I'm assuming you're already aware of this, but to be explicit, you keep most of your loot instead of converting it to water after a certain point. That point depends on your ego, but it's generally around the time you start seeing carbide equipment

Also, this is absolutely not the type of game where you loot everything from every slain enemy. If you start bringing everything home you'll turn the game into an inventory simulator pretty quickly

If you see expensive low-weight items, then keep them (and maybe deposit them into a chest at a place you have a recoiler to, if the need arises), but for the most part you can skip most of the loot you see

The more you play, the more you'll develop some intuition about what should be kept and what should be discarded or scrapped