Where can I obtain lots of ammo?

I struggled with ammo in the beginning and found that once you don't scrap any and all things you find and instead trade with vendors, you will get much more ammo than by just relying on finding ammo in the field.

I do not have Scrounger, so maybe that would have made looting ammo more reliable.

what i did in the beginning was find a camp of easy to kill raiders (near a town) and loot everything i can find and suffer with being over encumbered until i can make it back to town and sell all of it. not an issue anymore after getting the "strong back" perk.

You just to keep progressing into the game. For me, I found more ammo the farther out I went. As well, try to use melee weapons as much as you. If you are a settlement builder/sweeper, it'd be pointless to waste all of your bullets on Mole Rats or Ghouls. Just keep on playing the game, and you'll do fine✌

There is a better way, I think it's easier to buy ammo from dealers or in diamond city market or you can make your own stores and assign someone for it then you can buy ammo from that

The main way that I hoarded ammo was by picking up dropped weapons from enemies or containers then returning them. By placing them into your inventory, all of the ammo inside them is added to your total. Removing the weapon, however, does not take the ammo back so your ammo stockpile keeps increasing.

I've made at least a dozen characters at this point, playing through the game multiple times on various difficulty settings with all kinds of character builds: semi-auto pistols, semi-auto rifles, melee weapons, no-VATS sniper, high-luck, low-luck, high-stealth, low-stealth.

You can find ammo in lots of places. Just loot, loot, loot. Some places to look that might not be obvious:

1. Flat orange tool boxes. These sometimes contain a bunch of ammo instead of crafting materials.

2. Super mutant gore bags. Mutants like meat and ammo. You will find both of these things in their bags made of meat.

3. Locked safes. Pretty much always ammo in these.

4. Feral ghoul corpses. Yes, that ghoul was carrying .50 caliber ammo. No, I don't know what he planned on doing with it.

The only time I've ever had any issue with running out of ammo is on my current playthrough, which is on Very Hard using Commando (automatic rifles and pistols). Automatic weapons burn through ammo, as each shot does significantly less damage, VATS fires bursts whether you need the extra shots or not, and one usually ends up firing shots outside of VATS, wasting ammo on misses.

Even then, though, it's easy enough to supplement my ammunition supply by buying some. Vendors with ammo are all over. Junk vendors (Carla, Myrna, Trudy, etc) usually have some, and of course weapons vendors (Arturo, KL-E-O) have plenty.

So, in my opinion, if you're having ammo problems, you're probably using too much, rather than not finding enough. You can conserve ammo in various ways:

1. Use semi-automatic weapons. Sounds like you're already doing this. These do much more damage per shot, so you have to fire less rounds. They also let you control your fire better, missing and wasting less shots.

2. Use VATS. If the enemy is at all close to you, you'll probably land more shots in VATS than out of it. Every critical shot hits, even through walls or at extreme range.

3. Use crits. Crits are auto-hit, and do tremendous damage. Use luck and luck perks to generate more crits.

4. Improve your weapons. More damage per shot means less shots total. More accuracy means less wasted shots. You don't need crafting perks to improve weapons. Pay attention to loot and weapons in shops for mods you can remove and attach to your own weapons.

5. Let your follower get kills. A follower with a good base weapon, like Danse, can fire effectively forever. Giving them a melee weapon works for followers with crappy base weapons, like Piper.

6. Use a melee weapon. This should be self-explanatory. I made a melee character on survival that can kill an on-level sentry bot with one sneak attack, or two to three non-sneak attacks. She only carries one gun (Kellog's pistol) and almost never uses it.

7. Use multiple weapons with different ammo requirements. If you're always finding .38 ammo, keep a weapon on you that uses it. You can kill mole rats and other stupid stuff with it, saving the good ammo, then switch to your real gun when you need it.

8. Use explosives. These do huge damage. Get Demolition Expert 2 so you can see a throwing arc for grenades. This lets you accurately place grenades among groups of enemies, so that you don't have to waste a bunch of ammo on all of them. You can fire 100 rounds into a mirelurk's shell, or save the ammo by dropping one frag mine and killing two of them.

9. Shoot weak spots. Many enemies have spots that are more vulnerable to damage than other spots. It's usually the head. Not always, though. Most robots have heads that are stronger than their torsos. You can determine which spot takes more damage by checking the size of the flashing damage segment on each limb in VATS.

If you waste less ammo, then the amount you find should be enough.

What you need is the scrounged perk. I used that at lvl 18 and I had 3000+ ammo!

Get the nuke-world DLC and when you start clearing different parts of nuka-world they will give you a rifle with a bunch of ammo to go with it. The market is also a great place to find ammo because there are some ammo boxes there that contains ammo and you can take it not steal it.

I suggest using a melee weapon like a machete or tire pipe to conserve ammo. Sure, you have to get up close and personal, but it's quite simple to dodge or block attacks. To find ammo, I suggest looting raider outposts. You'll usually get around 50-200 .38 rounds depending on the size of the outpost. Any loot you can find (like weapons, armor, food, or chems) can be sold and used to buy ammo. The more loot you find, the more you have to carry. To this, I suggest bringing a companion (if you haven't already) and focus on the strong back perk. I also suggest getting the cap collected perk as it lowers prices and expands a traders buying capacity, and locksmith as it allows you to get any good loot locked away. And as other people have said before, the scrounge perk is useful for getting more amounts of ammo, so it's a good perk to have.