What are the best things to collect when starting out in Fallout 4?

[NME]

Bit of a noob.

[Axer]

just continue the game as you want, the first 30 minutes you will already have a laser musket and a power armor

[Kellion]

Well, if you get hooked on the settlement building part of the game, then you'd want to pick up everything - junk included.

[Joe Coffee]

Bottled purified water and mutfruits. They go for good cash.

If you're not above hoarding, grab anything that might have oil, copper, steel, and wood in it. Later, grab all the circuits and ammo and everthing from turrets that you shoot. It'll make base building easier.

Don't overlook aluminum. Your power armor will love you for it.

Grab as many adhesives as you can. You'll need them for certain weapons attachments.

[Cyan]

Originally posted by ☢NME☢:

Bit of a noob.

Adhesive (duct tape)
Fertilizer
Oil

[Axer]

player.additem 000000f -1

[hyperion]

At first, pretty much anything and everything. But especially food, healing items, and ammo.

[Aries the Grinning]

If you mean junk to craft with, go low weight first on the junk (cans/small misc items) and focus on getting the necessary weapons primarily. Once those are acquired... Loot all the junk everywhere :D
Guns/armour will tier up as you level up, so basically you'll just be swapping till you get your perfect set. You can mod to make the lower stuff more worthwhile for a bit, but that would need speccing Gun Nut. Basically the higher you get the more chance you'll have of looting the good stuff of enemies, and you can swap out mods if needs be without Gun Nut as stripping a weapon requires you to build the lowest mod possible (don't need Gun Nut thre :D)

Helps speccing strong back & lone wanderer for quick bursts of running and stocking up, if that's your build. And Dogmeat still works with lone wanderer so an extra mule can be provided that won't nag yer ears off :D

[Sentient_Toaster]

Early on? Mutfruit, corn, tatos -- these are for planting so that you'll have more reliable sources in quantity. If you get enough production of them so that you have spares (3x each), and you get some water purification (1 per set of 9 veggies) set up, you'll be set for cooking vegetable starch -- which breaks down into adhesives.

Adhesives, aluminum, ceramic are useful in a lot of mods. Copper is pretty useful as well for building settlements.

Ammunition (including fusion cores) and stimpacks are both weightless, so no reason not to take them.

[Cyan]

Ah, yes, Copper. Copper is very important. Collect telephones and light bulbs and stuff.