So what is the pont of Manufacturing items?

So you can have a machine to make guns, one to make armour, but why? You can do all these things yourself you really don’t need 1000 10mm pistols.

Manufacturing Experience

I’ve been trying to find a use.

One contraption I made broke down junk (manufacturing expanded mod, which adds logical variations to what’s already available) and then sorted it into area’s like food, caps, mixed materials, etc. It also fed water into a track that lifted up and went over the top of my settlement, coming down a ramp and into a catcher right next to the entry way to where I sell the purified water I’m generating for caps. That’s kinda a gimmick, but it gave me something to mess around with. The same contraption area then makes .45 ammo, to help me keep up with supply on em, which is sort of practical because a settlement vender can often have none, not enough, etc.

The contraption warehouse I’m working on now is sorting stuff again, then sending the required materials off to make bourbon and instamash. I’m doing this because my new settlement doesn’t have a water supply to harvest for caps. Only problem is the vanilla value for these manufactured items is completely out of sync with the raw materials needed to make them. Instamash for example pretty much costs exactly what the ingredients cost to make it, if they were sold by themselves. To keep this concept though of manufacturing for caps, I’ve just started making a mod using the Creation Kit, which takes the value of the component needed to make things and then doubles it (for a standard 100% business mark up on costs) so the manufactured products turn more profit than their base ingredients.

I don’t know if other ammo or weapons make a profit in vanilla, but food and drinks don’t (actually I’m not sure if the auto distillery is part of the mod too, but as I mentioned, seems a logical extension if it’s not).

Question

Something I’ve always wondered, and I could probably answer this myself with a search in the script files, but the shops… particularly the general trader… they generate caps, but do they disperse items when doing so?

Is there a mechanism to hand off manufactured items to vendors, and do they get “sold”?

And “who” is buying, or would the game simply remove that stocked item and replace with equivalent caps?

Answer

I’m not expert on this, but:

1. No they do not actually disperse items, other than to the player. I haven’t noticed any correlation at all between buying from a vender (being their customer) and the amount of caps deposited in the workbench from their existence.
2. The mechanism to hand off manufactured items is like this: you grab it, walk it over, barter it. Maybe it can be a mod, but currently there is no auto sell option. As I mentioned above, I actually made a big over head conveyor belt to move my purified water to a deposit box right next to where I can sell it (so I dont’ have to waddle far over weighted).
   The second part of the question is they get sold because you sold them, but that also means the vendor will need the money to buy (or you swap for their inventory).
3. No one buys or sells but you. The caps that a vendor generates is calculated by settlement populations, happiness, other such factors. It’s just generated with no actual selling or items involved.

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