Salvaging

Salvaging a Debris Field

Salvaging, often done with the Scavenge ability, is a way of obtaining commodities (usually supplies, fuel, metals, weapons.

While this doesn't particularly make a lot of Credits, it does allow the recouping of supplies & fuel either during exploration or after combat.

On rare occasions, salvaging will net the player rare items such as blueprints, AI Cores or even special colony items.

Salvaging effectiveness

Salvaging effectiveness increases the drop rate of common loot like commodities & weapons but not rare loot.

Factors that increases salvaging effectiveness are:

Factor	Effect
Base effectiveness	25%
Heavy Machinery requirement met	Up to 75%
Crew requirement met	Up to 1x
Salvaging skill	50%
Containment Procedures skill	50% more Fuel
Fleetwide salvaging bonus (Salvage Gantry)	+10% (Shepherd) +25% (Salvage Rig)
Debris field density	Varies, up to x1
Easy difficulty modifier	1.5x

Crew & Heavy Machinery requirements

The amount of Crew & Heavy Machinery needed to effectively salvage a target varies.

Target	Crew	Heavy Machinery
Derelict Ship	30	10
Debris Field (unstable ~ created after combat/salvaging)	30	10
Debris Field (stable ~ pre-generated)	30 - 150	10 - 50
(Minor) Supply Cache	30	10
(Minor) Weapon Cache	30	10
(Minor) Equipment Cache	30	10
Domain-Era Probe	100	30
Domain-Era Survey Ship	170	60
Derelict Mothership	300	100
Orbital Habitat	100	30
Research Station	100	30
Mining Station	100	30
Scattered Ruins	100	30
Widespread Ruins	170	60
Extensive Ruins	230	80
Vast Ruins	300	100

Debris Fields

Stable Debris Fields are debris fields that are generated as part of the Sector generation, and will remain on the System map when discovered.

Unstable Debris Fields can be created in a variety of ways, most commonly after defeating a large enough fleet in System space (debris fields cannot generate in Hyperspace).

Unstable Debris Fields will also be generated after exploring & looting the following targets:

• Domain-Era Probe
• Domain-Era Survey Ship
• Derelict Mothership
• Orbital Habitat
• Mining Station
• Research Station

It is highly recommended to salvage unstable debris fields generated by such structures as it shares a similar drop pool as said structure, so it is possible to obtain rare items from such debris fields.

Additional modifiers

See also Salvage Generation and Drop Groups page.

The following values in settings.json determine the value of the randomly generated loot for post-battle salvage:

"salvageValuePerFP":300,
"salvageFractionCreditsMin":0.1,
"salvageFractionCreditsMax":0.25,
"salvageCargoFraction":0.75,
"salvageDebrisFieldFraction":0.25,
"minSalvageValueForDebrisField":1000,

Weapons and hullmods have their own salvage probability multipliers:

"salvageOwnWeaponProb":1;
"salvageOwnWingProb":1;
"salvageWeaponProb":0.25;
"salvageWingProb":0.25;
"salvageHullmodProb":0.02;

Notably, weapons and fighter wings from own ships are always 100% recoverable.

Change history

0.9

• Reworked Salvaging mechanics:
  • "Salvage rating" no longer a player-facing stat; still affects crew/machinery needed
  • Removed "blow it up" option as it's no longer relevant
  • Salvaging skill provides up to a 50% bonus to finding resources and rare items
  • Recovery of resources is affected by:
    • Having enough crew (multiplier, 0 to 1)
    • Having enough heavy machinery (+0 to +100%)
    • Salvaging skill (up to +50%)
    • Salvage Rigs / other ships with salvaging capacity; diminishing returns for more ships
      • Ships must be at at least 10% combat readiness for bonus to apply
    • A fraction of the total bonus also applies to post-combat salvage
  • Recovery of rare items is only affected by the Salvaging skill
    • Not affected by not having enough crew, machinery, or any other modifiers
  • Goals are:
    • Clean up the flow by removing the "blow up then scavenge" option
    • Allow player to specialize in getting a lot more value out of it
    • Ensure that salvaging something will not feel like a wasted opportunity due to missing out on likely-otherwise-inaccessible items such as blueprints
    • Give Salvaging skill long-term value - it grants access to 50% more stuff that would otherwise be hard or impossible to get
    • Make salvaging without the skill but with Salvage Rigs a viable option, both in terms of rare items and resources gained
    • When exploring a ship wreck, added notification when there's cargo on board
  • During salvage, when finding information about the location of another entity of interest nearby:
    • Will no longer point to small derelict ships, only cruisers and larger
    • This also means that more of these will point to other, larger structures
    • (Since no longer diluting the pool of potential targets with larger number of chaff)
• Increased number of crew recovered from "cryopods with crew" exploration special

Up to date for latest version, 0.97a.