Can someone do me a in a nut shell regarding the equipment and inventory. It seems very overwhelming.I seem to have a lot of junk and some items that say can be upgraded to a better version of said item. Just literally don't know what I'm doing
or rather what I'm supposed to be doing with everything. Am I supposed to sell it all or keep it. Tutorials are pants. Took me about an hour to figure out how to hack that credit chip we were given by a certain lady.
I'll give it a go.
Junk has two possible uses:
i) You can sell it to any vendor (or deposit machine) for money. There's a "sell all junk" button, so at least it's simple to do that. Most junk is worth very little, but a small (but not trivial) proportion of junk is worth 750 eddies each. One piece of "junk" (a painting) is worth 4000 eddies.
ii) You can scrap it for parts. It will yield common (and maybe uncommon, I forget) parts. Due to the abysmal UI, this is insanely tedious as you have to scrap each piece of junk or stack of junk individually and you have to select how many of each stack too.
By default, you have to hold the scrap button for ~1s each time. That can be changed by manually editing a config file (details available online) which I would wholeheartedly recommend doing if you are going to scrap, craft or sell anything. Which you will.
There's a perk that causes you to autoscrap every junk item you collect. Due to the abysmal UI, you can't set conditions. So it will scrap the valuable junk items too. Which option is less bad is up to each player to choose for themself. I took the scrapper perk because I thought I'd use crafting more than I'd use money. I reached the final mission with ~800,000 eddies and was never short of money at any point in the game, so losing out on the extra money from selling junk didn't matter. I also ended up with far more components than I needed, so I guess it doesn't matter either way.
For the other categories, it depends. Here's my take on it:
Consumables. Most of them are weightless and worth very little, so it doesn't matter what you do with them. You will very rarely need food (it's for healing outside of combat and any 1 item of food fully heals you over a short period of time). I never used drinks at all other than for roleplaying. They restore stamina, but that could only possibly maybe matter with a melee-only character and then only if you can use drinks during combat (I think you can't). Alcohol is worth 30 eddies each so it's worth selling at least in the early stages of the game. It might also have some weight, but my memory about that is uncertain.
Grenades. They have weight and it adds up, so they're something to watch for when managing your inventory. Unfortunately, they're almost worthless so it's barely worth selling them. Scrapping them is usually bugged - in my case, I got nothing at all for scrapping grenades. When it's not bugged, you can scrap grenades for more components than you can craft them for so they're a magic infinite component source. Since you can use the components to make stuff that isn't worthless, it's also a magic infinite money source. Rather silly "balance" there. I rarely used grenades and it wasn't long before I got the arm-mounted grenade launcher that has infinite ammunition (it's meant to - that's a feature, not a glitch) anyway.
Quickhacks. Weightless, so you may as well keep all the ones you find. Sell ones you don't use if you're really short of money (which will probably never happen).
Cybernetics mods. Rare and weigh little or nothing (I forget which), so can be ignored unless you're looking for a mod for your cybernetics. Select the cybernetics ("cyberware"?) section to bring up a picture of your body and which cybernetics you have installed. Each part will show how many mods are available for it in your inventory. Select it to bring up the modding screen and add mods if you want. You can't change your cyberware yourself (you need to go to a ripperdoc for that) but you can change the mods on it.
Equipment mods. You'll acquire loads and almost all of them will be of no use to you and of very little value at vendors. I think they're weightless, but I'm not sure. They might weigh 0.2 units each. My memory isn't certain. Sort by weight if you want to check. Some of them are extremely useful, though. For example, using the Armadillo mod on armour can easily make it 10 times more effective as armour.
I'll mentioned crafting your own mods here because the mechanic for it is different to how any reasonable person would expect it to be. Every time you craft an item mod it will be crafted at a random rarity up to either epic or the highest rarity you can craft, whichever is lowest. So you have to craft a bunch of them, then go back into your inventory and see what rarity level you got since of course you'll only want the ones that are the highest rarity available to you. Then you'll have to scrap the others. One at a time. Crafting them only uses common and uncommon components, but scrapping them yields components of whatever rarity the mod was randomly created as being and also the lower rarities and the amount of components acquired from scrapping is greater than the amount used for the crafting. So it's a magic infinite component source that you can only avoid by dropping the surplus mods.
Weapons will depend on what you want to use, as usual. You will specialise to an extent. For example, my character specialised in smart assault weapons with a smart pistol as a backup weapon and a melee weapon mainly to train that skill for some more perk points and then, when I realised it was sometimes useful, a non-lethal melee weapon. Clothing is actually armour
except for the outfit slot. Those are for appearance only. They're optional except for the heist mission in the initial part of the game, where you and Jackie enter a hotel dressed as corpos so you're wearing suits. So what matters for items of clothing is the armour value and how many mod slots it has (usually none in the early stages of the game - mod slots only appear on the higher rarity rating clothing).
Upgrading kit is a bit odd, so here goes...
The key thing is that each item has a level. This is hidden from the player because reasons. This is what you're increasing in the upgrade screen. I'm not sure (because it's hidden from players) but as far as I can tell you can only upgrade an item to your current character level.
I found upgrading almost totally useless. The cost per level is very high (in terms of components used) and the improvement is very low. YMMV.
However...the hidden level also applies to items you craft. So whatever you craft (including mods, which can make a very big difference to kit) will have its stats affected by the level you're at
when you craft it. So it can ber very worthwhile crafting another of something you use when you get to a higher level. I found this especially important for the armadillo mods I had on all my clothing-armour.
Items labelled as 'iconic' can also be upgraded in rarity rating and that has a far larger effect than upgrading their hidden level. But you don't do that upgrading in the upgrading window because the UI is abysmal in many ways. Instead, you do it in the crafting window. When you have an iconic item you will automatically learn a crafting plan for that item at the next higher rarity rating. So, for example, if you find a rare iconic item you will automatically learn the crafting plan for the epic iconic version of that item. If you then craft the epic iconic version, you will automatically learn the crafting plan for the legendary iconic version. Note that you'll need the iconic item to craft the iconic item at a higher rarity rating. Don't scrap/drop/sell iconic items.
There's a bug with clothing vendors that's very relevant to crafting items. Some of the clothing vendors sell crafting plans for legendary clothing items but due to the bug they will only ever sell legendary crafting plans the first time you speak to them. They will never have any afterwards. Legendary versions have more mod slots and that has a huge effect. You can find legendary clothing items in the world, but rarely. Being able to make your own is far more reliable. If you're planning on getting a high level in crafting and getting the required perk to craft legendary items, avoid clothing shops until you have a stack of cash.
