You collect a lot of junk in Fallout 4, which means there is a lot of junk to scrap as well.
Breaking down all of your junk isn’t really necessary in this one however, the game does a lot of the scrapping for you. As long as you have all of the junk stashed in your workbench, the game will break down all of your junk into the necessary parts when you go to build something.
Storing your junk in the workbench is really easy too. All you need to do is pull up the workbench, and you’ll see a button prompt to “store all junk” (Y on Xbox One, Triangle on PS4) so there’s no need to place them one by one.
There is some speculation however that junk parts get wasted during the build process. For example, some have said that if you use Adhesive from a roll of Duct Tape and what you’re building doesn’t require cloth, that the cloth will be discarded.
This could be a big problem if it is true, especially since you can’t pick and choose which junk parts get used, however I haven’t seen this to be true in my testing.
Long story short, you should probably do some tests of your own. I have seen a lot of mixed reports of some saying that it does happen, and others saying that it doesn’t.
If you really want to scrap all of your junk manually, here is what you need to do:
This process will take a LOT of time, but if you really feel like the game is cheating you out of your junk, this is the way to get around it.