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Toying with ideas for a crafting station for synthetic biological items
Synthetic Biological Crafting System Concept

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In Fallout New Vegas with the DLC "Old World Blues" the player could learn to break down plants into "Salient Green", a substance that could be consumed or crafted into new plants in the field. I've been thinking about bringing that concept to Fallout 4, except I'd intent to make it a bit more advanced and complicated to reflect Fallout 4's focus on settlement resource management over frontier survival. I've made a new workstation out of cobbled-together Institute items, and I've made jars of Salient Green from retextured acid jars, as well as other color variations (salient red, brown, blue, etc) to act as additional components in crafting.
I'm also thinking this idea could be expanded to cover various forms of meat and animal parts, which is currently handled through a system of different kinds of "protein pastes".

The only real hurdle that remains is figuring out exactly how to structure a crafting system for this. I'm unsure about what level of detail and complexity the system should have? How to keep the recipies both consistent and balanced? How many types of special forms of component should there be? How should the breakdown recipies function compared to the synthesization recipies? How should the flora system work compared to the fauna system? (I've got a working item script that allows the use of dummy misc items that can yield multiple items when crafted.)

So if you wanna ask questions or if you have suggestions on how I should formulate all this, feel free to leave them in the comments here. Endorse if you like the idea, to maybe guilt me into actually finishing this mod some day, hopefully.

8 comments

  1. brandonp729
    brandonp729
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    This is a really neat concept. In my opinion though, you should just scrap the protein pastes and make all the meat recipes salient based as well; like Beyond Meat in the Fallout universe. There's some plants that are considered protein-rich, after all. That might simplify the recipes a bit, and as a general rule, you could just require the larger and more complex meats to need a more diverse slurry of salient colors. Like synthesizing brahmin steak might require more colors of salient (like nutrients) than simple mole rat chunks.
    1. abborre
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      I'll concede that from a gameplay perspective, having a shared set of resources for both flora and fauna is perhaps more compelling, since it's more likely incentivize you to mix up hunting and gathering. Though, from a realism perspective, that would be harder to make sense of. The way the salient components work in the current build is that green represents basic green chlorophyll and cellulose structure, white represents stuff like fruit flesh, yellow represents starch, brown is roots/protein/coarse fibers, black is tough extremophilic, grey is fungal matter, and red, blue & purple is basically anything that looks red blue or purple.
      This table shows what how could possibly look like:
      Spoiler:  
      Show
       

      Meanwhile, a draft for the meat recipes look like this
      Spoiler:  
      Show
      (Granted, this probably would not make sense, given that some meats seem to be considerably more voluminous than other)


      If I wanted to make the salient components work for both plants and meats, I'd need to come up with some kind of logic for it, otherwise I'm not sure I'd be able to formulate how it'd look like.
  2. Radsweeper
    Radsweeper
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    Sounds like a cool mod idea.

    But I would suggest more serious labels to match the creation machine. Otherwise it looks like uncle Huey moonshine's stash.

    There's an example on this page:

    https://www.resourcelabel.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/spot-pigyback-labels.jpg
    1. brandonp729
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      I kinda like the makeshift labeling, the tape labeling and jars might make more sense if the mod author decides to allow the Chem workbench to also be used to convert things into Salient while out in the Commonwealth. But the labeling you suggested might fit better if salient production is limited only to within the confines of the Institute.
    2. Radsweeper
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      That's what I was aiming for!

      Also, its just my take on it. Beside, uncle Huey might get upset and sue...
    3. abborre
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      I can see the argument. Whilst the current labels fit the sort of Fallout-ish homebrew mad science theme, the machine itself implies a level of professional quality, and I currently have no plan of making the salient pastes craftable outside of the Bio-synthetic Lab, so maybe they should match that look? Not sure.

      However, whilst I am thinking there could be a Bio-Synthetic Lab placed in the Institute BioScience division, there could possibly be machines place in other locations, such as Med-Tek Research, or Greentech Genetics, not to mention that you'd be able to build them yourself if you have the right science and medicine perks.

      Either way, retexturing the jars to replace the label is not something I'll be looking into now, that would requiring me somehow redoing parts of the normal map, and that's not a feature-creep I wanna devote energy to before I know if the mod will ever get published.
  3. DellSinn
    DellSinn
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    Very cool!!! I love when mods make nods to previous games

    Also I agree with the other commenter, makes more sense to scrap the protein pastes and just make meat into Salient as well
    1. DellSinn
      DellSinn
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      (also I've installed a ton of cooking mods lately and it just hit me how cool this'd be with them, synthesizing ingredients and stuff, oh man)