Everything is relative.
Let me describe in detail what you do in terms of UI, and where problems may or may not lie. Whether those things will be too busywork like is ultimately up to you of course.
You need raw materials to make shit (duh). You get raw materials from “scrapping” things. There are a couple of ways to do this:
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IIRC< you can go into the pip boy, select items from the menu, and press a button to scrap them. This is awful in every possible way. The pipboy is a terrible UI device and you quickly accumulate a ton of shit so there’s lots of scrolling. Busywork? I think so. But it’s just not an elegant want to get what you need. There is an exception use-case which I’ll talk about later.
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You can dump all junk into crafting stations, which serve both as crafting stations and storage containers of unusual capacity. I really don’t know if there’s a limit. I believe there is actually a “dump all junk” or somesuch command, so no need to do this one item (or stack of items) at a time. Anyway when it comes time to make all the things, the UI is quite clear about what you need. If you are short on the actual materials (be it copper, concrete, or springs), the crafting station will select some item from the shit you dumped into it and scrap it to get parts it needs. AFAIK it will keep doing this until you are ready to make the thing.
This is actually a really nice piece of UI work. Except Reddit has claimed that when items are scrapped in this manner, you only get whatever it is you needed from them. A watch when scrapped by any other processes (#1 or #3) produces 2 gold, I think 2 sprockets, and a spring. If you needed a spring and the station ate a watch to get it, you would lose the sprockets an gold. This is bad because some of the things items break down into are apparently much more important than others (I am told copper and ceramics are a really big deal). I cannot at this time confirm if this is a problem or someone misunderstood. Further, it could be a bug.
- You drop shit on the ground near a crafting station and enter workshop mode. This is done by pressing and holding ‘v’ (not just pressing; that toggles 1st and 3rd person view, ugh) in a “workshop area”, or using a crafting station. “workshop areas” are zones around crafting stations. They’re quite large in some cases (all of the starting slice of suburb that is Savlation or Serenity or whatever they are calling it counts as one eventually). In this mode, you can access various crafting menus to do crafty things. But you can also walk around and highlight almost any object. An option that appears is to press ‘r’ to scrap the item you are highlighting. Boom! Component parts. I think there’s a visual distinction between “junk” (which is anything designed for you to turn into materials) and “this is a thing you built”. Yellow versus green.
You can drop shit on the ground and scrap that way. It’s better than #1 but not preferable to a #2 that always leaves you with every material.
Lastly, there’s another nifty feature in “Workshop mode”. Maybe you want to make power generators. Who doesn’t! they power things. It’s great. Anyway, the materials list will appear and show you - not quite as distinctly as it ought but never mine - an X/Y list of “how much you have/how much is needed”. The items you are short on appear slightly dimmer. I can’t recall the exact UI interactions, but you can essentially elect to put items into a search list. What this in turn does is put a little magnifying glass next to any item that breaks down into a component or components on your search list. So if you go look into a chest of drawers where you stored a bunch of shit, when scrolling trhough the list you can easily tell “oh, they, this has something I need”. But not what it has. Also this icon appears I think when you are trading with people and randomly wandering the wasteland and looting. This is a nice feature though the list needs to be curated. It’s the only time I would go into the inventory and look for junk to break down.
Some additional problems crop up with the UI. Some things require a confirm dialog that we could argue ought not to. Quitting a crafting station, e.g. (this problem is further exacerbated because Tab “backs out” of menu levels, essentially sending you to the top of the tree one press at a time. But pressing it at the top invokes the quit confirmation in crafting screens; another tab press cancels teh quit confirmation and returns you to the top level crafting menu). You have to confirm scrapping when using method #3, which is understandable on paper. Maybe you dropped a bunch of shit on the ground that is not junk but you want to scrap some. Or sort it. Or whatever. The confirmation to scrap, though, makes scrapping in that manner more tedious. Which makes clearing up #2 all the more important.
And then there’s the fact that Bethesda has spent exactly 24 seconds explaining the entirety of the game mechanics introduced in the first few hours of gameplay. Yeah, some of it is familiar. Some of it is not. Exiting power armor, for example, is a totally new thing and requires pressing and holding ‘E’/Enter, which are ordinarily the “confirm/go deeper into a menu hierarchy” buttons. Haha! Also the afformentioned “wait, I need to correct generators and powered things with wires. Where are the wires again?” scenario.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable for people to find method #3 a bit involved/busy work even without scrapping (you still have to go drop what is potentially a lot of junk). If you are a “if it’s not bolted down pick it up” sort of person, you will be filling up on junk somewhat rapidly and need to dump it somewhere.
