Give Feedback
0 of 0
About this mod
Immersive changes to the game mechanics for crafting workstations, turrets and stores.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
- Donations
-= Retool and Rebuild =-
One of the many things that always irked me when playing Fallout 4 was the unimmersive crafting components for things like stores, workbenches and other settlement items – not to mention the whole Local Leader 2 gating for something as mundane as a pot on the ground with a fire under it. Like: who is supposed to sue me over roasting a molerat, minding my own business? The Commonwealth Fire Brigade?!
Toolz is my attempt to fix these issues. The mod started out as a simple set of changes to the crafting and building recipes for various objects, but over time it became clear that simply adding a hammer for building a weapon store won't cut it: the tools I wanted to use were junk items (in other words: they have a component list associated to them), which caused them to be automatically scrapped whenever another object just happened to require these specific components – not cool when you were about to build an object which actually had the entire junk item as a requirement. After going down the entire rabbit hole and emerging somewhere to Albuquerque (that damn left turn again!) the mod grew into a small framework which does some significant changes to both items and perks, among with the addition of a slew of new items to make building stuff in Fallout 4 both easier AND more immersive.
-= Winds of change =-
Toolz does the following changes to in-game objects, items and perks:
Renamed the Chemistry Station to Crafting Workbench (with all the stuff it's supposed to do in Fallout 4 that step was long overdue anyway, and I didn't want to add just another micro mod to rename it, so I killed two birds with one stone in the process). I also added a few new designa to provide some more variety for settlements and/or playthroughs where a boiler or laboratory wasn't thematically fitting enough. The new versions include a workbench-type style, a fancy 1900s-style scientific version and a compact version which can be snapped on any "Do I Yourshelf"-compatible table.
Several junk items were turned into MISC items which can not be scrapped automatically anymore (more about this later). These items include:
Ball-PeenHammer
Screwdriver
all types of wrenches
Fumigus Blowtorch
Aluminum Oil Can
Unused Flip Lighter
Undamaged Clipboard (the pre-war version)
Preserved Cigarette Pack
Surgical Scalpel
Enhanced Targeting Card
IV Bags
Clean Drinking Glasses
All building recipes for stores and workbenches do not require Local Leader 2 by default anymore. Instead, LL2 now has a new purpose: the perk allows you to bypass ANY requirements for building stores and/or workbenches, it only requires you to pay a fair amount of caps to let someone else do the dirty work for you. In game terms, this means that the old store recipes now lack steel and wood as crafting components as well as any other perk except for LL2, while workbenches got a new recipe which only include caps as a component to mirror this effect.
Added a second crafting recipe for both stores and workbenches. These recipes now require certain MISC and/or JUNK items to craft, and some of them may also require a perk or two to keep the recipe comprehensive and plausible.
Generally speaking, the rules for perk requirements are as follows:
Small stores and all workbenches do not require LL at all Medium and large storesrequire LL 1, while large stores also require Cap Collector 1. The only exception is the General Store, which requires Cap Collector 1 for medium stores and Cap Collector 2 for large stores
Cooking stations now provide a slight happiness bonus. Having a meal that doesn't incur any RADs for a change ain't a bad thing after all
Caravan hitching posts also provide both some extra happiness and also generate some small income for your settlement. Makes them even more useful in the long run and also helps you in becoming the next big tycoon of the Commonwealth
Added a few new workbench recipes to the mix, including a new compact cooking station which requires a working hotplate and a cooking pan. The other ones just allow you to craft ground pot cooking stations and the small power armor station. Don't wanna let these go to waste in your game files, after all.
Another thing which kinda broke immersion for me was the fact that the player miraculously knows how to build a laboratory out of the blue, so I added a new requirement while I was at it: you need to find the blueprints for any workbench that isn't for cooking, and you need to have the blueprint in your inventory when entering workshop mode in order to build the workbench. You can either find these blueprints in the
Commonwealth OR you can buy them from merchants (most notably Carla and Trudy, but others like Daisy in Goodneighbor, Diamond City Surplus and Deb in Bunker Hill also sell them to you – for a hefty price). Each blueprint can be found 3 times in the Commonwealth, some of them are somewhat more hidden than others, but generally you literally have to avoid them in order to not being able to find them and pick them up.
And to add the usuall oddball to the mix to not make it too sterile and monotone: the compact crafting workbench is unlocked when you either have the blueprints for the boiler OR the lab version, while the fancy Crafting workbench quires BOTH of these to be unlocked (basically as a little reward for exploring the gameworld)
Since some of the items required to build settlement objects are somewhat obscure, I went ahead and placed quite a few of them in the game world. No changes to precombines/preVis necessary, so don't worry about it.
In the rare event that you REALLY need a specific item and you just can't find it, you also have the chance to craft it yourself. Just head over to the nearest Crafting Workbench, and check out the new „Crafting“ category. It'll contain the recipes to build the required components from
scratch, however you will need Blacksmith 1 in order to craft most of them.
And finally: since they also just require generic crap instead of plausible items I changed the crafting recipes for turrets. They now require some very specific items you can salvage from common junk items or simply craft them if needed.
Turrets now require (for the most part, the only exception being the basic tripod turret for game balancing reasons):
1 Enhanced Targeting Card
1 Gearbox Set
2 Electric Motors
1 standard receiver and 1basic barrel of the weapon it is supposed to mount. This only applies to “true” workshop turrets using the orange clamp-style mount and tripod, not the military-grade versions. None of the turrets require the previous perks to build anymore, as acquiring the needed weapon parts (or simply crafting new ones to replace them on weapons you found in the field) already greatly affects the player level they can be crafted anyway. And let's be honest: stuffing a lasergun's receiver and barrel into the turret jack does not require a Science01 degree.
The only exception is the heavy tripod turret, as it does not require a standard weapon to be mounted.
-= Let us play item ping-pong! =-
One glaring issue with re-categorizing the tools was that it will cost you a fair amount of crafting resources, as the workshop mode won't be able to scrap these items if required. I solved this issue by linking two complementary versions of a single item, one for scrapping and one for building.
Most of the time I simply recycled the building components out of the pre-war counterparts (see unused flip lighter), while others required
a new matching item in the other category to build a suitable pair. Generally speaking, you can create non-scrappable items out of junk
items at a low extra cost, while turning MISC items into junk items is always free.
Since different items require different ways of patching them up and making them usable as MISC items (and vice versa) the Crafting Workbench features several new recipe categories:
Cleaning: requires purified water and is mainly used to simply clean a cooking pot or for your grinding stone to resharpen an old hack saw
Repair: actually fixes items like hotplates or a blowtorch. These items usually require at least two additional components
Scrap: convert MISC items back into junk items or right into their original components.
Craft: create MISC components from scratch. This category also includes salvaging specific MISC components right out of junk items without converting them into another item beforehand to reduce the number of steps required.
Generally speaking, both JUNK items and MISC items with no pre-war version available by default share the same name, with the MISC version having a suffix in parentheses. For example:
Hack saw → Hack Saw (resharpened)
Cooking pot → Cooking pot (clean)
Hotplate → Hotplate (fixed)
Scissors → Scissors (uable)
Drinking Glass → Drinking Glass (clean)
That way, you can easily keep track of what items might be missing whenever you want to build a store or workbench but you can't due to missing crafting components.
As usual there also is the occasional oddball in the mix. For example, both turrets and some workbenches now require an electric motor, which was added as a new component and can be salvaged from desk fans or Giddyup Buttercups. The other new member of the component list is the Enhanced Targeting Card (guess what workshop object desperately needs it ^^). Like the electric motor, the Enhanced Targeting Card can either be salvaged (from assaultron circuit boards), simply found as loot or bought from vendors (without a component list, it will now be found in the MISC section of their inventory), or built from scratch using common components (requires 2 circuitry and 1 silver, which corresponds to the original component list minus the 1 plastic), albeit this also requires the Science 3 perk to reflect that this piece of equipment is among the top tier technology level items available in the Commonwealth. In the rare event that you really need that circuitry, you can also scrap an Enhanced Targeting Card at any Crafting Workbench and get 2 circuitry out of it.
UPDATE 1.0.1: electric motors are now a standard crafting component and therefore can be salvaged from their original sources directly instead of being crafted first. You can now scrap an electric motor and receive 2 copper. This should massively speed up and sreamline the crafting process, I left the original toolchain in the mod because I wanted to expand on it later on - turns out that there are easier ways to do it anyway, so keeping this oddball was unnecessary. ^^
While most MISC items have their complementary junk counterparts I deliberately omitted a few very specific items from the equation. You can not turn clean oil back into common oil (why should you do that, and how exactly? Spit in it?) the gearbox set (as a means to limit the amount of this particular component since it is rarely used outside of crafting turrets and workbenches which include complex moving machines) and the Chem Set (which is solely required to create a Crafting Workbench, and due to its own crafting requirements you should never have more than a handful of them in the first place!). In case of the Chem Set, however, scrapping a Crafting Workbench will give you the original test tubes, test tube rack and unused lighter as normal scrap items, so you could recycle most of it if you really need to.
-= FiXiT! =-
Sometimes you just don't want to wait until you get back to a settlement for a reason, and the next Crafting Workbench is either miles away or some baddies block your path and you ran out of bullets (or your knife became too dull to even cut through water). In that case, you got a new little helper at your disposal: the FiXiT!
A FiXiT is a small EDC-style pouch filled with all sorts of small tools and items you need to perform some very basic tasks. It can be used to clean items using dirty water (and even allow you to craft empty water cartons which you can fill up at the nearest water source!), do the minor repairs required to make a hotplate or oil can run like a charm again, open a box of cigarettes to get the juice and expensive
content inside (which you also need for setting up a new bar at your settlement, btw), or craft clean oil or pack some greased gears or
various junk items into a small package required as a new crafting component.
However, a FiXiT only hassome much storage space available, which means that whenever you use it there is a certain chance that you might run out of a vital component, rendering the FiXiT unusable until you refilled it. Right now it can require 3 items to be refilled with: clean oil (which can be crafted with a FiXiT lacking oil, however), turpentine, and wonderglue. Depending on the task your FiXiT will try to use any excess items suitable for completing the task, and if that fails, it will use its own resources and get depleted in the process. By default a
FiXiT and a Crafting Workbench have very similar crafting recipes, but the FiXiT has the occasional advantage like not requiring
turpentine for creating a working blowtorch at all, which makes it a powerful addition to your inventory out in the field but would not
stop you from creating new components even if you have no working FiXiT left.
A FiXiT can neither be crafted nor can it be bought from a vendor. You need to find one or two once you left the vault in order to get one. Not all of them are in working order, and the items you need to refill them are common enough to be found on a regular basis but not common enough to be wasted without a second thought. Most of the time, using a FiXiT right after you found a valuable junk item clearly is the best option to remove it out of the junk pool, but you should always keep track of how many crafting items you already have (and most likely need in the near future) to prevent excessive squandering of valuable resources you could really need for other items.
-= Meh, scrap it! =-
Now, with most of the changes out of the way a few remarks about that time when a workshop object is no longer needed anymore and you want to scrap it to make some room. While this is no biggie for the most part when it comes to workbenches I deliberately omitted any new scrap recipes for the stores. The simple reason is that I want to keep stores as a money sink to remove resources out of the game instead of generating even more on a short notice. Stores are supposed to be a long-term investment, not something you just throw in for good measure. The same does not apply to workbenches (at least to that extend) as workbenches are a necessity to keep your gear in good condition, and the farmers will keep you fed while you are not out in the field. I also didn't include scrap recipes for the turrets as they are
supposed to be an extremely valuable addition to your settlements since they prevent you from having to assign a settler to a guard
post to increase protection.
Generally speaking, the goal is to be able to set everything up in a settlement in a reasonable amount of time, albeit on a very low level and with only a handful of settlers. That way, rebuilding a settlement becomes a bit more of a challenge and requires some long-term planning instead of a quick “set it and forget it” task as it is the case by default.
-= Future plans =-
Toolz has been set as a master file because I actually am planning to add the occasional mod to the mix requiring this file as a basis. One of them being a small mod that is gonna add a new workshop turret or two, which will profit from the new components I added with Toolz. Other things may be new workstations, workbenches, tools or whatever the computer between my ears may come up with. Or maybe someone else has an idea and wants to give it a try using Toolz as a starting point: in that case: the stage is yours. ^^
-= Additional Info =-
Since there already were a few questions concerning compatibility issues with other mods like ECO: Toolz only affects the COBJ records for the vanilla workbenches of the game by replacing the standard scrap components with my new crafting components and adding a very specific condition to unlock the crafting recipe which only affects the particular COBJ record in question. Therefore, any mod which brings new workbenches and/or crafting recipes for vanilla workbenches to the table will NOT be affected! However, any mod installed and loaded after Toolz which alters the crafting recipe for the vanilla workbenches will override this mod's changes so please keep that in mind when managing your load order.