How to manage your economy

[HunterFromAbove]

What are the most effective and efficient ways to boost your economy in this game?

[Jouchebag]

...what do you mean by that? Is this about finding money? Settlements? Vendors?

[HunterFromAbove]

Originally posted by Jouchebag:

...what do you mean by that? Is this about finding money? Settlements? Vendors?

I meant in making money in the game. Perhaps best places to sell stuff for good prices etc.

[Upsidedownsign]

Originally posted by HunterFromAbove:

Originally posted by Jouchebag:

...what do you mean by that? Is this about finding money? Settlements? Vendors?

I meant in making money in the game. Perhaps best places to sell stuff for good prices etc.

just set up high level stores/ market stands, caps shall start coming in (no matter where you are)

[tbloyzz]

Making money was never my focus in this game, but I guess producing/selling purified water helps.

[Lee]

Purified water is a good way as tbloyzz said. Just place multiple water purifiers at sanctuary and sell the ones you don't need.

[The Inept European]

The economy problem isn't getting goods to sell. The problem is getting enough traders with enough buying power in convenient places so they can actually pay for what you are selling.

Unless you like going to DC market carrying a hundred raider chestpieces and shotguns.

[tbloyzz]

True, but you only need money to buy some unique stuff, right? And that unique stuff is only available at one specific trader in the game. So carrying your valuables to that vendor makes sense to me.
Apart from that, I like the market in Nuka World. Decent amount of caps and lots of high end ammo to trade.

[DouglasGrave]

It's not too hard to mitigate the shortage of vendor caps if you're not in survival:

Selling: I will take all your caps, plus a giant heap of ammunition.
Buying: I will buy that for ammunition dollars.

[sigmapsidelta]

Like anything else in Fallout 4, taking advantage of this given universe's differences from our own is often helpful and/or profitable. And life, wherever it happens, consists of manipulating the rules of the universe you live in to your own best benefit. The Dev Gods made the rules - I just put them to use. If that's cheating then it must be what the Dev Gods want, or it wouldn't be possible.

A single vertical concrete wall panel can have a roof panel added to it in both this and the Fallout universe. However, in Fallout another can be added, and another, in a line away from the wall panel. You can do this to the edge of your settlement, given the open space, and gravity in the Fallout universe does absolutely nothing about it. You can then remove the wall panel and gravity will ignore you and the now unsupported roof.

The Vault Tec lunchbox can give you wealth you'd find hard to spend if you manipulate it with the Contraptions Workshop machinery.

Spectacle Island and other settlements with access to lots of water can make you wealthy, too.

It takes a bit of time and investment in most cases, but the scavenging, scrapping and building involved is part of the game anyway.

.

[blood_guts]

Originally posted by sigmapsidelta:

Like anything else in Fallout 4, taking advantage of this given universe's differences from our own is often helpful and/or profitable. And life, wherever it happens, consists of manipulating the rules of the universe you live in to your own best benefit. The Dev Gods made the rules - I just put them to use. If that's cheating then it must be what the Dev Gods want, or it wouldn't be possible.

A single vertical concrete wall panel can have a roof panel added to it in both this and the Fallout universe. However, in Fallout another can be added, and another, in a line away from the wall panel. You can do this to the edge of your settlement, given the open space, and gravity in the Fallout universe does absolutely nothing about it. You can then remove the wall panel and gravity will ignore you and the now unsupported roof.

The Vault Tec lunchbox can give you wealth you'd find hard to spend if you manipulate it with the Contraptions Workshop machinery.

Spectacle Island and other settlements with access to lots of water can make you wealthy, too.

It takes a bit of time and investment in most cases, but the scavenging, scrapping and building involved is part of the game anyway.

.

Nostradamus? Is that you?

[The Inept European]

Originally posted by tbloyzz:

True, but you only need money to buy some unique stuff, right? And that unique stuff is only available at one specific trader in the game. So carrying your valuables to that vendor makes sense to me.
Apart from that, I like the market in Nuka World. Decent amount of caps and lots of high end ammo to trade.

It's mainly that caps are more portable than raider chestplates and double barrel shotguns.

Ammo is also pretty low weight (zero if not in Survival) but vendors don't have huge amounts, and depending on your effective CHA, you can lose a lot more on the buy/sell spread of ammo, because of rounding.

So basically the problem is how to trade bulky loot for light-weight items that keep their value. (Caps being simply the best case of that, but not the only option.) Economics in FO4 is basically a logistics problem. So it makes a very big difference whether you are playing Survival or not. The lower carry weights and weight of ammo have a big effect.

[The Inept European]

Originally posted by sigmapsidelta:

.
It takes a bit of time and investment in most cases, but the scavenging, scrapping and building involved is part of the game anyway.

Agreed.

[The Inept European]

Whether you launder your loot, water, etc into caps or ammo or chems or whatever, the limiting factor is always the availability of vendors.

With that in mind you will need to plan for the perks that help with building stores in settlements. In at least one settlement, preferably close to where you are looting or farming or producing, you want one of each trader type (including a doctor) and upgrade them as soon as you can.

All traders of the same type in your settlements are like branch offices that share the same inventory and caps. If you clear out one of your clothing stores, all of them are cleared out. So build stores in additional settlements only for convenience of access.

The bobblehead where you find Nick Valentine gives more caps to all vendors.

The Bunker Hill questline adds more caps to those vendors [Bunker Hill, resident and travelling] and eventually allows you to build trade caravan posts where the Bunker Hill travelling merchants will show up. This does not increase the amount of caps or inventory they have, but it can make it much more convenient to sell to them, particularly if you are selling/trading heavy loot.

There are magazines that will help with bartering, and some traders will give you better terms if you do specific actions or quests.

Naturally you want reasonable CHA and to acquire CHA boosting attire. While you are still working on that you can use alchohol for a slight boost to buy/sell prices.

Berry Mentats give a huge boost but the ingredients can be scarce. Be on the lookout for these ingredients and save them for this purpose. However they are probably more useful for succeeding at difficult dialog checks than for plain bartering, unless you are doing a massive transaction(s) in a short period of time.

There are very few things that can be crafted that will actually return a profit over the cost of buying the raw materials in bulk ("shipments"), even if you have the max effective CHA of 16. Bulk prices are usually higher than the price of miscellaneous Junk items so you can craft [using found junk items] for a small profit as a "cottage industry" but you can't scale that up.

Farming plants rather than water is a respectable way to make a living. It's not cheaty like water farming, as the constraints are much more realistic, and the return on investment is reasonable rather than ridiculous.

[brownacs]

Originally posted by The Ex-ept European:

So it makes a very big difference whether you are playing Survival or not.

Amen to that. My current non-survival save has about 100 mini-nukes (and every single other ammo type in abundance). My survival save has none at all.

[The Inept European]

Purely in the tips and tricks category (these are all pretty cheaty):

Spamming manual water pumps is exponentially more efficient for starting a water farming business, than building powered pumps or purifiers. And it doesn't need water, just soil.

Manual (and powered) water pumps can be stacked vertically using garden plots on stacked prefab cubes.

With Local Leader you can grow ingredients in multiple places but craft them in one place (eg near a cluster of traders). This effectively teleports the finished product (vegetable starch) to your location. It is a good way to monetise your settlers' labour while bypassing the whole logistics problem. It makes less profit than selling the raw vegetables, but it is way more efficient in terms of your time and effort. Supply lines + a cooking stove next to each group of traders will make you good money.

You can carry a single stack of unlimited size without encumbrance penalty, moving at normal speed. Drop the stack on the ground and it looks like one item. Hold down select to pick it up. It is tricky to fight like this but a short safe route (say Hangman's Alley to Diamond City) is fine. Helpful if you want to take 5000 water to market in just one trip.

You can carry an unlimited amount on a Vertibird without suffering periodic damage in Survival. If you put fast travel markers near workbenches or stores, the Vertibird will try to land close to them. (This one isn't even that cheaty).

There are some glitches and exploits that basically allow you to make unlimited resources (= money). I won't go into those here. Compared to them, water farming is "perfectly balanced". ;-)