This is… not something that I understood at first. I’ve heard from enough people who had the same problem that I’m confident I’m not alone on this one.

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You actually don’t even need to approach the red workbench to get started. The game doesn’t tell you this unless you’ve already started crafting, but you can enter the workshop by holding down the view button/touchpad (depending on your system) when you’re first approaching the truck stop.

You can scrap everything in the truck stop.

Another thing I didn’t quite grasp at first—you can scrap everything within the bounds of your workshop. You should definitely do this. Just walk around, select stuff, and scrap it.

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There are a few things you’ll want to leave standing, of course—your various workbenches, any furniture you may want to keep—but those tires and busted shelves and junked cars? Scrap that shit.

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If you scrap most of the junk in your workshop, you’ll have a lot more material with which to upgrade your armor and other gear. In fact, I’ve found that when I leave and return to my workshop, the game gives me new tires and other assorted pieces of junk, almost like the tire-fairy has stopped by in the night.

Once you’re comfortable with basic crafting and scrapping, you can start a settlement and get deeper into managing it. But that’s a post for another day. For now: I hope this has been helpful for anyone else who didn’t quite get what to do at first.

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If you have any more crafting tips, I hope you’ll share them below.

To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com.