Crafting System - Redux

[Ruadhan2300]

I dunno if I'm the only one who's thinking this. I doubt very much that I am.
But I was kinda disappointed by the crafting systems in Fallout 4.
The amount of emphasis they placed on it, the lengths they clearly went to to make it amazing, and somehow it's terribly shallow feeling.

So I've been thinking about how I'd have done it, what I'd have done to make the system more interesting in itself.

First up, my biggest gripe.
The ability to use raw materials to make complex things.
I can (without any training or perks) take a glass bottle or a jug of water and turn it into a shaped lens for use in a rifle-scope.
In reality, that takes an incredible amount of skills and knowledge. glass-forming, shaping it with tools, grinding it to shape, polishing it to transparency...
I get that a lot of it is abstraction, but still, not unskilled labour.

Second, use of components.
When I decide to craft something, it tells me what objects are going to get broken down, but I have no control over which ones beyond cancelling the crafting and placing those items in a container somewhere.
Kinda annoying, not such an issue because the game's mechanics are all based on the assumption that the junk itself doesn't matter.
But there's a quest quite late on where the Brotherhood of steel send me off to fetch a bunch of giant super-conducting magnets.
They're listed as quest items and can't be scrapped, but you can find such magnets elsewhere in the wasteland.
I could have been hording junk for weeks of gameplay time previously and simply have them in stock myself and fetched them, rather than run through a dangerous quest.


So I'm thinking on this, how would I make it better?
First up, a selection menu on what I break down into parts. something kin to Skyrim's potion crafting system where you can select the materials for use in enchanting. That'd solve that issue as far as I'm concerned, and it's something they've already done previously, so presumably not too far out of the realm of possibility.
Second, I'd break down the crafting system a LOT, add an extra layer of materials to it.
Rather than break a microscope down into glass and steel and screws, I'd have steel, screws and lenses.

Player characters with no scrapping/crafting perks should not have the knowhow to do much more than unscrew the parts and hammer things into rough shape. attaching modkits to weapons is fine, but making them is entirely out. First ranks of the crafting perks should involve being able to make simple stuff, a pipe with some lenses in it as an ad-hoc scope, maybe a few lenses on the end of a laser rifle will adjust its range/accuracy a little. nothing too dramatic, but using glass bottles to make precision lenses for laser weapons is right out. you don't have the knowhow and it's well beyond your ability.

The addition of the Scrapper perk would open up the range of parts available, the microscope's mechanical mechanisms now become available, hinges and such.
You'd be able to break down items which are otherwise sealed, open up the Sensor Module to access the raw parts inside like fuses and circuit boards.
The upper levels of the related perks would allow you to work with increasingly raw materials. finally allowing you to use any source of glass to craft lenses, any source of copper allows you to make circuit boards, so on and so forth.

To break it down.
Rank 0 - no crafting, you can move objects around in your settlements and that's about it.
Rank 1 - you can make use of existing parts, modkits and suchlike, bolting them onto weapons and armour as needed.
Rank 2 - you can craft your own modkits using components from items, but you can't necessarily access all the materials you need. if you buy them from vendors you can still craft with them though.
Rank 3 - You have increased range of parts available to you and have therefore greater options for making modkits.
Rank 4 - You can break down any item into component parts and materials and build mods with them.

I'd also require use of some crafted components in order to make more advanced objects.
EG: with the highest ranks, you can break a beer bottle down into raw glass. you can then with appropriate blacksmith ranking craft that into a lens, which you then use as a sub-component of a scope, or laser rifle mod.
Similar to how in Skyrim we can craft iron ore into iron ingots before using it in armour and weapons.


essentially make an extra tier of component which allows a greater range of perks and skills involved in the crafting system, adding better depth.


Sorry, all of that was a bit muddily written. I hope it made sense.
I'd like to hear other people's feeling on it too.