‘Fallout 4’ Crafting System Comparable To ‘Minecraft’ 3D Printing Technology Invention

Bethesda Game Studios and Fallout 4 game director Todd Howard delved into how the current hit Minecraft influenced the crafting system for the post-apocalyptic game. It’s not uncommon for video games to have been influenced by other game developers, and Bethesda is no exception. The inspiration became apparent around the time Minecraft was released, and Fallout 4 was in its infancy.

An exclusive interview by iDigital Times revealed how Howard had thought the elaborate system used by Minecraft did bring inspiration to Bethesda’s Fallout 4 creation kit. Most notably was when he looked at how it was that gamers were able to create a 3-D copier in Minecraft using a specific amount of components, similar to the method used in Fallout 4.

“For us, we had been thinking about a feature like this [crafting and settlement building] because it hearkens back to us doing mods for a long time and having a creation kit, but our games only span [a limited] audience, and the PC audience is at best a third of that, and then the people that use the creation kit to make things are a small subset of that audience.”

At this year’s San Diego Comic Con, Howard presented their featured Fallout 4 game ensemble, which included character creation, a segment during the time before the bombs fell, and then shortly after the Vault 111 dweller reached the surface 200 years later. Included in his talks was settlement creation, where a player could form his own home using components collected or forged from the Fallout 4 wasteland.

According to an interview by Games Radar with Pete Hines of Bethesda, he describes Fallout 4’s crafting specifics and what one would need to do in order to build components for a Fallout 4 vault dweller’s home. That one cannot just grab a piece of furniture from anywhere in the game’s wasteland and place it in a room, but wood components would first be needed in order to manufacture the a chair, dog house, or whatever one desires in Fallout 4.

“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”.

This is not unlike Minecraft‘s methods of bringing things together by gathering components and there was a demonstration, according to Wired, where they came across a YouTuber that demonstrated how he created an object from a 3D printer, which included a control panel of sorts, which looks to be analogous to the in-game terminals found in Fallout 4. The terminal must be built in Fallout 4 in order to access it. That being said, it appears to be a rather immersive process in Fallout 4.

In another interview by GamesRadar with Bethesda’s and Fallout 4‘s video game director, Todd Howard, he mentions this do-it-yourself method of customization in Fallout 4 and how even an in-game jukebox would be included. In the SDCC presentation, there are also in-game video games that can be played on Fallout 4’s Pip-Boy device. A player may be so immersed in the game, that it may be possible to get engrossed in one of many of its many fun elements.

“You can build a terminal, and then access everything on it… So as the artists and the other designers make new things, they give them properties, and those properties will feed back to the terminal, and you can see those.”

That being said, there are pretty stunning similarities between Mincraft’s control panels and Fallout 4’s terminals. Although the crafting system isn’t as expansive, it does appear to be enough, coupled with the elements of fighting, running missions, and massiveness of what is Fallout 4.

[Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images]