Fallout 4 Guide: Scrapping For Beginners

In Fallout 4’s post-apocalyptic wasteland, resources are scarce. You need to be a pro at scrapping if you’re going to survive.

You can use buildings, trees, furniture, tires, and many other environmental elements like these as resources for wood, steel, concrete, and other basic building blocks. If you are in range of a workbench (anywhere that a settlement can be founded), you can hold V on your keyboard to access it. Then look at the object you want to scrap and press the R key to get a menu list of what resources you can gain from that object. You can also scrap items, weapons, and armor, but you have to pick them up and drop them in a workbench area (and then hold V and press R, as above).

Once you click yes in the scrapping menu, the object will disappear from the game and the scraps will appear at the workbench.

Maximizing Your Resources

When you use an item with multiple components to craft something else, it will destroy the other components not used in the process, wasting precious rare materials. 

For example, if you were to use a gold watch as a gears component, the gold will be destroyed in the process. However, if you break the watch down beforehand, you salvage all the raw materials.

What Can You Scrap?

This list will be updated constantly. To look up an item, use ctrl+f to search this page. Please comment if there are any items you’ve been able to scrap that are missing!

Acid - Insect parts like bloatflies, bloodsuckers. Batteries.

Adhesive - Wonderglue and duct tape. 

Aluminium - Aluminium cans. Coolant caps. TV Dinner trays.

Antiseptics - Abraxo Cleaners. Turpentine.

Asbestos - Abraxo Cleaners. Rat poison. Oven mitts.

Ballistic Fiber - Only available in shipments at merchants.

Bone - Skulls. Teeth.

Ceremic - Dinner plates, cups and mugs. Toilets.

Circuitry - Machine gun turrets. Some tech items like phones.

Cloth - Clothing of dead raiders. Sofas and cloth chairs. Rugs. 

Concrete - Cinder blocks. Ruined Houses. 

Copper - Various metal items. Broken light bulbs. Lamp Posts. 

Cork - Antique globe. Baseballs.

Crystal - Crystal Liquor Decanter.

Fertilizer - Bag of Fertilizer.

Fiberglass – Weapons. Rat poison. Shipment of Fiberglass item. Abraxo Cleaner. Telephones.

Fiberoptics - Biometric scanners.

Gears - Toasters. Other mechanical objects.

Glass – Empty Nuka Cola bottles. Other drinks.

Gold - Gold pocket watches and other jewelry.

Lead – Pencils. Batteries.

Leather – dead clothing of raiders.

Nuclear material - Fusion cores. Alarm clocks. Biometric scanners. Some board games. 

Oil – Lighters. Gas canisters. 

Plastic - Plastic silverware.

Rubber - Rubber tires.

Screws - Toy car. Toasters. Antique globe. Other mechanical objects.

Silver - Silverware. Silver jewelry. Turrets.

Springs – Lighters. Toasters. Other mechanical objects.

Steel - Ruined cars and houses. Furniture. Toasters. Toolboxes. Lamp posts. Rubble. Tire irons. 

Wood – Trees. Home furniture. Picket fences. 

If you liked this guide, check out some of our other Fallout 4 explainers: skipping the intro video, unlocking frame rate, which settings to turn on or off, companions, basic and advanced console commands, and disabling mouse acceleration.