Preparing For Your Fallout 4 Wasteland Workshop Menagerie

With the Wasteland Workshop added to Fallout 4, players get more items to improve their settlements and make them cooler. You can put up more defenses and have some extra decorations to make it feel like home. Most importantly, you can cobble together something of a zoo. Thanks to an array of cages, it’s possible to start trapping the Commonwealth’s animals and humanoids.

Now, capturing critters in Fallout 4 doesn’t always make sense. You have to have the cages set out, powered, and ready to go, but that’s it. There’s no need to head to certain areas to gather particular prey. But, that’s almost a blessing. The requirements to catch each kind of character will have you do enough hunting already.

To start, you’re going to need quite a bit of steel and copper for most cages, and gears for larger models. Which makes sense. This has to be a durable metal box with copper wiring and, in some cases, mechanisms to get the door open and closed. Copper and gears are already rather rare on their own, but I found it much easier to meet the requirements thanks to the Automatron add-on. It already gets you in the copper, gear, and steel collecting mindset you’ll need for Wasteland Workshop.

But the real challenge comes from the hunt. In order to get something to stumble into your trap, you need bait. Let me use the cat as an example. The cat cage needs 2 Softshell Mirelurk Meat to build it. Do you know how hard it is to find a Softshell Mirelurk when you need it? I ended up walking along the river until I remembered stumbling across some at the Westing Estate when completing a quest months ago. Preparing for your menagerie of beasts is surprisingly time consuming.

Which means stocking up whenever you can helps. Here’s a checklist of the ingredients needed for each of the Fallout 4 Wasteland Workshop cages.

• Brahmin Cage: 16 steel, 4 copper, 4 gears, 4 razorgrain
• Cat Cage: 6 steel, 1 copper, 2 softshell Mirelurk meat
• Deathclaw Cage: 16 steel, 4 copper, 4 gears, 4 Yao Guai meat
• Dog Cage: 6 steel, 1 copper, 3 canned dog food
• Feral Ghoul Cage: 10 steel, 2 copper, 4 mongrel dog meat
• Gunner Cage: 10 steel, 2 copper, 500 bottlecaps
• Insect Cage: 10 steel, 2 copper, 4 Mole Rat meat
• Mirelurk Cage: 16 steel, 4 copper, 4 gears, 4 Mirelurk eggs
• Mole Rat Cage: 6 steel, 1 copper, 4 Radroach meat
• Mutant Hound Cage: 6 steel, 1 copper, 2 Brahmin meat
• Radscorpion Cage: 16 steel, 4 copper, 4 gears, 4 Stingwing meat
• Radstag Cage: 16 steel, 4 copper, 4 gears, 4 carrots
• Raider Cage: 10 steel, 2 copper, 6 Jet
• Super Mutant Cage: 10 steel, 2 copper, 5 Brahmin meat
• Yao Guai Cage: 16 steel, 4 copper, 4 gears, 4 Radstag meat

The good news is, most of the items are ones you’ll come across during ordinary exploration. The bad news is, you may have already cooked the various meats to eat for your Sole Survivor to eat, meaning you’ll need to hunt down more creatures. Though, if you don’t mind killing animals you’ve captured and tamed, you can use traps to farm meat you’d need for stronger animals.

However, you may also have to do some leveling before you build up the arena or zoo of your dreams. Cats and Brahmin are the only docile animals. Others will require the Beta Wave Emitter to be tamed. Rank 1 Animal Friend and Rank 1 Wasteland Whisperer perks are required to build one, along with 8 aluminum, 3 circuitry, 5 copper, 4 crystal, 5 nuclear material, and 2 rubber. You need to be charismatic to get both. Animal Friend is easier, since you only need 5 charisma for it, but Wasteland Whisperer will require you to have at least 9 charisma to unlock it. Constructing an arena out of concrete and the arena contestant pads out of 4 wood and 10 steel each is easy compared to that.

Also, it’s best to designate one settlement in particular for your arena and animal husbandry. Once you start capturing animals, you increase the risk of that settlement being attacked by others of its kind. So if you have 3 Yao Guais tamed, there’s a good chance feral Yao Guais will stop by to attack.

Once you do make all of the proper preparations, Wasteland Workshop can be quite a bit of fun. Personally, I’m working on turning Abernathy Farm into a zoo. Since I don’t have the Wasteland Whisperer perk yet, I can just construct some cages for the wild animals and leave them penned up until I do. It’s not as robust as Automatron, but it’s fun if you enjoy focusing on some homestead activities.

Fallout 4 is immediately available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC. Wasteland Workshop is $4.99.