Looting and scavenging

Everything you can see is worth a look. Look at a cupboard, a shelf, a car, a trash can or a body with ALT and choose Search. What's inside depends on where you are, so think about what a place would really have held.

• Grocery stores and gas stations: cans, dry food, water, batteries, matches, snacks and motor oil.
• Gun stores and police stations: ammunition, cleaning kits, zip ties, dressings, flashlights and radios.
• Hospitals and clinics: dressings, antiseptic, saline and pills. The good drugs are locked in the dispensary.
• Mechanics and hardware stores: vehicle parts, tools, tape, wire, rope and building materials.
• Farms: seeds, fertilizer, rope and tools, and whatever's left in the larder.

Locked rooms

Back rooms, gun cabinets, armories and drug cabinets are locked. Look at the lock and choose Force. A crowbar or bolt cutters are quick but loud, and bring the dead within about thirty-five meters. A lockpick is quiet, but it snaps about a third of the time. Once a lock is forced it stays open for everyone.

Restocks and stripped places

A searched container fills again twelve to twenty-four hours later, at a different time for each one. Real places run dry, though. Every stack carried out of a store takes something off it, and a store that's been picked clean holds only packaging and dust until the world brings more: a supply convoy arriving, the region being secured, or time passing in quieter days. The radio often says when a place has been stripped or restocked.

Valuables

Gold coins, gold earrings and gilded goblets, figurines, vases and the like turn up in houses, cabinets and gloveboxes. You can't eat them, but they're worth carrying for trade. A fence buys anything, and you can list them on the Exchange at the Haven, Paleto and colony terminals.

Carrying it home

Open your pack with F2. Weight slows you down and makes you louder, so choose what you keep. Your secure pouch (F1) holds four slots that are never lost. Its fifth slot is your keepsake's, the thing you kept from before: it stays there for good, it weighs nothing, and it can't be traded, dropped or lost. Right-click it and choose Hold it when you need it. The quick slots (TAB, then 1 to 5) keep what you need in a hurry.

Dragging one thing onto another does more than stack it. Drag rounds onto a magazine to load it, drag a magazine onto the gun you're holding (or onto Hands) to load it into the gun, and drag plates onto your vest to fit them. See Magazines and reloading.

Loot from a Blackzone is contaminated. It leaks the Bloom into you while you carry it unsealed, and traders and benches refuse it until it's been through decontamination. See PvP and zones.