once I got to level 20 and had a few settlements growing my inventory was ok except for some rare stuff. To reduce the monotony of scrapping I added another file cabinet at red rocket and store all my scrap in it. Now I just wait til I have 6 or mor of an item (or 30 cans or so) so I can drop them as 1 and save a bunch of scrapping time.

It's worth noting that there are some items you can craft at the Chemistry Station that require intact junk items. Mentats require Abraxo Cleaner, for example.

haha, everybody did that at first. you can just dump it into the red workbench and it will breakdown what it needs to on its own. Just trust it. There are some exceptions like leather armor and clothes or guns that need to be broken down at the armor or gun stations and some clothes you can scrap on the ground not at the armor station but is not necessary. All the junk is broken down automatically and you dont need any of the junk in its whole form so an alarm clock being broken down doesn't mean anything to you. If you have some twisted desire to put an alarm clock next to your bed then dont store it in the workbench. Otherwise none of that junk does anything besides get broken down into more junk.

I was wondering why you would scrap things en-masse like this instead of just dumping junk in the workbench? Is there some organizational strategy to this?
I can kind of see how it could help keep tabs on things like oil and screws. I have trouble remembering which items brawl down into what so maybe that would help with keeping track?
Otherwise, I can't see another reason to go to this trouble but I'm interested to hear if there is a strategy to this?

I often wondered myself what the benifit of breaking down items is. I just keep all 'junk' items in the workbench, that way if I need their components, they are broken down automaticaly, or if I need the base item (as swk3000 pointed out) I can use that as well.

Still though, that is good thinking by saving up 6+ before scrapping, for whatever reason.

Mostly, but not completely, true. As I said, there are a number of items that can be crafted at the Chemistry Station that require specific junk items, not the components they break down into. Baseballs for Baseball Grenades, Anti Freeze Bottles for Yellow Belly Syringes, Abraxo Cleaner for Mentats, etc.

You are generally right, but the saying that you never need junk in it's whole form isn't completely accurate.

If you run charisma build and/or get local leader for supply lines, then junk = auto scrap = moot issue for most part, just store junk without scrapping manually. Based on lack of UI, this almost seems to be the 'intended' way bethesda wanted every player to play. With supply lines.

If you dont run supply lines, then manual scrapping is what you need to do in order to more easily move needed parts between settlements and/or even know what items to take until and unless you memorize the common stuff.
E.g. Ok i need to build 5 new turrets, lemme grab 10 ligjtbulbs, 5 paint cans, etc

And during the early phase of game, yhe point when new players are most likely turned on or off by the game, there are couple fairly common and critical components you get decent amount of only by manually scrapping.

For example cloth - to build up beds and other common items, you need cloth which you get tons of later but early to early-mid game, its not irrelevant, and one of your most common, repetitive, and easy to get cloth scrappables is the light aemor and clothes off dead enemies. None of which auto scraps even with supply lines because it is not junk, but also not catgorized as armor for breaking down via armor station.

Early on, gas masks, clothes, and other lightnarmor pieces are great sources for leather and cloth.

Best thing to do when you first activate a settlements work bench, use the 'scrapall" command first, save alot of time. you will have to replace any secondary workbenches.

what jacozilla said. Untill you have the supply line possibility (if ever) moving broken down components to build things at other settlement or to move it back to your own settlement while carrying it, is worth the scrapping time.

I know that you can use unscrapped items out of the local workbench, but I've scrapped them anyway because I didn't know two things:

Are unscrapped items in Sanctuary (for example) available in other settlements on the supply line network? I know raw materials are.

When an unscrapped item that breaks down into multiple components is used to make something that doesn't use all the component types are the unused raw materials lost?

I was just talking about this on another thread.. I do not dump all my junk into a work bench.

The reason is that what junk gets dumped into work bench is great and self scrapping at that one settlement. Even with supply lines and second star on Local leader. Only raw and base materials transfer from settlement to settlement. Despite those over packed looking Brahmin we see they do not carry un broken down junk back and forth. Fans, fuses, light bulbs, oil cans.. You have to have them at the basic material component level for settlements to equally share these things.

I build that rocket trash can from Decorations>Miscellaneous>at the far right end.. Then place it next to each workbench as my personal universal symbol for a dump pile that I will address later when I have time and want a break from the adventuring. Yeah as mentioned above it helps having 6 or more when you drop an item but I often just svck it up in monotonous time spent scrapping and break everything down instead of piling things in my workbench as it gets confusing and cluttered quite fast.

I'm even anol enough on this subject that I have a storage system set up where I store weapons in one style of footlocker, Armor/clothes in another, Prewar food in one ice box, Cookable caftable foods in another, Medical supplies in separate container... Then I go even further and have a chest for magazines to cut clutter from my Misc. section along with holotapes that are no longer needed. I also lastly keep a container for my weird items of some future value like 'Overdue books' 'Synth Components' and other interesting items of possible value. The only stuff I currently store in work benches is Base material components.. Weapons mods. That's it.. This way if I cant find something I at least know where I should look for it and nothing gets broken down without my specific say so and action.. Yeah it is time consuming which is why now that I am Cap secure and better funded I like buying those shipments of materials and I spend less time scavenging old locations.

Of course that's my way of doing things and I do like spending a lot of time on some days just doing my settlement upgrades. When I started off I just dumped everything in the work benches. I also used to save my prewar money and cigarettes as a way to make caps from vendors. Now that stuff makes me sleeping bags instead. I try to stick to the buildable items that seem to cost the least.. Sleeping bags instead of the more costly beds with mattress and frames.. Wooden stools, benches instead of comfy chairs. This helps conserve costs but on the other hand building the biggest generator is better then the low cost generator same with the water purifiers. Low cost ones may cover your bases and get you started but when you get rolling the actual cheapest one in terms of production v/s cost are the more expensive builds.

Yes what Capin Quasar said is correct:

1. The supply routes will only "supply" food water, and raw materials. They will not supply intact items. If you have 2 steel, and 400 buckets in your Workbench at Sanctuary and you are trying to build something in a networked settlement (say Red Rocket) where you have no items in the workbench at all, as far as I know, the engine will not be able to scrap the buckets at Sanctuary to get steel for you to build things. It will just see "2 steel" and you will not be able to build.

A couple of points that I'm not sure have been made fully.

2. When you scrap on the ground, you expand that settlement's maximum size. I am positive of this as I've tested it with Covenant. Whether this is a bug or a feature, for now this is how it works and I think it is fine. Basically the engine cannot distinguish between scrapping of something that you built there and scrapping of something you carried in. Every time you scrap something it 'subtracts' the value of that item from the "total built" variable or something like that. This effectively allows you to build settlements of infinite size, or at least of very large size, though I'm not sure if settlers will stop being attracted at some point by other mechanics in the game.

I have no particular desire to have gigantic settlements but at least this 'feature/bug' allows you to have as much more room to expand as you want. My largest settlement so far is only about 25, but I was annoyed when Covenant's building allotment was mostly used up as a consequence of me building a second story in the center of the courtyard and ramparts that overhung some of the walls. Using this "feature" I was able to reset Covenant's max size down so that the bar is completely unfilled and that means I can probably build two or three times more than what I've already built there.

3. As someone noted above, some items might be of more value in intact (meaning "unscrapped" form), either for use in trade, for use in modding, or for use in crafting. For example, abraxo cleaner and antifreeze bottles I generally do not drop on the ground and scrap; they are components for building certain drugs and syringer darts and the XP + caps from these are of greater value than the raw plastic and other raw materials you would get from scrapping those items.

Pre-War money is another good example. Depending on your charisma and perks, one Pre-War note might be worth 6 or 7 caps; boost that with drugs, clothes etc. and Pre-War money (which I believe has a base value of 3 or 4 caps and a weight of zero) is possibly the most efficient value/weight item in the game. Letting the workbench auto scrap this stuff is literally like burning 50 dollar bills to toast marshmallows. Packs of cigarettes and cartons of cigarettes are not quite as "efficient" as Pre-War Money, but they too are worth a lot more as a trade item than as scrap.

Human skulls can be used in construction. Not sure what effect they have but I'd assume those skulls on pikes deter would be raiders?

Weapons and armor, scrap them in the workbench (actually I'm not positive it will do this for you auto or not) and you will not get any of the additional materials you can get with Scrapper perks. Scrap them at the appropriate bench and you can get those materials. Also, in many cases, a weapon or armor piece that can be scrapped might be of greater value as a medium for modding / XP farming.

I have not done a lot of anolysis on the effects of modding on weapon and armor values, but one thing I have noted: a mod that is disconnected from a weapon, when sold is worth considerably less than when the mod is sold attached to a weapon.

My basic procedure:

1. Chests to contain: a. armor; b. weapons. c. routine gear (meaning stuff I tend to use a lot). d. stuff to sell. e. stuff I am saving just in case.

2. When I arrive back at base, I first move all aid items that are useable in Chemistry or cooking to the workbench (purified water, flowers and similar "wild" foraged items like fungus and mushrooms, meat . . . that sort of thing). I generally use Jet and Psycho to make the upper tier versions of these (UltraJet, PsychoJet, UberJet, etc.) so having enough of these and similar items in the workbench (mentats, flamer fuel, whiskey, dirty water, etc., etc.) that I can build any cooked or chemically derived stuff is good.

3. I then move all armor and weapon items that I might eventually want to either scrap, mod or sell from my inventory to those two respective chests (which are sitting next to their respective benches). This is the most fiddly part of my routine and I haven't really figured out the ideal pattern. I had wanted to outfit all my settlers in color-coded and job-related garments but that was just too tedious. I generally just sell most of the crap tier armor and weapons, but do use some of the weapons to XP farm by modding, depending on availability of adesive, etc.

4. Human Skulls, Pre-War Money, packs and cartons of cigarettes, abraxo cleaner and antifreeze jugs go into a "stuff I am saving just in case" else straight into the workbench (if I have plenty of plastic and cloth so that these items are not likely to get auto-scrapped, just putting them into the workbench is fine). Once I've built up a large enough pile of this stuff to go on a shopping spree, I'll collect it and any drugs or other light weight items I want to sell and head off to the mall(s).

5. Next I go to a spot in my settlement (the foundations left when you scrap the house ruins in Sanctuary are about the best I've found for this) and drop all the junk. Just highlight an item and start spamming "R" you will have to hit "E" when you drop a stack of 6 or more. You can literally drop hundreds of items in one go, but this sometimes causes strange behavior when items clip into each other (e.g., buckets doing a whirling dervish dance with alarm clocks and such). Now you have a ring pile of junk all the way around you.

6. Go into Workbench mode. move your workbench item selection to something like crops or wall hangings (so that when you misstype you do not wind up building something), and start highlighting items and rapidly clicking "R" then "E" to scrap everything. You can literally scrap hundreds of items in mere minutes.

A further comment. I make an effort to keep everything from all settlments transferred to one workbench (generally Sanctuary so far).

That explains a lot to me right there as my size has increased even though I was pushing yellow for a long time. So this is how that happened. I hear about an exploit that requires some shuffling junk back and forth from inventory to bench etc.. I never used this and still saw my size limit increase many fold. Now I know from what you said above how this happened... BIG Thanks!!

I agree about the prewar money and cigarettes but I have been doing well without using them lately for funds. My main money earner is .38 ammo which everyone in the wasteland seems to favor. I have not a single weapon that uses it and it builds to the 1000's every few real days of my playing. So this I sell off now. Also with my water building up large excess I sell purified water in mass and all this adds up to I buy what I want.. Stimpacks and ammo I am low on, Junk, and shipments of materials then sell my ammo .38 and purified water and clean their caps out.. Basically I make a profit even spending massively at shops. (most of the time)

I do burn those prewar moneys up as well as cigarettes on building sleeping bags these days but I have reached a very comfortable cap spending account and honestly I am only level 39. (first playing here) My population is going through the roof so beds have been a main issue lately.

Cool. Good to commiserate with a fellow gear fondling builder type

My two favorite things in games: a. Pawning programmed opponent bad guys (preferably by shooting them in the head from a very long distance away); b. Building stuff. About a year ago I had a "Life is Feudal server" and played so damn much I literally burned out on the game.

One thing I have observed anecdotally, and noted in the "Help files:" different items contribute different modifiers to settler happiness. It is probably reasonably intuitive what will "make them happy" but in some cases it might slip under the radar. Based on my experience, I'd speculate that the following items will make settlers happy, and in some cases relatively more so than their "more primitive" counterparts:

Proper beds > mattresses > sleeping bags

Lamps (1 per building/rom) > hanging bulbs > spotlights > no lights (unsure on this one)

Toilet + bathtub > none

Spare electricity > all used > none

Decorations > none (I'd guess that one decoration per settler is a threshold?)

As far as the merchant stalls

Level 3 > Level 2 > Level 1

I am pretty confident that the food vendor and the chems vendor/doctor have a benefit to happiness, and possibly the trader or clothing vendor, but I'm not sure of the latter and also not sure about weapons and armor vendors.

Of course having enough food and water and enough beds at all are basic issues, but I've observed anecdotally that these other factors seem to come into play at all.

Yeah I agree and as I have been doing low cost sleeping bags I can get the settlement fairly happy but with the frame beds I think they like more and also I think there may be an over crowding issue where stuffing 8 settlers into one of the basic prefab shacks is not optimal. Decorations and lights yes.. I don't know about what types work best. However they like TV's gods only know why as all you ever see is - Please stand by, and radios..

I found that by building a Bar stand and decorating it with tables lights stools etc.. The settlers happiness increased the most and when the sun goes down they all congregate there, eat food and laze around till about 2 am.. So this I think was a bigger help on happiness then the other shops

I have no toilets or tubs.. I wish I could build a tub and drop in a bar of soap, and have it effect my settlers. My medic looks very unclean in particular

As pointed out above, while raw resources get shared via Supply lines, items NOT broken down don't get shared. But preferentially, I don't like to scrap armor and weapons because I often mod those and then distribute to my settlers to make them better and safer defensive fighters for the inevitable settlement defense battles to come. HOWEVER, I found out the hard way that ONLY the workbenches are safe for storage. I had been using two separate cabinets to store Armor and Weapons, and each had > than 100 items in them. Then the game refreshed those two cabinets, leaving only some few caps and a couple of Junk items in their place. So that means I _must_ store anything I don't want to cart around anything I do NOT want to scrap in the workbench -- where if I go crazy building at that location, will inadvertently scrap items I want to preserve. [My basic rule of thumb is: Do I value this item more than the number of caps I can get selling it, or for the raw materials it creates when it gets scrapped? Early game, I am willing to "pay" 10 caps for 1 raw resource. Mid game, that figure drops to 5 caps per item. Late game... I haven't gotten anywhere near there yet (after 200+ hours of play).]

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Along these gameplay lines, here's a valuable tip: In Sanctuary in particular and other settlements as well that you visit regularly, KEEP all storage containers that you can move. Gather them together at one location and leave them empty. The game tends to restock empty containers periodically; the greater your Fortune Finder perk, the more frequently containers get restocked. I have the workbench house in Sanctuary filled with dressers and cabinets. EVERY time I visit Sanctuary, I check each container. On average, I get 50-100 caps, even if I checked just the day before. Also, it seems that cabinets restock MUCH more often than dressers. I also have two stars (the max?) in Fortune Finder, so that probably accounts for the frequent restocking.

Wow, some good tips on both the happiness benefit of a bar, and the respawning containers. Crap! That is kind of annoying that even containers the player builds and places are subject to respawn. I had not noticed that yet.

My problem with scrapping everything is summed up by the Gears issue. For those who don't know, Gears are used in several items (turrets are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head), but they break down into Gear. Gear further breaks down into Steel. So if you're scrapping everything into pure raw materials, you won't be able to make things requiring Gears, as you've broke the hem down.

Now, in this particular case, it's better to leave the Gears alone, as Steel is easy to come by. However, since this issue exists with one item, it may exist with other items that are harder to decide between, so I just shove everything into the workbench as-is and avoid the problem entirely.

There are gears, and then there are Gears. Gears (with a small g) break down into 1 Steel and 1 Gear. Gears (with a big G) have already been reduced to their lowest raw material and can no longer be scrapped any further.

Yeah this is a bit confusing. I hadn't noticed what Patch is pointing about about the distinction in capitalization for the first letter. But the graphic both in the inventory and for the object in the landscape is distinct.

gears (intact "non-scrapped" items you find in places like Corvega) look like gears, both in the inventory and in the landscape.

Gears (the raw material that will break down into an equal number of Gears when you drop it and scrap it) look like a little cube labelled "Gears."

As far as I can tell, Beth did it the nice way on all this stuff. Once a unit of something is in its "irreducible state" it cannot be messed up by inadvertently reducing it to a lesser state. Meaning: drop 50 "Steel" or 50 "Gears" or 50 "Fiberglass" on the ground and scrap them, and you will (or at least I think you will) get 50 Steel, 50 Gears, and 50 Fiberglass.

I'm in the middle of the Reunions mission, so I don't have access to my workbench, but when I'm done, I will double check this, as it doesn't agree with what I've seen. I may be misremembering, though.

Too bad I scrapped all my containers.. Honestly Sanctuary has been my main base and as such I love it and hate it. Sometimes wish I could in good conscience level the whole place and start over. All my biggest mistakes I made there. Wish I knew about the containers thing before hand. As CaptainPatch just said I am now worried about my stock piles and will need to do something. Yet I have not had them cleared out at all so.. Maybe this is because I do seem to have to move and reset these storage containers frequently as I reorganize my space. Best thing with that is moving say a chest packed full of weapons is easy as clicking and moving it.

-edit- Although my thoughts also now make me wonder if Captain patch used a pre made container as he mentions getting some caps and other random loot where as in a newly built from base material chest or container is not a item capable of generating random loot.. So perhaps I will not worry on this much yet.

But yeah I would hate to log onto game some day to find an empty chest where I stored a couple weeks worth of loot including legendary armor. I might need to just sell it off or equip my settlers better asap.. Great one more job I have been putting off I now feel I should address.

Yeah I have seen Gears and gears.. One is what I get breaking things down the other is an object that I find well one place I find in large quantities is in the corvega assembly plant on conveyor belts.. Heavy objects but they provide some scrap value.

So, I finally finished Reunions, and am looking at the Gear/Gears. Neither of them starts with a lower case g, and I've never seen an item in-game that isn't capitalized, so I'm not sure where that came from.

Now, I have two items. The first is "Gear", and it breaks down to 1 Steel. When dropped, it appears as a wheel with 6 holes, identical to the ones picked up in, say, the Corvega plant.

The second item is "Gears". It breaks down to 1 Gear, and looks like a small blue box when dropped.

As a test, I dropped the items, and the Gear breaks down to Steel, but the other does break down to what it already is. So it appears to be a display issue: the Gears item breaks down to Gears, but it says it breaks down to Gear, which is a different item.

The capitalization was my distinction. The larger, clunkier gears (which I termed "gear") simply scraps to one steel. Gears extracted from finer items like Desk Fans, etc., are the raw material "Gears" and are used for creating, among other things, Gun Turrets, which makes them kind of valuable.

I could swear the last clunky gear I scrapped yielded 1 Steel and 1 Gear. It might be because I maxed out my Scrapper perk, and therefore get "more bang for your buck". (Or, more likely, I just am misremembering.)

If you make a container to store stuff in, the game won't refresh it. It's in the furniture section.

Currently at level 62 or so and never lost anything in my containers, so yeah... pretty sure containers you make are safe.