The question comes up because the game hands you a mallet and a room full of breakable furniture, and the obvious conclusion is that breaking is the point. It is half the point.
The loop, in the developers’ words
“Smash furniture for resources or feed them into the Grinder for gold.”
“Everything you haul back rebuilds your Outpost. Unlock interactive furniture, stat upgrades, rescued survivors, and stranger ways to survive.”
That is a fork, not a sequence. Every haul can become building resources or gold, and which you want depends on what your Outpost is short of — not on what the item is. If a room upgrade is blocking your progression, resources; if you are saving for gear, gold.
Why “scrap everything” is the wrong default
Before the advice, a note on where it comes from. The three rules in this section — that damage lowers value, that the glint marks what is worth carrying, and that there is no cart — are repeated consistently by players across the game’s discussions and guides. What we have not found is a single thread or video we can point you at as the origin, and the developers have published none of it. So they are labelled Community throughout, and you should treat them as the room’s working consensus rather than measured fact. Our sourcing policy explains why we would rather say that than dress it up.
Community The consistent player report is that damaging an item lowers what it pays. Smashing is how you uncover loot and clear space, but the object you actually came for should reach the elevator intact.
So the working rule is: break the room, not the payload.
Read the glint
Community Value is signalled visually. Items that shine are worth more than plain furniture, in roughly three tiers of brightness — plain, glinting, strongly glinting.
That is as precise as the honest version gets. The developers have published no per-item values, and every site quoting exact gold figures is auto-generated with numbers that contradict each other. We keep the tier rules on the loot tool page, including why the item table there is empty on purpose.
There is no cart
Community Hauling is done with empty containers found in the level. There is no wheelbarrow and no carry upgrade that solves the problem for you, which makes the route you take through a floor a bigger factor than how much you can hold.
The elevator is the actual save button
“Extract with Treasures, Items & Vessels in the Elevator”
Community Players put the practical version more plainly: “anything loaded on the elevator comes home with you, even loose gear, furniture, constructs.”
Treat the elevator as storage from the moment you find something good. Carrying a valuable item around while you keep exploring risks it — and risks you, since your hands are full when the Corrupted arrive.
Two things that changed in the patches
Both are worth knowing because older guides predate them.
- Items owned by a player who leaves a session are no longer destroyed — they are “dropped on the ground or moved to the lost and found crate.”
- Vessels can now sit on all balconies “without taking any fire damage.”
A bug preventing players from picking up “coins or the fuse in some boxes in the deep layers” was fixed twice, in 1.01 and again in 1.02. If you played on release week and concluded certain boxes were empty, they were not.
The short version
- Smash to find, not to farm. Damage costs you value.
- Glint decides what leaves intact.
- Resources or gold is a question about your Outpost, not about the item.
- Load the elevator early and often.
- No cart exists, so plan the route.