Items

Appalachia is generous with stuff and stingy with space. You will spend more of this game deciding what to drop than deciding what to pick up, and the useful question about any item is not how rare it is but what you still have once you have used it.

Sort our twenty-six item pages that way and they fall into a short ladder. Most leave you nothing at all. A few leave you half an hour. Exactly one kind leaves something permanent, and it does it by ceasing to be an item.

Leaves nothing: the things you use up

Four pages cover items that exist to be spent on a single moment.

• Stimpaks are the one you will run out of first. The page's best trick is dilution: mixing them with purified water at a chemistry station turns one strong heal into several weak ones, which is the right trade when most of your damage arrives in small amounts.
• Chems are the same idea with a bill attached. Every one has an effect, a duration and a cure, and using them often enough brings addiction and withdrawal, so the page is as much about stopping as starting.
• Fusion Cores are fuel rather than a consumable in the usual sense: your Power Armor is a paperweight without one, and the page includes a repeatable method for keeping a supply rather than hunting them one at a time.
• Nuka-Cola Quantum sits oddly here because most people never drink it. It is a collectible that happens to be a consumable, which makes drinking one a decision.

Leaves thirty minutes

One page occupies this rung by itself, and it is the one people misremember. Magazines do not read like books and stay with you. They grant a buff that expires after thirty minutes, which puts Grognak the Barbarian and RobCo Fun somewhere between a chem and a perk card.

The Luck perk Curator multiplies that window by two, three or four depending on its rank, which is the only way to make a magazine last long enough to plan around. Read one before an event rather than when you find it.

Leaves a smaller number in your wallet

Eleven pages cover things whose entire purpose is to be spent, and Fallout 76 runs more of these in parallel than any Fallout before it.

Two of those deserve a second look. Adhesive is the bottleneck nobody warns you about, because it is consumed by repairs and upgrades across every category rather than by one of them, so it runs dry while you are not watching. And base components is the page that reframes the rest: junk is not clutter, it is the unrefined version of everything in the table above, and a workbench breaks it down for you automatically as you craft.

Gold Bullion is the odd one out because it does not exist until the story hands it to you. It arrives when the Vault 79 heist in our quests guide concludes, and from that point there is a second price tag on things, payable in a currency the base game never had.

Leaves something permanent, by stopping being an item

This is the only rung on the ladder where you keep anything, and the mechanism is always the same: you read the thing, the thing disappears, and the knowledge stays in your Pip-Boy forever.

• Plans are the big one. A plan is a single-use object that permanently unlocks a recipe at a workbench, which is why our page lists what each one crafts alongside where to find it. Everything you can build in a C.A.M.P. started as a plan somebody read.
• The Armco Ammunition Construction Appliance plan gets its own page because it unlocks ammunition manufacturing rather than a single item, which changes how you supply yourself rather than what you own.
• Holodisks and notes fill the HOLO and NOTES tabs and stay there. In a game whose original cast was entirely recorded, these are the cast.
• Treasure maps are a picture of a place; once you have worked out where, the map has done its job.
• Keys and passcodes and door keys are the smallest version of the same thing, since a code you have read is a code you know.
• The broadcast tape is a one-off: you load it at a radio tower during Hunter for Hire to lure bandits in, and it exists to be played rather than kept.

The two that are not items at all

Overseer's Caches are supply boxes rather than things, scattered across West Virginia and holding a mixture of useful gear and quest rewards. They belong in this bucket because finding them is the same activity as finding anything else on this page, but what you take out of one could be from any rung above.

Survey markers are stranger still, five points across Appalachia that you photograph rather than collect. They are a challenge dressed as an item, and they pay in the same way the tasks in our challenges guide do.

Finally, Wastelanders items is the roundup for everything the expansion added at once, armor and weapons and clothing together, sorted by which reward gives you what. It cuts across every rung of the ladder, which is a fair reflection of how an expansion actually arrives.

Why the ladder matters more here than in other Fallouts

Because you cannot keep everything. Your stash box has a ceiling, your carry weight has a smaller one, and going past that ceiling takes away your ability to fast travel home, as our stash box guide points out at length. The permanent rung is therefore the only one that is free: a plan you have read weighs nothing, and a code you have memorised weighs less.

That is the practical reading of this whole bucket. Read plans the moment you find them, drink the Quantum you were saving, and treat everything in the middle of the ladder as inventory you are renting.

Frequently asked questions

What should I never scrap?

Anything you have not read. A plan is worth more unlocked than melted down, and our crafting coverage notes that scrapping returns less than you paid. Junk is the opposite case, since it exists to be broken up.

What is the fastest way to make caps?

Selling chems, which our caps guide and our vendors guide both land on. Sell in bulk, because individual vendors have a limited pool of caps to pay you with.

How long do magazine buffs last?

Thirty minutes, multiplied by two, three or four with the Curator perk. Anything that tells you they last for hours is describing a stacked Curator build rather than a plain read.

Do I need Gold Bullion?

Only after Wastelanders, and then yes, because several of the guns in our weapons guide are sold for it rather than for caps. It is a second economy layered on top of the first.

What is the single most useful resource to farm?

Adhesive, because it is spent by every other category. Aluminium is a close second for the same reason on the metal side, and both have dedicated farming routes rather than being something you find by accident.