So I have about 30 scavenging stations all connected between my settlements. From the wiki it says it should produce at least one item a day.


Not only do I need to wait more than that I also only get 2-3 steel and 2-3 wood. Is that normal for that many scavenging stations?


I'm on ps4

My goal is too kinda be able to wait a day and have enough resources every day to at least build a small house

I've never really monitored this. I'll keep a closer eye on it to see what is made.

I just manually did the math. Between all resources I made 9 junk items after waiting two days. With about 30 scavenge stations

Does it matter if you have more that one scavenging station in a settlement?

Do you have a settler assigned to each of the scavenging stations? Just like any other thing they need to be assigned.. unlike farming where an assigned settler will take on as much as he can, only one settler can be assigned to each scav station.

Yes there all assigned

Maybe it only counts so many.. I mean, 30 is kind of going overboard.. I'd take them all away and compare to what you get with just 9 stations.

I thought the point of those stations was so eventually you could built your society up enough where you no longer need to fetch resources but your workers do it. That was my dream. Really needs to be mor information about these. Maybe I'll mod it when mods come out for ps4

AFAIK, unassigned settlers default to junk gathering, but assigning them to a station doubles that output, counts them as having a job (which affects a settlement's Happiness), and changes how they wander around.

Unassigned settlers produce 1 junk per day.

Settler assigned to scavenging station produce 3 items per day each.

If you have 30 stations across your empire you'll get 90 junk per day.

Keep in mind the items will be placed in the workshop where the station is located.

There is also a limit to how much a workshop will hold, once you reach this limit no more junk will be added to that workshop from the station, though you can keep adding junk manually to your hearts content


Edit: I'm on ps4

Wh-whuuuuuuuuut? Dang. Did not know. Though mostly I assign settlers to junk detail when I don't want to build another store or plant more crops.


So I guess if you get the Strong Back perks and regularly relocate all of your scrap to one settlement, you can ensure each other settlement never hits that limit?

I think this is going to continue to be a dream. Personally I find the stations are essentially useless, and just one more random generator that I can't in any way control.

Keeps'em outta trouble, 'reckon.


Mamas: don't let your settlers grow up to be Raiders.

LOL. You're alllllllright, friend.

If you have a certain amount of junk/materials in your workstation, the scavenging stations wont generate anything. They are pretty useless tbh.

Correct. If you up for that kind of hassle. Even doing so it's still not enough to fuel an empire. I can't seem to find it, but the formula was something like popx30.

Pretty much. I don't even notice it, to be honest -- though admittedly this is because I'm a big fan of the building system in general, now that I feel comfortable with it, and all of my characters are pretty obsessive about gathering building supplies and managing workshop inventories.

Only time I even noticed the scavenging stations working was when I set one up at Red Rocket, where I'd previously emptied the workshop and left the entire place just sitting there for many, many levels. Then I finally decided to send a couple of settlers there, and at one point I looked in the workshop and sure enough there were a few completely random items of junk. Basically, I like it for the variety of tasks I can have my settlers doing, livening up the joint. But the functional element of it doesn't impress me.

So basically from what I'm getting from everyone is this mechanic is broken and probably not working as intended?


Damn I have like 50 work stations now.


I'm sure the intended use was to do what I wanted to do. However it seems not many people are aware of this so it'll probably never be patched

It's a subject that has been discussed on this board before which at the time caused me to do a little test.

IIRC I found that a scrapper bench caused 3 junk items to appear in that settlements workshop every 24 hours.

They would appear at around 2.30 p.m.

The junk items would be random things like wood, concrete, steel, lockets, teddy bears and so on.

There also seems to be a cap on the total amount that is collected.

A bit like the situation with food and water when on a daily basis existing food and water in the workshop is over written by the next days production.

I started to test the existence of junk cap once but forgot about it.

I cleared out a Workbench with the intention of keeping tabs on it to see at what level collecting stopped.

As i wrote I forgot to do that but at a later date when i checked that particular bench there were low hundreds of assorted junk items in it.

I personally feel that the scrapper bench probably provides enough scrap to maintain a settlement but if you have a large building project it won't be enough.

An example for me was when i went around rebuilding all of my settlements which originally catered for lower numbers of settlers.

I had, over the course of the game, added bits and pieces to them as the settlements grew.

So I did a major refurbishment.

Scrapping the old a replacing with new building.

For aesthetic reasons replacing sleeping bags with comfy beds and placing lots of rugs.

I ran out of cotton part way through that process, so put the project on hold while i went about the map.

Revisiting places and whilst there collecting and bartering for cotton and items containing cotton so that i could continue that project.

There was no way that the settlers would be be to collect all of that required cotton because the items they generate appear random.

I'd say it's working as intended, but good intent don't build a settlement. Not gonna lie, if you plan to do alot of settlement building, just do the shipment glitch before they patch that in 1.4, unless you have somekind of moral gripe against it. They year may actually be 2287 before you find enough wood.

Hmm this is strange.. But then again all I ever use em for is "guard patrols".

pretty much how i use them, livens the place up a bit

Yes, additionally if you care about settlement happiness, idle settlers causes happiness to decline.

Consequently I make sure my settlers are occupied.

I also like to see some movement about the place so build scrap benches and guard posts.

I build more guard posts than assigned guards so that the guards move between them.

Just for aesthetics because if there's an attack everyone joins in the fight anyway.

Eh the whole scavenging/resource gathering seems pretty random to me.

I have one settlement that produces 40 water, but yet when I look in the workbench there's like 2 purified waters.

Then I go to another settlement with barely enough water pumps to supply the settlement, and then there's 40 purified waters in the workbench.

Keep in mind, Bethy is the same company that didn't notice the McReady 95% headshot glitch for months on end, so yeah...