The Cyberpunk 2077 Perk You Should Absolutely Avoid

There are a lot of perks you can buy for your character in Cyberpunk 2077, allowing you to customize your version of V to fit your play style and the ways you want to approach the game. There's one perk, however, that you should absolutely avoid--at least in the early part of the game when you're trying to earn money. That perk is called "Scrapper," and it will rob you.

You'll find the Scrapper perk under the Technical Ability attribute, on the Crafting skill tree. At first, it sounds useful enough. Scrapper allows you to automatically break down junk items into crafting components. Cyberpunk 2077 is littered with things that are considered "junk," like old vinyl records, ashtrays, packs of cards, lighters, and dildos. (It's worth noting that a recent update seems to have drastically reduced the number of dildos appearing in the game. For a while, though, there were so. many. dildos.)

Most of the junk items you find in Night City really are junk, and if you check them out in your Backpack, you'll find that they're pretty worthless. Most junk items will net you about 3 Eurodollars (or "eddies" in Night City parlance), so they're basically not worth the effort you'd expend in picking them up and lugging them to a vendor to unload them. Along that line, you might think Scrapper sounds great, since you can instantly break down junk you don't actually want, and that way it's not littering your backpack, weighing down your character (in a literal sense, because if you become over-encumbered by the stuff you're carrying, you won't be able to move quickly).

You'd be wrong, though, because Scrapper will steal money for you, especially during a time when earning money is very important.

Although it's rare, you'll occasionally find junk items worth a lot more than 3 eddies. Some pieces of jewelry that you can loot off enemies or find scattered in buildings are classified as junk, but they're extremely valuable, going for 750 eddies if you can sell them. Since Cyberpunk calls those items junk, they get automatically disassembled same as an ashtray or a dildo, and all those eddies vanish for a handful of super-cheap crafting materials. Especially in Act 1 and the first half of Act 2, eddies are pretty important--you'll need to save up quite a bit, as there's a story mission that requires you to pay a hefty sum, more than 20,000 eddies, to advance it.

Most cyberware enhancements are also pretty expensive, and you'll want the eddies for those. Cyberware changes how Cyberpunk 2077 plays pretty significantly--for instance, buying the ability to double jump opens up a huge number of otherwise-unreachable options throughout Night City.

Meanwhile, the Scrapper perk is next to useless. You can safely ignore crafting much of the time in Cyberpunk, unless you really want to lean into it. Even if you do, however, the crafting materials you get from junk aren't really that useful. So this is a perk that mostly does more harm than good, but you wouldn't know that until after you've unlocked it.

So save your perk points and get something better than Scrapper. It might sound like it'll save you some time, but it'll actually rob you of an easy way to earn some quick cash. The costs of this perk far outweigh the benefits.

We've got a whole lot more Cyberpunk 2077 coverage to help you through the game as well--be sure to read our Cyberpunk 2077 review, and check out our essential tips, character attributes and build guide, romance guide, life path guide, and our rundowns of where to find iconic weapons and the game's best cyberware.