Characteristics
Overview
Crafting at a workbench with this upgrade has a chance to refund up to 10% of the ingredient costs back to you in raw material form.
One teammate in most groups lives at the bench. Every evening the farm run turns into ammo, walls and meds there, and this upgrade gives each of those crafts a chance to hand back part of what went in. The game text caps it at 10% of the ingredients, returned as raw materials.
Read that figure honestly. It is a chance and a ceiling, so on a single rifle you will hardly notice it. Over hundreds of crafts it starts to show, and the more your group crafts at one spot, the more it hands back. A nightly batch of 5.56 rifle ammo is the kind of load it suits. You cannot craft or research the upgrade itself, so it comes from loot or a trade, and a spare recycles into metal fragments with no scrap back.
The other upgrade aimed at heavy crafting is the Efficiency upgrade. That one rolls for a whole bonus item when you craft in batches and skips explosives and raid gear, while the Recycle Bin text names no such exception. Pick by what your bench actually spends its evenings on.
Tip
A solo crafting a gun, a door and some arrows a day will hardly notice it. If one turns up, it belongs on the bench of whoever crafts the most.
Recycling
At power grid stage 2 a green recycler works at 60% instead of 50%. Yields depend on the recycler.
