In Outriders, there are two ways to dispose of your unwanted gear: dismantling and selling. To dismantle gear, you just need to open your inventory, highlight all of your old gear, and click the dismantle button at the bottom of your screen. Selling gear is just as simple, provided you're in a town or camp with a vendor. While these processes may seem similar, the resulting materials you earn serve vastly different purposes. Whether you should dismantle or sell your gear is a tricky question, and the answer will change throughout the course of the game and depending on what it is you hope to accomplish. If you're early on in Outriders, you may not be sure what to do with your junk gear. Here are the major differences between dismantling and selling, as well as the best uses for each method.
What Do You Get From Dismantling And Selling Gear?
When you Dismantle your gear from your inventory, you're going to get a variety of resources. When you dismantle any white, green, or blue weapons, you'll get a pile of iron based on the strength of the item. Meanwhile, dismantling white, green, or blue armor provides some amount of leather. When you dismantle purple or legendary gear, you'll instead get titanium. Iron, leather, and titanium are crafting materials that are used to level up, swap variants, modify, and improve the rarity of your gear.
Additionally, dismantling a piece of blue, purple, or legendary gear will give you access to that item's mods. Anytime you dismantle a piece of gear with a new mod, you can visit Dr. Zahedi and slot those mods into other pieces of gear. Mods only need to be unlocked once and then you will have access to them forever.
Dismantling armor rewards one additional material: shards. Every time you dismantle a piece of gear, you will receive shards based on the specific attributes of that piece. These shards, which represent attributes like Status Power, Max Health, and Crit Damage, can then be spent on other pieces of gear to increase their individual attributes.
When you sell gear, no matter who you sell it to, you will receive scrap in return. Higher rarity gear rewards more scrap, but it there are no other resources that come from selling gear beyond scrap. Scrap can then be used to buy gear.
When Should You Sell Your Gear And When Should You Dismantle It?
When considering what to do with your gear, it's important to consider where you're at in the game and what your goals are. The in-game economy changes dramatically after you complete the campaign, so you may end up changing what you do with your gear after you finish the story.
One factor to consider regardless of whether you've finished the campaign or not is your unlocked mods. When you look at a piece of gear, you can determine at a glance whether you've unlocked its mods or not. If the gear has a mod you've already unlocked, you'll see a square symbol with a cross on it. That symbol tells you that it's safe to sell the gear rather than dismantle it. If you don't see the symbol, it's highly recommended that you dismantle the gear so that you will unlock the mod to be used in other gear. This will apply to the vast majority of gear you find while leveling up because there are around 200 mods to find an unlock.
Throughout the campaign, it's usually better the dismantle your gear rather than sell it. While the crafting materials you receive for dismantling this gear won't be particularly useful to you throughout the campaign, you'll be glad to have a stockpile of shards, iron, titanium, and leather once you start upgrading your gear in the end game. You could sell your junk for scrap and buy more powerful gear from vendors while leveling, but gear cycles out so fast during the leveling process that it would be a total waste. Whether you sell or dismantle while leveling, you're better off hoarding the materials you get either way.
Once you finish the campaign, things shift a bit in favor of selling. While you still need crafting materials to upgrade, Selling gear is more profitable because you can trade scrap for titanium and trade titanium for Drop Pod Resources, the new end-game resource.
Drop Pod Resources can be used to purchase legendary weapons with unique Tier 3 mods, so it's in your best interest to save up and buy these items when you see mods that you want. You'll earn some amount of Drop Pod Resources every time you finish an Expedition, but if you want to expedite the process you can sell all of your gear and convert the scrap into additional Drop Pod Resources. If you use this method, you'll still want to dismantle all your purple items because this will give you more Titanium than selling and converting would.
Simply put, dismantle purples or rarer and anything with a mod you still need, otherwise, sell your junk and convert the scrap to Drop Pod Resources.