Fallout 4: How To Scrap Junk

There is a lot of junk in Fallout 4 that players can find and pick up. It doesn’t matter if it’s a box of detergent or a bottle of glue. If it makes sense for the item to exist within an urban wasteland, then you’ll probably find it in the world. Each of these junk items can be broken down into its core components and then used for various crafting recipes.

Junk also exists in more than one form in the game, and this guide will show you how to break down each junk item into useful ingredients.

Junk Items

As mentioned above, players will come across a significant amount of junk items simply by playing through the game. These can be found littered out in the wasteland, inside different strongholds or buildings and even on the bodies of killed enemies.

You can pick these items up, after which they will take up precious space in your inventory like everything else in the game. They can now be found in the Junk tab of your Pip-Boy.

Now to turn these items into useful ingredients, you will first have to travel to any one of your settlements in the game, then interact with the Workshop bench found there. You will now see an option to deposit all of the junk items you are carrying into the Workshop inventory.

Once that’s done, players can now craft anything they want in the game and the junk items will automatically be broken down into their desired components and used in the recipe. That’s all there is to it.

Weapons And Armor

As you play through Fallout 4, you are most likely going to pick up a number of different weapon and armor pieces from the different locations you visit in the game, as well as from the corpses of your foes. And as appealing as it might seem to always keep these in your inventory, there’s a limit to their usefulness. Sometimes the best use for older gear is simply as a source of materials for crafting newer items.

To do this, go to Weapon and Armor workbenches found in your settlements and interact with them. In the crafting menu, you should see an option to scrap each piece of gear in your inventory, with a secondary menu showing you what materials will be extracted from them.

You should also keep in mind that scrapping weapons and armor will only give you back a fraction of all of the components used to craft that piece of gear. So if you crafted an item and now want to get all of the resources you invested back, that’s not going to happen.

Settlement Junk

The final and most convenient source of useful materials in the game are the large pieces of junk found all over your settlements. These include everything from rusted cars to broken fire hydrants and even the trees growing around the areas.

To scrap these items you have to go to a Workshop bench and enter ‘Build’ mode. Now you can walk around your settlement, pick any junk lying around and interact with it to turn it into useful components that will automatically be sent to the Workshop inventory.

One of the most time efficient ways of gaining materials is to quickly run around your settlements when you first gain access to them and scrap any and all junk you can find. This ensures that you have a large stockpile available at all times.