*Sigh*
"Up to 15 Minutes" for completion time in the particular guide I read.
I did come with the understanding that this wasn't technically the reality, based on the fact that this was under the assumption you had already acquired every material necessary to craft the items pertaining to the Wasteland Workshop - and merely needed to build them.
However, I didn't anticipate running into a package full of some traditional glitchy Fallout goodness, which stacked the hours on top.
Before I jump the gun any further, this piece of DLC focuses on some of the new contraptions introduced as part of the Wasteland Workshop, along with 3 new trophies, which take a specifically closer look at animal cages and arena fighting.
There are a couple of prerequisites to note.
Firstly, you will require a pretty hefty shopping list of items in order to build all of the contraptions that correlate to the 3 trophies on offer. These will mostly be for the 15 different types of animal cages you will need to build, and will require you to possess some unusual meats, such as Yao Guai, Stingwing and Radstag meat, which is both hard to farm in the natural wasteland and to buy from traders due it's rarity. Mirelurk Eggs and Nuclear Material can also be a pain to find, but this part of the process is the most time consuming element of this package. You may have alot of these materials already from playing through the game, but as someone who doesn't like to horde junk, and not being that aware of how useful it would come to be, I needed alot of resources, which costs both time and money.
Secondly, you'll need to have invested your skill points into 2 specific skills within the Charisma skill ladder - Animal Friend at level 5 and Wasteland Whisperer all the way down at level 9 - in order to build some of the objects you'll need to tame these creatures. If you don't have them, you'll need to reset your characters statistics and re-distribute accordingly.
The process of collecting all the resources I needed took me around 3-4 hours, due to the aforementioned fact that I never saw the benefit of hoarding junk up until now, and therefore had to spend the time acquiring this vast list of items, so I'd spent this amount of time already without technically getting going. Fun start.
But it's only 3 trophies, and I'd read "15 minutes" so at least we were almost done...
Except we weren't, and whilst the 3 trophies on offer don't really "stand out" per their requirements being complicated, time-consuming or any other form of challenge any given trophy could take the form of - They were just terribly glitchy and problematic in the same way that Fallout games always seem to be.
You get the first trophy for having 5 tamed creatures in a settlement. No problem. Just build any animal cage, power it up with a generator, build an emitter which tames the creature (this is the object you need the special perks for, to be able to build), and the cage will spawn a tamed creature every 3-4 times you sleep for 12 hours.
This went to plan, until my settlers started randomly attacking my tamed creatures, which is detrimental to progress given the fact you have to have 5 creatures tamed simultaneously, and not in total, and every time you need to breed a new tamed creature from the animal cage, you have to "repair" it, which means sourcing more meat from a specific animal which I had already done in preparation for a later trophy. So I was suddenly scavenger hunting again.
Anyway, repeat the process, and then find out that different species of tamed animals will also attack each other, whilst continuing to be attacked by settlers whose natural reaction to this is to also get involved, and all of a sudden, we're back at square one again. There's no way to control which type of creature comes out of an animal cage. I used the Insect cage for this trophy, and ended up spawning Radroach, Bloatfly and Stingwing - Not a good combination apparently.
I eventually stocked up on Mole Rat Meat and went through a constant loop of just pumping out tamed creatures and hoping something stuck, which did eventually get me the trophy at the expense of another 1-2 hours of my time. "15 minutes" it said.
Moving on though, there's also a trophy awarded for starting a spectated arena fight in a settlement, another trophy with simple face value requirements, which also turned out to be anything but.
You can create 2 podiums (red and blue), assign 2 settlers to these podiums, and they will then ensue a fight to the death, which should in turn trigger the trophy. No problem.
Except, after carrying this task out on a settlement so often to the point that there wasn't physically anybody left to fight each other anymore, and still not seeing the trophy pop, I find out that some theories suggest you also need to build a Clocking-off Siren, which, when triggered, summons settlers to the arena area in order to spectate the fight, which is apparently a critical trophy trigger.
So, we reloaded, in order to regain our decimated settlement, and tried this out. Build the podiums. Again. Assign the settlers. Again (which is also glitchy as fuck, because they always run into invisible obstacles or just refuse to move). This time though, we then build this Clocking-off Siren, power it up and activate it and then watch the fight. And nothing happens. Just another dead settler and no trophy.
I then read up and find out that it is possible there are more triggers to this trophy, and large parts of the difficulties faced here are around the general cloudiness of what works vs what doesn't matter, and that you need to make sure the combatants don't see each other before they fight (which usually triggers a premature shootout), AND there needs to be an official spectator to the witness the fight. So I have to build an actual arena that has enclosures to ensure both fighters can't see each other when assigned to the podium and prior to the Siren being sounded (which summons the crowd). There also has to be adequate seating made available, which is populated by other settlers when the Siren goes off.
So I end up building, not exactly an elaborate arena, but something more extensive than I expected was necessary, to only then find out other stuff would occur that just didn't make sense. Settlers would stray from their assigned podium, settlers wouldn't seat themselves and react to the Siren properly and they would still somehow start shooting prematurely, even behind metal walls. The inconsistencies were rife and I was yet another 1-2 hours deep tackling what I now believed was a deliberate mindfuck and that this was the underlying challenge.
I did eventually discover that, it was easier to summon the settlers to watch FIRST, and then assign anybody who wasn't sat down to fight. Even though this still triggered a premature fight, I think they fact that some settlers were seated and started cheering when they saw the fighting was the trigger for the trophy, but I never actually read that method anywhere and merely drew my own conclusions - but at least it worked.
The final trophy just requires you to build one of every type of cage, of which there are 15 and this is where all those resources gathered are needed. This one was actually quick and didn't spring any unwanted surprises, so at least we finished up on a positive note, albeit around 8 hours into a package that absolutely shouldn't have taken anywhere near that long.
This led to pure inconvenience in the end, and even though I was never a big fan of the Workshop element of this game before, this package actually gave me reasons to actively dislike it. However, it gets us one step closer to an end that I'm glad is finally in sight.
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