Salvage

Salvage turns debris into RMC, which no recipe uses yet but future blueprints will, and disintegration is meant to yield processed materials matching what the ship was made of, with some loss.

Thorsten says industrial loops like mining and salvage already work and are improving, with crafting set to tie them together and base building later; whether they're fun is left to each player.

The Salvation's salvage heads are locked and forgiving because it's a starter ship meant to introduce salvage without added complexity, and locked bespoke versions let the team tune them if they underperform.

Mining will be split into bespoke rocks per resource and separate FPS, ground vehicle and ship deposits, while salvage will yield ship construction materials that can be separated, though that approach is still being decided.

A dedicated salvage visor is still at concept stage, intended to give extra detail on salvageable objects, while players without it will rely on their weapon's screen.

Some missions are already rebalanced under the new system while others still carry old designer-set rewards; several mission types are getting bumps, the full rebalance will create a new normal, and it is ongoing work, not all in 3.24.

Yes, derelicts are being considered in tiers: fresh wrecks allow item removal and hull scraping, old ones likely only limited item removal and salvage, with inhabited ones still undecided.

Inhabited derelict Reclaimers already have lootable items, but mission-spawned ones can't yet spawn loot crates due to a dynamic-spawn limitation that Todd Papy wants to fix soon.

The first hand salvage is hull stripping, using a multi-tool or dedicated tool to burn material off a hull into a generic material usable for selling or repair, with separate materials and ship-scale salvage planned for later iterations.

Beams are used because current systems are very first implementations on the multi-tool, a simple interaction that keeps players in control and at range, with more detailed and complex mechanics planned later.

Selling ships back is the plan, possibly with hiding ASOP entries and scrapping at junk sites, but it won't be in the first iteration because ship persistence data needs extra caution.

Yes, they will use more shipwrecks as soon as they get them, but making walkable wrecks takes much more work than ships breaking up in-game.

Harvestable entities are currently just mining, but the tech is meant to spawn anything, such as fruit from plants or loot in derelicts, once things like personal inventory exist.

Designing for unimplemented features is tricky, so the team presents a few concept options, then reviews them in first and second passes where every discipline flags problems early, since later changes are very expensive.

At the first tier a salvaged fuel tank is just an item with its contents that you sell or convert, though special equipment like the Vulcan's drones might later salvage fuel separately.

Will Maiden doesn't know if existing derelicts will replenish boxes; they want players to discover and strip wrecks and will adjust depending on how often they're used, and destroyed ships also spill cargo.

Salvage will combine scrapping debris into raw materials and removing working parts to resell, with scanning to find the most valuable sections, scalable to groups of players or NPCs, and repair roughly the inverse process.

A human catapult for moving salvagers probably won't happen on the Caterpillar because of animation work, but some form of high-speed crew mobility is intended to stay as core gameplay.

Salvage design is still in progress, but the intent is that undamaged broken-off weapons can be collected and repaired later, though not attached to other ships; they would be scrapped.

Only the Reclaimer is purpose-built for salvage so far, the Caterpillar and Crucible can do light salvage, and more salvage ship concepts are being looked at, with more to come later.

Yes, the team says it is going to include encounters with hostile alien creatures on derelict ships and elsewhere, enabled by the first-person nature of the game and a mostly NPC-populated universe.

Salvage is seen as a resource mechanic for recovering material from battle wreckage and stripping working weapons from destroyed ships, with possible ship repair roles too, and salvagers could support organisations in combat.