do some of you have some expierience with this topic from the older Bethesda games?

I want my first playthrough to be as long and stable as possible and I have a few questions

is it dangerous to simply drop items on the ground and leave them there?

will they despawn? or will they lie around forever making my save games bigger and bigger with time?

and what do I do with legendary stuff, if I don't want it?

will the dead bodies with legendary weapons despawn eventually, if I don't pick them up?

or do I really have to loot every single legendary weapon from them? :/

is save bloating even something that may happen in an unmodded Bethesda game?

I've had a lot crashes in the old Fallouts and F4 haven't crashed once so far and I'd like to keep it that way

thanks :]

Since save bloating was porting related with the old console gen its unlikely to pop up here, so far as I heard no one has reported save bloating happening.

You will still get save bloating dropping stuff and so on.

However that was mostly an issue on old consoles with 512 MB ram.

Current generation has 8GB and will have the same problem as an PC running Skyrim.

For pc the problem is less as the game is 64 bit.

Anything I want to keep, goes in a container or more appropriately this time on Fallout it goes into the Workshop.

I've seen a few things on the ground from time to time I dropped and later came back to but if I want something to be safe, it goes in container/workshop.

You can delete older saves you don't need, if you are worried about hard drive space. I found out that you can do it on PS4 as well.

Only speaking to your question about unwanted legendaries: sell em.

Items left on the ground and corpses do disappear. In settlements some corpses (some corpses do disappear quite fast) seem to stay forever as long as you visit them once in a while (not test how many days, but it seems that if you don't visit for certain amount they would disappear). Bodies and items left in random areas would disappear in somehow random fashion - when you leave an area (fast travel somewhere) and come back immediately some of the bodies will be still present while others won't. Items stashed in containers seem to persist unless the zone somehow resets for example when you get a new random quest targeting the zone or maybe it could happen if the zone is not visited for a long time (a few weeks game time - untested).

In conclusion it seems the game would actually do some cleaning, although the mechanism is kinda of complicated and can result it a bit random results with items left on the ground and corpses.

Ash piles will need a "nuke me" script added when the G.E.C.K. comes out.
As to the dead from combat, those seem to despawn and respawn on their own.

Sell off extra junk. Merchants respawn stock pretty quick in this game.

I have been using a weapon modded Gauss rifle of late, so not as many ash and/or goo piles being made now.