Empty Can Of Beans

You eat a Can of Beans and this stays behind in your inventory. It has one job: throw it into a furnace next to your ore and it melts down into metal fragments, as its game text says. A recycler takes it as well and pays out frags.

It goes into no recipe, so there is no point hoarding a stack. Ten fit in one slot, which is plenty for an evening of looting. Toss them in with the next batch you smelt and forget about them. Right at the start of a wipe, when every frag counts, a few cans from food loot are a small but free top-up.

The page also shows a recipe that turns 20 frags into an empty can, but the game files give nobody that blueprint, so you cannot craft one at all. Every can you hold came from a meal or from loot.