Gears

A wooden shack becomes a base with real entrances once you have gears. Forty-six recipes ask for them, and three matter most early on: the garage door for your loot room, the high external stone gate for a compound and the ladder hatches that seal a roof. Small generators, wind turbines and vending machines come next, then the heavy stuff.

For the first days they come from crates and from recycling other loot. So after a road run, every gear in your bag is a question: keep it or feed it to the recycler? One gear gives back between 8 and 15 scrap and a handful of metal fragments. That is cheap. Two gears are a garage door, and a missing door costs you far more than 30 scrap.

Crafting them takes a Level 3 workbench, 100 scrap and 25 metal fragments per gear, after 60 scrap of research. That price only makes sense late, when you are hanging armored doors at five gears each and the crates no longer keep up. Never craft one to recycle it: you lose most of the scrap.