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 butt from crackhead cut boob from Propecia butcher Propecia
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 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. There are many other great places to scavenge in. A list of them and the stuff you can find is here.
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 many parts of the world - the Mountain Pass one being the first that most players will run into.
You'll need a pickaxe as well as a light source. Some armor with decent beat protection (like tire armor), a few insta-casts and a bottle of Jooky might also be a good idea.
Before mining in new areas, make it a habit to appraise here - that way you'll see if the ceiling is about to collapse. Some tiles have support beams you can repair too.
Mining is both influenced by your Scavenge skill and fightstyle. Berserker and aggressive mine at 100%, normal at 75% and cautious/pacifist at 50% speed.
Other ways to grind scavenge
You can also grind scavenge using a particular weapon, the rusty can opener.
Commands
Simply use scavenge to start searching an area, it can yield various results - depending on what room you're in. First it looks for secret exits, then objects, geo-caches and so on.
You can also automatically discard items you find while searching. Type scavhate <item> for an item in your inventory to add it to your ignore list. Type unscavhate <item> to remove it. Scavhate by itself will show you the ignore list.