What generic loot is best to take?

[💗Blaaashyyy💗]

Armor? Weapons (like pistols over rifles)? Specific armor pieces (like its rather obvious chest pieces are gonna be heavy and value for weight is going to be rather slim compared to hands armor or legs)? Specific weapons? I mean value to weight stuff.

[Your Dad]

If you're running a build that uses guns, I'd go to a workbench and scroll down to the best possible mod for that gun, probably something that requires Gun Nut 3 or 4. Tagging that mod for search will automatically show you which junk items have the materials you need, and by extension, which loot is best to grab. Things like Screws, Adhesive, Oil, etc. That lets you cut out the middleman of buying the materials you need from vendors. Perks that let you find more materials and ammo also let you focus your budget on stimpaks or other things that you might craft less often.

If you really need cold hard caps for some reason, anything with gold or silver as a material component is good, as well as pre-war money. Addictive drugs also sell well vs weight, but Psycho, Buffout, and Jet can be lifesavers alone or when combined at a Chemistry Station, so if you're at a point where you can afford to sell them instead of using them, you probably don't need money anymore. Mentats are generally less vital and can be merch'd.

There is a perk that lets you scrap weapons for rarer materials, but weight becomes a factor pretty quickly, and generally if you need all those gun-crafting materials you're probably not running a high strength melee character to begin with, meaning you can't carry all that much, which means you'll have to dart back to base pretty often to deconstruct those guns to capitalize on that perk choice.

If you're not specifically targeting money-making by using settlements or charisma perks or whatever, your income from quests and caps you find while looting are probably going to way outweigh what you make from bartering.

Generally I wouldn't bother picking up a heap of assault rifles and leather armor pieces just to sell, unless I was the type of person to just keep hiking back and forth between my last encounter and town for hours until I sold off the whole place, but at that point just cheat in some money and touch grass lmao.

[Iron Knights]

You can mark & unmark loot at the benches, so it will visually stick out for you when you go looting.

[Iron Knights]

Rifles over pistols anytime, even in this game, where weaponry is somewhat SNAFUBAR.
Heavy = best armor value, may weigh more, sells for more, or keep it.
BoS Vertibird > Fast Travel, if your'e overloaded.
There are console commands to blow out the carry weight limitations.

[K13Cove]

Modified weapons are very useful for scrap components, or for removing their mods and adding it to your existing weapons. Junk is obviously useful for crafting as well.
Most weapons and armour in this game sell for a disappointingly low amount of caps. Only legendary weapons sell for good caps. Otherwise, I found I got most of my caps through selling chems, and Fortune Finder (which is extremely good, as it generates caps in more or less every single container in the game).

Strong Back is a much more useful perk in this game because it allows to to run (in exchange for AP) and fast-travel while over-encumbered, and has a rank that reduces AP costs too. You can't sprint, but it solves the inventory micromanagement you'll otherwise have to do if you're eager to loot.

Of course, it's easy to get carried away and have 7500 lbs of equipment on you, but it doesn't matter. Once you're over that over-encumbered threshold, how much you're over it is irrelevant, so you can technically carry as much as you want.

[Slippery Williams]

All the medication is super light and sells well, stimpacks, Radaway and rad x are common and sell for a great price.

I also just grab any ammo I find and sell the stuff o don’t use, it’s pretty much my second currency. I’m playing on survival and usually keep 20 stimpacks, 20 water, 10 rad x and 10 radaway then sell the excess. I could probably halve those values and be fine too but I like to play safe

[Iron Knights]

Originally posted by Dragonkick:

All the medication is super light and sells well, stimpacks, Radaway and rad x are common and sell for a great price.

I also just grab any ammo I find and sell the stuff o don’t use, it’s pretty much my second currency

WRONG ! Never Ever Sell Ammo. I sold perk magazines before ammo.

[wtiger27]

Originally posted by Iron Knights:

Originally posted by Dragonkick:

All the medication is super light and sells well, stimpacks, Radaway and rad x are common and sell for a great price.

I also just grab any ammo I find and sell the stuff o don’t use, it’s pretty much my second currency

WRONG ! Never Ever Sell Ammo. I sold perk magazines before ammo.

And? What you want to do with your ammo is a personal choice. I always sell the ammo I have no use for in a play run and building around a melee, pistol perk for example. Early in a run, I will hold onto some .38 or .45, 308 rounds, in case a nice legendary weapon which would use those happens to drop.

But normally by the time I am in my mid 30's upwards, all that crap ammo is sold. Same for missiles. I may keep some rounds to give to my settler for a weapon assignment. And by that time, caps is not a issue anyway.

What perk magazines are you talking about?

[wesnef]

Originally posted by Blash:

Armor? Weapons (like pistols over rifles)? Specific armor pieces (like its rather obvious chest pieces are gonna be heavy and value for weight is going to be rather slim compared to hands armor or legs)? Specific weapons? I mean value to weight stuff.

If I'm looking to scrap things, I look for weapons & armor that have lots of modifier names (base ones, especially armor, give very little). If I'm looking for caps, well. . . I just look at the weight & value and rough-calculate the ratio in my head. ("oh, that's 1lb to 10 caps, it's better than that 1:5 armor, but worse than that 1:20 gun.")

And if there's a workbench nearby, I'll just grab & scrap all the worse-value stuff.

[Anvos]

Any loot sans ones that have no value or scrap value is worth taking. At bare minimum take it to the nearest settlement and scrap it.

Hell when your just starting out even pick up loot too big to loot into inventory and haul it back to the nearest settlement to scrap.

Unlike Fallout 76 there is realistically no stash limit, so horde everything. (ie the only limit is crash your game stupid amounts that you functionally have to be using the console to get)

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Dragonkick:

All the medication is super light and sells well, stimpacks, Radaway and rad x are common and sell for a great price.

Chems are my top pick as well, along with any zero-weight items like pre-war money, pencils, burnt magazines (not burnt books), which are typically just 1 cap (or 5 for pre-war money) but zero weight is zero weight. And a lot of the lightest food items (0.1 weight) also have a very good ratio.

My general guideline is to aim for at least a 10:1 value-to-weight ratio when weight's an issue. So if something weighs 1 unit, it has to have a value of at least 10 before I'll consider it.

[Sep]

Best loot to take is chem, value to weight ratio is probably the best...

Also, you might wanna collect pipe pistol if you plan to have decent size settlement early on.. those pistol are cheap and easy to modify while it's ammo is abundant, so it was the fastest way to arm all your settler at low cost.

[Slippery Williams]

Originally posted by wtiger27:

Originally posted by Iron Knights:

WRONG ! Never Ever Sell Ammo. I sold perk magazines before ammo.

And? What you want to do with your ammo is a personal choice. I always sell the ammo I have no use for in a play run and building around a melee, pistol perk for example. Early in a run, I will hold onto some .38 or .45, 308 rounds, in case a nice legendary weapon which would use those happens to drop.

But normally by the time I am in my mid 30's upwards, all that crap ammo is sold. Same for missiles. I may keep some rounds to give to my settler for a weapon assignment. And by that time, caps is not a issue anyway.

What perk magazines are you talking about?

I just sell any ammo I’m not currently using and use that money to buy ammo I am using at the moment

[💗Blaaashyyy💗]

Originally posted by Dragonkick:

All the medication is super light and sells well, stimpacks, Radaway and rad x are common and sell for a great price.

I also just grab any ammo I find and sell the stuff o don’t use, it’s pretty much my second currency. I’m playing on survival and usually keep 20 stimpacks, 20 water, 10 rad x and 10 radaway then sell the excess. I could probably halve those values and be fine too but I like to play safe

Very cool advice, especially as I haven't even thought of survival mode yet. Thaks!

[wtiger27]

Originally posted by Dragonkick:

All the medication is super light and sells well, stimpacks, Radaway and rad x are common and sell for a great price.

I also just grab any ammo I find and sell the stuff o don’t use, it’s pretty much my second currency. I’m playing on survival and usually keep 20 stimpacks, 20 water, 10 rad x and 10 radaway then sell the excess. I could probably halve those values and be fine too but I like to play safe

In Survival, I never use Radway and Simpaks. Except if I get crippled or limb damage. Or to rez a companion. Otherwise, Refreshing Beverage is far superior to those other types to restore health or remove rads. And you need radaway to make Refreshing Beverage at the chemist station.

This method can help with weight management.

[wtiger27]

Originally posted by Dragonkick:

Originally posted by wtiger27:

And? What you want to do with your ammo is a personal choice. I always sell the ammo I have no use for in a play run and building around a melee, pistol perk for example. Early in a run, I will hold onto some .38 or .45, 308 rounds, in case a nice legendary weapon which would use those happens to drop.

But normally by the time I am in my mid 30's upwards, all that crap ammo is sold. Same for missiles. I may keep some rounds to give to my settler for a weapon assignment. And by that time, caps is not a issue anyway.

What perk magazines are you talking about?

I just sell any ammo I’m not currently using and use that money to buy ammo I am using at the moment

Yeah, that is a important thing to consider in Survival. Excess weight.