Give me some specifics [on the Alpha 3.19 salvage missions]: what was the thing you had to create?

Yeah, so the introduction of the mission giver mission into that. We've been doing a lot of work to just be really on top of which mission givers could use additional content. We're going to get to do a lot of stuff with salvage, particularly in this case. If someone else wants to take it, I feel weird being in the spotlight.

I mean, one interesting thing that I think we worked on between narrative and design is this idea of these early missions as salvaging is matured, because it's still a tier zero, newer system, not fully as robust as where we want it to go eventually. We were talking to them about, all right, what is the end of the mission? Are the players returning the recycled material composite? And that was feeling sort of weird, in that why would this mission giver care about collecting a big pile of scrap material? And so then it sort of evolved through our conversations with them into, oh, maybe they're selling you the rights to a location. And so the missions themselves are more like buying the rights to the location of a ship for you to salvage. Whereas, of course, players can go out and find their own salvage. But sometimes it simplifies it: if you're willing to drop some credits, we'll give you an exact location of a ship totally ripe for collecting materials, and you get to keep all the profits after that. So that was something that had a little bit of back and forth that we helped influence, of trying to figure out why is this organization offering this mission? What do they want out of it? Does this make sense? And often we tweak stuff with them where they have multiple possible paths and we hone in on what feels best and what makes the most sense.

In that process, we ended up creating a new organization, Adagio, to handle more of the lawful salvage. And when we were figuring out new opportunities, we assigned the new mission giver salvage mission to Clovis Darneely, who will be handling that. And just breaking down, I know when MFT was on here, they talked about the three different kinds of salvage missions that there are, but there's going to be more than just those three that we're building and working towards, and hopefully salvage will continue to develop beyond that, just because it's a really fun gameplay loop and it has a ton of cool opportunities. I mean, just the introduction of the soft death mechanics, I think, does fundamentally change things in the verse. And so seeing that supported with narrative mission content and procedural mission content, I think, is really exciting to me.

There's also the introduction of the new outlaw group, the Tar Pits, coming in, where they have a fun little backstory. TAR stands for Tow and Rescue, and they're known for using fake tow ships to trick people and attack them or steal their ship when they're pretending to be a tow company. And so they're basically selling you salvage rights locations because they have too much work on their hands. They can't handle it all themselves. And so they're giving you an opportunity to buy one off them, kind of thing. And there's more risk in the locations they sell and stuff like that. So it's interesting.

So not only do we have players using service beacons to lure and trap people, now we have NPC organizations that are like, yeah, we're coming to help you, and we're not.

Not in gameplay yet, but thematically that's kind of the idea, to keep you on your toes.