Caps. They’re everywhere in Fallout 76. The game throws them at you nowadays. In the beginning is was tough though. You could sell to a vendor bot a maximum of 200 caps per day (or 20 hour period to be specific). This meant a trading run of 7 stops if you had discovered these places of course and had worked out that this limit was also PER FACTION. It could take a player a good amount of time to visit each, pay caps for the travel and be cut short by that faction limit. It was time-consuming, it was realistic but it was annoying.
So when the news came that Bethesda had revamped bot trading at the same time that the Whitespring Resort became a hub of sorts, many of us saw dollar signs or at least cap signs in front of our eyes. All traders cap limits were now pooled meaning a single visit to a vendor bot was all you needed to grab up 1,400 caps per day.
When people complain about inflation in the Fallout 76 economy they are on shaky ground. They say that the best items in the game aren’t available to new players or even players who have played for a (mere) few hundred hours. While I feel their pain, Fallout 76 is a loooooong game. It’s not a 100 hour explorey shooter where you can get everything and then sell the game on eBay. Players who play this game a lot (think 1,000s of hours since launch) deserve rewards for their efforts. Simply put, you have no right to own everything in the game.
I can feel the salt rising in response to that one. You will have objections and you may tell me I’m a 1%er oppressing the masses by owning so many caps (yes this has been said, how much in jest I’m unsure but at least half seriously I’m sure). But I’ll expand on that: a large fraction of game players in 2019 expect every game to be perfect (for them, not everyone, just them specifically), easy to complete and don’t seem to mind extra paid content (the content formerly known as DLC).
Any hitch in the demanding players progress from purchase to TOTAL AND UTTER FULFILLMENT in every minute of gameplay for at least three years after launch makes a game “crap“. And you shouldn’t play it. Because they say so. It’s more likely you’re simply bored with the game or (this can happen) that’s it NOT YOUR KIND OF GAME.
I reached a little hurdle in my FO76 gameplay around level 50. I’d taken my time in reaching what you might call the final quest of the main storyline which sees you try to launch a nuke. I had the bug whereby I couldn’t actually us the System Holotape to progress. Thinking it might be patched I left it for a few levels as I made a CAMP at Firebase Hancock and just did my thing for a while. 60 levels later I decided I wanted to finish it and tried again. Same bug. By now there were actually posts on Reddit about how to work around it which I tried and hey presto it worked!
What happened after the attempted nuke launch is another story. But after this episode, thinking that I had “completed” the game (I don’t believe this is possible) I had two options: stop playing or find a larger calling in (Fallout) life. I opted for the latter and had heard of players with (whisper it) MAXIMUM CAPS. I hadn’t even known for sure there was a limit before then as I’d not really interacted with too many other players and certainly wasn’t as active on Reddit or Discord as I am nowadays. If there was such a limit in Fallout 4 then I don’t remember ever troubling it.
I began to change the way I played the game from “KILL, SELL, BUY” always remaining at a low amount of caps unless I was saving up for a plan, instead to “FARM, SELL, BUY, SELL, KILL, SELL REPEAT.”
This changed the meta game radically for me. As I saw my caps grow I got excited. “Hey” I thought, maybe I could afford one of those Two-Shot Explosive weapons I’ve heard so much about. This was before the “explosive shotgun bug/nerf” affair that saw one of the best weapons in the game reduced to its lesser (and intended) damage level. But I’d already earned an explosive combat shotgun as a loot drop and that was a lot of fun so I decided to stick with that. Nowadays it’s actually preferable to a TSE CS because the TS effect really nerfs the accuracy of any weapon and shotguns are some of the least accurate already.
No, I was killing less and earning more (words to live by in the real world too I guess). But I was looting a lot by spending my limited killing time in places like the Whitespring Golf Club). And also picking up junk legendaries because the Legendary Vendor had been announced. You’d be amazed what people used to sell to the vendor bots and for how little.
I had to stop writing there for a few days because you know, I wanted to actually achieve my aim after all. Now I’ve done it (you’ve done it?), I can get on with writing about it.
As of Friday August 2nd 2019 I have become a bottlecap millionaire in Fallout 76. Watch this, or at least the beginning and end, the middle is not entertaining at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62AM1iuEXRg
More soon!
Fallout 76 Trading Guide 
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