Scavenge

Scavenging is like dumpster diving, only better. It relies on senses and endurance. Scavenging takes four forms:

Hacking up corpses

The first is hacking up the corpses you might come across in your travels. With a blade type weapon you can cut <part> from <corpse> to obtain body or other parts, though using a butcher's knife is recommended. The butcher command moves all the corpse's body parts into your inventory. For instance

cut skin from crackhead
cut penis from crackhead
cut head from crackhead
cut boob from Propecia
butcher Propecia

Finding hidden items and hidden exits

The second use for scavenging is looking for items or secret passages in your surroundings. The higher your scavenge skill, the better you will be at finding hidden paths and objects. To do a search of your surroundings, simply type

search

You can scavenge (or search) just about anywhere. If and what you find depends on where you are. In the streets of FC, for instance, you can find things like pogs, ashtrays, and religious tracts (among other things). The streets of gangland will yield cinder blocks, syringes, piles of scrap wood, crowbars, and even severed heads.

A list of stuff you can find in places can be found here.

A popular spot for scavenging is the Sharpton Projects in gangland (marked SH on the map). In the projects you can find many useful items for crafting. Almost any component for a rifle can be found there as well as electronics equipment, spraypaint, and even lengths of springsteel.

The JunkRat mutation will help determine what you can find by using the 'sniff' command.

Vor starts sniffing around the room, poking her nose in every nook and cranny.
You think you could find tracts here.

Breaking items down

The third use for scavenging is to break down items into their core components. It will help greatly to have a schematic to work from and to be in the same room as the bench the item would be made on. However, you'll want the schematic in your inventory, not in the bench. The higher your skill at scavenge, the better chance you will have at not destroying the item utterly, and the more of its raw materials you can retrieve.

break AK-7

Mining

The fourth use for scavenge is in the mines located in Mountain Pass, Tortuga Island and Ashen Valley, where scavenge affects the products of your labors (Mining is just fancy scavenging). A form of mining also occurs in Panopticon Prison. Mining is an effective way of grinding scavenge.

Other ways to grind scavenge

You can also grind scavenge using a particular weapon, the rusty can opener.