Fallout 4: The Ugly - Renewable Resources

Renewable Resources?  What in tarnation does that mean?

In modern game parlance this is known as re-spawning.  In a game area that the player goes through, there are general background trackers that indicate to the game engine if the area, lootables and individuals die a permanent death (looted once) or if they re-spawn as entities (usually generic, though some lootables may be specific) if the player returns to the area at a later time.  In addition containers that are not marked permanent will also re-spawn their contents.  In Fallout 4 the player can utilize resources found in areas to create or upgrade armor, weapons and equipment, as well as use it for larger scale building.  All of that is resource intensive and intentionally made that way so that the player does not lightly expend certain resources while crafting.  Additionally the salvage amount for any given item is less than was used to craft it, and some materials (like adhesives) can never be recaptured via salvage.  To satisfy the building needs of just player based equipment means scavenging widely for resources (aluminum, fiberglass, steel, cloth, adhesives, etc.) and then utilizing those materials to make something useful or more useful for game play.

This new game mechanic is one seen in other games, and the concept of gathering resources to make/upgrade items is not an unusual one.  Additionally there is usually some game mechanic involved that allows for the equivalent of mining, forestry, or other means to get a continual, low level supply of materials.  That low level supply can build up over time and be a major factor in the game.  FO4 does not have that as an exact game mechanic, although it is possible to assign a generic Settler (individual attracted to a player developed site) to a task which yields very, very low amounts of salvage material that can be scrapped for raw resources.  From vendors magical shipments of material can be purchased that are a receipt to be redeemed at a workbench: how the materials get there is a total mystery as there is no delivery caravan showing up to drop the stuff off.  It is interesting to think that these vendors have the ability (via some means) to teleport materials from place to place, but since the only groups able to do that are Big Mountain and the Institute, that is unlikely.  Needless to say a torque rod or cogwheel showing up once a week from a Settler working on finding scrap material doesn't go very far.  Thus the player gets that task.

Using materials

To the great credit of the team that designed the game, they  took all the trash that had no obvious use in prior releases and then assigned each piece a scrap recovery value so that the player could begin to get the raw materials to build stuff.  As a game mechanic it is only passable, however, as a number of items (like screws as an example) can be made on the relative cheap with a low-end lathe but that the player is not allowed to actually make and can only be recovered from wasteland scrap.  A lathe is the first machine that can make all the necessary components from properly smelted and hardened metal to create another lathe.  The lathe is the mother of all machines.  Precursors to the lathe that were used in woodworking served much the same purpose and when their gears and such were powered by water wheels, then the lathe could also make all the gears and such necessary to make another lathe.  Basic smelting and casting are necessary to start getting the raw materials for a lathe, but once you have them then what you make is left up to the precision of the machine and the ability of the machinist involved.  In prior installments of the Fallout franchise, robots can be seen amongst  smelting, casting and machining equipment, thus they had the programming to utilize that equipment.  That is the mechanical way to do things, and once you have the design specification for screws of various sizes, types and uses, then it is just a matter of machining the first one, putting that onto a copy lathe that is connected to the first and just replacing the raw material once the copy is finished.  With two lathes the production of screws goes from a few a day to tens or hundreds a day using one lathe to move a stylus or other indicating device over the original and having the other lathe follow that pattern via a direct connection.

Instead of doing a proper workshop set-up (and equipment that would allow for such a set-up is seen on workbenches!), the design team decided on the magical production capability of a background animation while the Player Character worked on crafting a new piece for their person.  When creating a piece for the settlement, the piece shows up in mid air, can be turned around set down and fit into place or snapped to an existing piece set down previously.  How does this get made out of the raw materials in the workbench?  Magic!  Or teleportation, which is matter transmitted from the main workbench in the workshop to wherever the design is needed as specified by the interactions from the player.  I have lots of quibbles with this system, as most of the stuff the player can make looks like junk.

The PC comes from an era of well fitted materials, and for home use the concept of walls and a roof to keep the elements out is a real concept.  And, no, using the argument that the wood found in the wasteland is all scrap doesn't work as the player can also scrap entire trees.  From entire trees you can get boards that are not weathered, not cheap looking and can fit together decently.  Basic drying oils can be applied to get a finish (ex. walnut oil, boiled linseed oil) that might wear down over time, yes, but will give a decent look to interior pieces.  For exterior pieces, perhaps the use of milk based paint with red ocher or other pigments might be a decent solution.  We do see some of those in the Far Harbor DLC build set, so why aren't they known on the mainland where they were historically used in the Fallout timeline?

So, to put these together: the game mechanic for construction, building and working on weapons and armor is unitized, but it makes no damned sense at all.  Where is the forge for heat treating metal?  Is it done magically via a matter manipulation system?  If so then why is it a surprise that actual teleportation exists for biological life forms?  If the red workbench that indicates the unified, master control of a workshop is available in The Commonwealth, was it just a local test market deal?  If so, who made it?  Where did it come from?  And where are the instruction manuals for it that would have allowed the people right after the bombs fell to start scrapping what was around them and build decent shelters and buildings?  Were they delivered AFTER the war?  If so, who did so?

That last question is important since I don't remember seeing the red workbench across the street from the PC's original home before the bombs dropped, so it must have been put there AFTER the bombs fell.  I can say that it wasn't The Institute as there are no records of those workbenches anywhere inside the place and they are still using old fashioned manual blasting and hauling of materials.  Yet Vault Tec (in the DLC) certainly had not only knowledge of such workbenches but deployed them as an extended network system for materials inside what was to be Vault 88's caverns.  Vault Tec had their hands on not just the basic version, seen in settlements, but an advanced version made specifically for them to build this demonstration Vault which was to be a crown jewel for the corporation.  If Vault Tec actually made them, then how and why did they deliver them to sites AFTER the bombs dropped?

The most surprising part is that the PC can just interact with one and it immediately responds to them without having to go through a boot-up phase.  Why, this almost sounds like something Big Mountain would make.  Too bad there weren't any around Big Mountain in its DLC.  Is this a complaint about a simple instance for enabling a game mechanic?  In some ways, yes.  In other ways...this is the sort of question you WOULD ask in an RPG and see if you couldn't find a label on the thing to indicate who made it, what it's model and serial numbers were and maybe even how it works.  How come the PC can use it, but no one else can?  Yes you get access to it from people who live in settlements, but they, apparently, never used the thing to clean up the trash and turn it into raw materials that could actually be put to good use.  And if they were the settlers ones who put in the design schema for floors, walls, etc. then why can't the player adjust those to something that, you know, actually protects people from the elements?

Infinite everything

Now back to the topic of renewable resources.  If you go through an area, a building, what have you, and gather up the resources from it, then all of those resources can respawn in the exact, same locations you found them the first time.  And as the game is open-ended and has no maximum level cap, that means that the opponents also respawn so you can harvest more experience points!  Now if you dare to question where these brand-new resources that were there before and wiped out (or looted) come from the next time you visit, then you may even have the temerity to ask where the enemies come from!  Because all these enemies, particularly of the human sort, appear to have an infinite supply train delivering them to these sites.  Where do they come from?  We don't see children in Raider camps or Gunner sites, so where are these adults coming from on a regular basis?  The wasteland is called that because there just aren't many people out there and a good part of it is barren of life.  There is a limited food budget, and that means there are a limited number of people available to draw on as a pool for all these sites that constantly respawn people.  Creatures I can give a hand-waving pass to, although with apex predators the problem is acute, as well.

I remember taking out Quarry Junction's Deathclaws in Fallout New Vegas (FNV) that had taken over the open pit quarry as their nesting site, and I can tell you that once they were eradicated down to the last Baby Deathclaw, that they did NOT respawn.  And for all the Raiders we see in the Nuka World DLC for FO4, they do not have a viable population nor age distribution to survive and respawn if you take out the adults.  In theory a few stragglers might wander in, but when they see the place up and running and that none of the Raiders they knew are left alive or that the streets are empty of any raiders...well...they may be dumb but they shouldn't be that stupid to stick around because they wouldn't survive to BE adults if they were.  Death comes easily in the wasteland, and idiots don't tend to fare too well. If you take out all of the Raiders inside the Nuka World grounds, then some will continue to respawn outside it, but no more will respawn inside it.There are singular instances where groups can be eradicated from certain sites in FO4 and its DLCs.  There are others that, no matter how thoroughly the enemies are removed, they will just come back in a few days to a week.  Even worse there are a type of quest which will necessitate going back to a place if you haven't cleaned it out recently...or put in a kidnap victim and automagically respawn the enemies there, too.  Making real progress in FO4 is an ultimate effort in futility.

FNV was not perfect in this respect and the area in and around Vault 3 did respawn Raiders who were chem addicts...after the supply line to the place had been cut off and all the easily found chems taken away.  An odd inhaler here and there stuck in the sand will not keep a large group of junkies happy.  Vault 95 in FO4 showed that an abundant supply able to keep everyone hooked for the rest of their (short) natural lives wasn't enough to keep people happy and individuals started hording the stuff which still had unpacked crates to be distributed full of chems ready to use.  The Nuka World Raider gangs are a cut above the normal sort so once a few come straggling back and see that someone or something has taken out everyone they knew, the idea of sticking around goes out the window.  Why?  Their support structure has been eradicated.  A few showing up ONCE in areas outside of the main Nuka World grounds would be fine, but with their leadership gone, their support structure no longer available, then they don't have a real way to operate like they used to operate and that had a high overhead maintenance cost to it.  Instead they are added to the random encounter tables for the main game, and that means they will keep popping up.  Just like Super Mutants.

The problem of demographics and population becomes acute with one group in particular.  This group has a definite maximum number of individuals and a short time frame for getting new individuals which has closed by the start of FO4.  These are Super Mutants, and they are a result of a decade long experiment by the Institute in using Forced Evolutionary Virus on people they kidnapped.  We can see how many chambers were available for exposing these individuals, see the limited space for containing them and then read the last logs on individuals and get a low rate of individuals who survived, weren't summarily killed and just dumped in the wasteland.

A maximum of 20% and more like 8-10% survived in the last batch.  Doing the math of exposure tubes, observation rooms and low success rate, then is put against a growth and maturation time, observation time and disposal time...the most you get from the Institute if all individuals were transformed perfectly is between 12 and 20 per month.  And that is if the transformation happened in a few hours to a day, and the maturation took about as long, and then the observation lasted, at most 2-3 days.  When mortality rate, along with kill-off disposal rate is factored in, then those numbers drop to 2-4 per month.  In year, that is 24-48 Super Mutants being dumped in the wasteland.  In 10 years that is 240-480.  Now lets say the processing and maturation rate was much faster so we can multiply that by 10.  Thus you have a maximum number of Super Mutants ranging between 2,400 to, at tops, 5,000.  And that is if and only if, none have died in the wasteland due to any cause at all from the time individuals were dumped on the surface world and during the few years between the end of the program and the start of FO4.

As seen in FO4 Super Mutants (in theory 'brothers' but they are all sterile and hold no trace of their prior biological gender) not only quarrel and fight each other, but also kill each other when things get out of hand.  Fratricide might only be a few individuals per month, say 5...that then goes to 60 a year and then 600 taken out of the way too optimistic huge total just due to in-fighting over 10 years.  This does not include deaths to any other cause, like starvation.  Small bands of Super Mutants, usually no more than 5 and usually around 3, are seen going out looking for food.  They do pretty well against humans on farms if they can find them.  A bit less well against Raider encampments.  They face a real challenge with Gunners.  And stuff like Radscorpions in groups or Deathclaws can start to cause a real loss of these scavenger Super Mutants.  How many is a pure guess, but the per year total has got to be something a bit higher than the in-fighting total due to the lethality of weapons and equipment that can be found in the wasteland.  Put in the semi-organized conflicts in certain areas and the number of Super Mutants drops heavily from the over-optimistic scenario of 5,000 still around when FO4 starts. 

If you wanted to be extremely over generous then 3,500 is good starting point for the absolute maximum number of Super Mutants left in The Commonwealth at the start of FO4.  Plus we see NO EVIDENCE of Super Mutants from OUTSIDE the region filtering into The Commonwealth so the numbers are not boosted.  In fact a few have left for Far Harbor due to the conditions in The Commonwealth.  Super Mutants are, by and large, homebodies unless they are forced to decamp due to circumstances. Super Mutants can face the radioactive fog of Far Harbor better than humans or even The Children of Atom, they face even nastier wildlife hidden by the fog.  Perhaps as many as 50 or 60 left for Far Harbor, which turns out to be a frying pan into the fire sort of deal.

In retrospect it would be interesting to have a counter that showed just how many Super Mutants were left in The Commonwealth and just watch it tick downwards when the PC wasn't even fighting them.  A reserve can be kept for story telling purposes, of course, and they can't be interacted with safely until the conditions for the story are met.  At some point after that the number will go into single digits if you just sit and wait around.  This means that using Mini-Nukes hand delivered by Super Mutants would be a non-starter: no Super Mutant would just let a brother throw his life away like that no matter how pretty the explosion would be.  Plus accidentally pressing the wrong part might take out a lot of other brothers with the one Super Mutant and that is just plain bad.  Super Mutant Suiciders is just a game idea put in by the developers, and a really bad idea as Super Mutants are loyal to each other and would put an end to such idea pretty quickly.  Again they are dumb, but not stupid.  To get a continual resupply of Super Mutants there MUST be an FEV facility run by someone, somewhere within or on the easily accessible borders of The Commonwealth.  Since they act like those done by the Institute, that would mean the Institute has a separate facility for this that isn't taken out if the Institute is destroyed.  They are the only ones that had the technology, means, capability to run this sort of program, and it can't be that far away due to distances that their teleportation technology can support.

Can the actual number of human inhabitants that can be supported in The Commonwealth be ascertained?  Not easily, no.   Places like Diamond City have their own crops inside the city which are grown by a few people and help to feed the citizens there.  In addition caravans bring in supplies to keep the place going.  Bunker Hill exists more on caravans than locally grown crops, although those are present as well.  Before University Point was killed off by the Institute, it had a community that grew crops, did salvage and used trade to keep itself going, and only the salvage part was problematical due to subsidence of the grounds into the oceans and the ongoing threat of Mirelurks in one of the buildings that had been broken apart and flooded on the lowest level.

Elsewhere, a thriving family farm, like the Abernathy farm near Sanctuary Hills can support a husband, wife, 2 grown daughters and a farm hand, as well as a brahmin as cattle.  That is a large farm, however, and not all of the crops can be actively tended to by the people there.  Plus the Abernathy family does some trading locally and even with Diamond City on an infrequent basis, so the food crops shown when they are found are supplemented by trade.  When they are found one of the daughters had been killed by Raiders, but the absolute number that was sustained included her (and having the crops she tended go untended is a nice touch, too).  Thus a diligent farm can keep 5 adults and one head of cattle fed and supplied.

The problem is that there aren't that many farms in The Commonwealth.  How can 10 adult Raiders be kept fed when one of the best farms can only feed 5 adults?  And by killing off an adult farmer, the food supply drops, meaning that someone is going to starve and that someone isn't a farmer.  Raiders killing farmers means fewer Raiders, not more of them.  The food supply, even supplemented by wild crops, is not enough to sustain the Raider population that is witnessed just on a single visit to every Raider encampment that is seen in The Commonwealth.  Some of the Raider supply does come via extortion of caravans going to Bunker Hill, but when they violate that agreement the management at Bunker Hill is willing to let someone take care of their problem.  The Raiders at Libertalia do try to go after those caravans, but have found out that the small numbers they can send out as scavengers don't fare that well even when they do bring back supplies.

Raiders do extort food from farmers, but that isn't going to go very far, either, given the farmers need to survive, as well.  Tribute from a farm or two won't keep 10 Raiders alive.  The demographics of feudal Europe has an upper crust that is about 1% of the population while feudal Japan has that around 10%.  At best 1 Raider can survive off of tribute from 10 farmers and keep a stable food supply in the bargain.  Even accounting for the small amount of craftsmen and tradesmen in feudal times, the basic idea is that it takes quite a few farmers doing farming by hand (without the ability to harness oxen to plough fields) to keep a small sector of society that is rich or taking tribute going.  Thus to keep 10 Raiders alive requires at least 90 to 100 farmers, or about 20 farms.  Even paring that back to allow for trade and such, the lowest number would be 10 farms with enough adults to actually work the soil.  The mutated crops help, yes, but there you are exchanging fertile acreage for fewer, but very productive crops so as to cut down on storage.

And that still doesn't answer the question: where do all the damned Raiders come from, anyway?

This is and has been a broken game mechanic since at least Fallout 3.  FNV also had it, but tried to limit the respawn areas and respawn rate, and allowed the PC to actually clear some areas permanently of problems.  Of course in a couple of instances what replaced the prior inhabitants proved to be much worse than what was cleared out...but that is the wasteland for you...and those new inhabitants tended to have a different diet and food budget.  Cazadores don't need crops to feed on, and are more than willing to feed on any animal that wanders their way.  That is a more than acceptable game mechanic: opportunistic and quite nasty things that don't require what the prior inhabitants needed can and will move into places.  That is one way the wasteland gets worse, not better, when removing bad actors.  Taking down a low level Raider gang, however, is not the cue for a higher level, better armed gang to show up because they would have easily gotten rid of the lower level one before the player ever got there.  That is a busted game mechanic.  It might make for decent game play, but it makes no damned sense at all.

If praise can be given to Bethesda Game Studios for incorporating ideas starting as mods for FNV to take back and secure wasteland sites from the threats of the wasteland, and for putting all the useless junk populating prior games to good use, then they can also be criticized for the way it is implemented.  Without giving a good background on where all the supplies are coming from and where all the respawned adults are growing up as children, then the game faces a huge problem in being believable as a game setting.  For a game that touts itself as an RPG, it gives in far too much to action/shooter game mechanics and resetting the pins to knock them down again and again and again.  Even the most interesting site gets boring the 3rd or 4th time through it.  By the 8th time it is just clearing out by the numbers, nearly sleepwalking through the battle just to get the damned quest done.  Again. 

No RPG offers this as a 'feature' because RPGs are supposed to present a world that people live in, work in, die in and care about.  And no matter how good the defenses you build for a settlement, and I've had places that are veritable fortresses, it takes only a couple of Raiders to get past all the walls, defenses, traps and whatnot, to kidnap someone and demand a ransom. That isn't defending anyone. Why go through all the trouble putting in stacked defenses that will kill any enemy that dares to show up when the game 'quest' design will just say 'nope, they do this anyway, it doesn't matter how good your defenses are'?  That is your 'reward' for putting in all the time doing that stuff because this is an action game with some RPG elements, not an RPG that has designers asking 'well if you do invest in great defenses, then any group trying to get in will be intimidated by them and see it as not worth the trouble', and then proceed accordingly.  That would mean zones of control around such places that tend to make potential enemies gun shy because they do have some value on their own lives.  Why?  Because they would in an RPG.