What is the point of investing in shops?

I have read through this related question about earning money with settlements - I have assigned a settler to each one of my shops however it doesn't look as though they're actually working at those shops.

Am I doing something wrong? I'm not seeing the benefits of these shops. Is it just caps that you receive or do you also receive armor at the armor shop, weapons at the weapons shop, etc.?

Solution 1:

Assigning Settlers to Shops

The process for assigning settlers to shops is the same as assigning them to crops or a bed. If you have assigned people to shops and they don't stand at the shop, check the following:

• Is it daytime? Settlers only work at the shop during the day.
• Is there room behind the counter and a clear path to behind the counter? The settlers need to be able to walk to the counter.

To see if the shop has someone assigned, highlight it in build mode:

If the "REQUIRES" tooltip has a picture of a red person, it doesn't have someone assigned. Once you assign someone, the red silhouette will turn green.

Shop Benefits

Purchasing Stuff

Each type of that shop will stock items you can buy of that type. So, if you build them all, you'll have a vendor in your settlement where you can buy:

• weapons
• armor
• clothing (the stuff you can wear under protective armor)
• junk (from the general store)
• food & drink (from the bar)
• chems & healing items (clinic)

Healing

At the clinic, you can heal HP, remove RADs, or cure a chem addiction.

Collecting Taxes

Every day, you see a small amount of caps transferred to your workshop. These caps represent your cut of the sales for that shop. Think of it as a tax for that shop to be able to operate in your settlement. The amount increases as your number of shops and settlers increases.

Selling Stuff

You can sell items you find on your travels to the vendors in your settlement for caps. In addition, if you take 3 points in the Cap Collector perk, you will be able to invest 500 caps in each shop. This has the effect of increasing the amount of caps they start with after their inventory resets by 500 caps, which means you can sell more stuff to them per reset.

A somewhat popular money-making scheme in the game is to have a settlement overproduce water. Then, you can collect the purified water that gets deposited in your settlement each day and sell it to the vendors of your shops for 11 caps apiece. Jet is also a popular item to make and sell to shops, although it's a little more difficult as you have to collect plastic and fertilizer to make it.