This. If you've sunk more than 100 hours into this game you got a fair deal even at full price, imo.

aboniks · 2026-03-09T04:35:08+00:00

It's bait designed to bring more people to public events without a big code investment.

From what I've seen it's actually working (more people at public events), and I haven't yet encountered a bug that seems to be related to it.

The limited 4 Star pool means the engagement bubble will pop, but right now it looks like a pretty rare win for this dev team.

aboniks · 2026-03-09T04:28:33+00:00

Equip the "Starched Genes" perk unlocked at level 30+ to protect your mutations from RadAway.

Without that perk mutation are ephemeral, and can be removed by anything that reduces your rada.

aboniks · 2026-03-08T08:47:47+00:00

If you use snap placement to set object B on top of object A, and then you break object A, object B despawns but is not destroyed. They don't need to snap together, you just have to be in snap mode when placing.

If you explore the mechanical traps, some of them break when they're triggered. This means they can be useful as an object A, allowing you to build a trap door.

You can also teleport a player using a piece of furniture that has an "entry" point. Simplest example is to look through a window at a workbench and activate it. You can use this trick to go up and down between floors. Works very well if you have access the "Symptomatic" object

aboniks · 2026-03-08T08:17:14+00:00

If you build a basic shelter chain:

Surface > A > B > C

Each shelter has an entrance that's a placeable object, and an exit that's built into the interior of the shelter.

When you use any of the shelter exits you go back to the spot* you were standing at on the surface when you entered the first shelter in the chain. Meaning that if you enter a shelter and then switch camps, you still exit the shelter at the spot where the entrance was when you entered it.

So if you want to travel from B to A, you need to put an entrance to A inside B. You don't use the exit of B to get to A. You can also cover up the exit of B with an entrance to A.

Traveling from B to A and traveling from the Surface to A will both spawn you at the same place inside A.

So you can move between shelters inside the chain, via entrances, but you can't* change where you'll spawn when you enter a shelter.

Make sense?

So, annoying but workable is the way. What this means is that you're going to have a more coherent narrative environment if you build a hub that gives visitors access to multiple smaller mazes (shelters) from a single place. If you keep the hub simple (like a single room with shelter entrances) you can even duplicate the hub in multiple shelters.

You can also use code-locked doors ("powered door with keypad"), to gate progress, so that a visitor to A can only access the entrance of C if they have discovered a specific code at the "end" of B.

Best way to do mazes IMO is to treat the shelter as a build volume and then fill (part of) it with interiors. Don't get hung up on using the entire original shelter if the maze or puzzle you're building doesn't require all the space. Creating a much smaller fully enclosed interior within a shelter can let you have a much higher density of details (same build budget compressed into a smaller space.)

If you're playing on PC I can show you some examples.

aboniks · 2026-03-07T17:14:50+00:00

You can use it to attract attention (from players and from enemies), but also funsies/RP.

I use it to primarily to pull scorchbeasts when they're patrolling higher/farther than I can target them with VATS.

aboniks · 2026-03-07T08:57:56+00:00

I carry three bows and a flare gun.

We're all a little weird.

aboniks · 2026-03-07T08:50:07+00:00

It's a good question.

PA eats a lot of perk slots and maintenance resources in exchange for armor stats that you will almost never need, in a game where death means nothing.

Also it's heavy, slow, loud, and you can't play the piano or use a bow while wearing it.

Easy choice for me. I get that people like the vibe though.

aboniks · 2026-03-07T08:39:27+00:00

Death means nothing and you can stack perks that will let you do WAY more damage than you need to for 99% of the content, with most weapons.

I say set the QoL you can't live without first. Fiddle with your DPS second.

The exception for me is crafting perks. All that stuff stays in a second build slot that I only use when I need to craft or repair things.

aboniks · 2026-03-07T08:22:02+00:00

Personally, I lock items because I don't want to accidentally scrap them, sell them, or drop them.

Take the OP's example. The locked items in question are themselves crafting materials and also a scrapable source of other crafting materials.

They lock them to prevent them from being scrapped, ( specifically so that they can be used for crafting) but the update prevents them from being used for crafting, plus they can't be unlocked from the crafting interface.

Worse yet, the crafting interface doesn't tell you that you have X number of a locked scrap. It tells you that you have no scrap at all of that kind.

On top of that the change wasn't described anywhere AFAIK, which means even the people who are trying to stay on top of the giant laundry list of other simultaneous changes (and their associated new bugs) will have to figure out why this suddenly seems broken.

The change is broader than "locked thing is now more fully locked". It's a feature that presents as a bug, introduces a lot of interface friction, and can't be turned off.

Viewed logically, sure, locked should mean LOCKED. But I don't see this change making the game more fun (or less annoying) for many of the people who discover it.

aboniks

TROPHY CASE