Salvaging Junk and Items in Fallout 4 is definitely essential in your plan to build up a settlement or to keep on top of your weapons and ammo in the early game.
Fallout 4 has brought a swathe of new features to the series, including settlements and crafting your own weapons from scratch. For the first time ever (outside of the Rock-It Launcher), this makes collecting all the random junk you can find in containers actually meaningful, as it can be stripped down into raw materials to craft a bunch of stuff. We go through how to salvage materials, using the tag system, important salvage items, and more.
How to Salvage Materials
Much like previous entries in the Fallout series, you can come across various containers as you explore the wasteland. These will often have useful things inside, like ammo and healing items, but will also contain total junk, like teddy bears and bits of bent metal. This time around, you can take these things to a workbench and break them down into iron, wood, and more. These components are then used to craft everything from guns and ammo to new buildings in your settlements.
While you can go around hunting random junk to turn it into materials, there are a few different methods that will help you salvage goods you can use more effectively.
Scrapping Settlement Features
One of the easiest ways to get a bulk of simple materials is to scrap a bunch of the stuff that is already in most settlements when you discover them. You'll find debris, old houses, rubble, and trash just lying all over the place, as well as fallen trees and other natural detritus.
Once you've activated building mode at the workbench, you can walk up to trees and other debris, scrap the objects, and acquire a large amount of each material.
Tags System
While scrapping wrecked settlements will get you plenty of basics like Iron and Wood, it won't get you a lot of the stuff that you need to create decorations for your buildings or the weapons and armor to keep you thriving. If you're trying to craft something specific in one of the various workstations in the game, then you can tag it as an important collectible.
Then, while you're out in the overworld, any items that contain these materials when scrapped will be tagged with a magnifying glass icon while highlighted. This makes it much easier for you to actually find what you need while you're out and about searching.
Scrap Weapons and Armor
You should remember that you can get materials alongside caps from your enemies' discarded armor and weapons. Whether you're crafting decorations or weapons, you'll need more materials than just Wood and Metal, so breaking down weapons and armor for Plastic, Leather, and Cloth builds up your stores of these items too. You can scrap these items at their respective workstations.
Store All Junk
At your main Workshop for each settlement, you can tap a button to store all of your junk items at once. This is insanely useful, and you should be using it every single time you come back to your settlement workstation.
You'll also want to get the Local Leader perk if possible at Charisma 6 because then you can set up trade routes between all your workbenches, or you'll have to manually cart all your stuff back to the nearest workbench you actually use.
Key Salvage Items and Resources
Now that you have gotten your hands on a bunch of Steel, Wood, Plastic, and other scraps, there are some items that you're constantly going to be needing, so you should start hunting them down as quickly as possible.
Key Resources
- Copper
- Adhesive
- Nuclear Material
- Screws
- Oil
- Gear
Key Scavenge Items
- Fan (Screws)
- Giddyup Buttercup (Screws and Gears)
- Typewriter (Screw and Gears)
- New Toy Truck (Screws)
- Copper Bar (Copper)
- Pre-War Lamp (Copper)
- Economey Wonderglue (Adhesive)
- Oil Can (Oil)
- Cooking Oil (Oil)
Dealing With Shipments
One final important note is that you should always be on the lookout for shipments of any items you're missing. Check out the big trading locations like Diamond City and Goodneighbour, as their major traders tend to have shipments of things like Adhesives and Gears from time to time. Not only can you use these to trade for a profit, but you can get your hands on bulk amounts of key items you require.
Be sure to check out our Top 10 tips on building your own settlements guides or our catalog of The Best Mods in Fallout 4.
Rutledge Daugette is the Founder of TechRaptor and CriticDB. His degree in Game Programming ultimately led… More about Rutledge
