Fallout 4: Bethesda Explains the Game's Crafting System

You may recall Skyrim's Hearthfire DLC, which gave the player limited control over creating houses, and while it's wasn't too warmly received upon release, Bethesda is taking the foundations of that DLC and offering a great deal more choice and freedom to players in Fallout 4.

Speaking to Games Radar, Bethesda's Pete Hines explained "It’s not buildings. It’s 'I want to put a wall here. I want a ceiling here. I want to hang a lightbulb here'. It’s not like prefabed houses, you are literally deciding exactly what pieces to put where. You build the furniture that goes in the house. If you don’t have the materials you have to go find enough wood to make your chair".

The materials you need are scattered throughout the game's world, though Bethesda says it's "still toying" with the actual crafting systems. There are currently two aspects to resource collection, one for item creation and another for world building.

"With the scavenging for all the individual stuff, you do it at the workbench," Hines commented. "Like, you have a bottle and it’s always a bottle until you're ready to scavenge it to use the glass for a scope. So, you carry this stuff or you need to put it in an inventory and when you go to craft, it tells you ‘this is what you need'".

It's possible to flag items you need to discover in the world for something you want to make, which means discovering the pieces you need becomes much easier.

As you might expect, there is a limit to the size of your inventory in the game, but "for the larger building stuff it’s not in your inventory, it’s in the workbench that you’re using in that area".

"So it’s not like you’ve taken that house and deconstructed it," Hines added, "I deconstructed this and it's all stored over here and then when I go to build it’s pulling from that inventory of stuff I have. It’s saying ‘okay, you’ve got enough stuff to do X. You can build a wall but you don’t have enough for a door. You can build a bench but not a chair'".

Fallout 4 launches on November 10th for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.