One Man's Wreck
Salvaging is the art of turning disaster into profit. Destroyed ships, abandoned stations and debris fields are full of valuable materials and components.
Unlike mining (pure resource gathering), salvage is unpredictable. You might find junk — or you might find a prototype weapon, a classified data core, or something that was supposed to stay buried.
Two modes: Hull Stripping (materials from outside, safe, steady) and Interior Boarding (go inside for components and data, dangerous, high reward).
Strip It Down
Use salvage lasers from your ship to scrape materials off wreck hulls. Color indicators show material density: blue = rich, yellow = moderate, red = depleted. Yields Recycled Composites and raw metals.
Dock with the wreck and go inside on foot. Top-down ARPG gameplay — explore corridors, loot containers, hack terminals, fight whatever is still active inside (malfunctioning drones, security systems, worse).
Find and extract intact ship components — weapons, shields, engines, nav computers. These are worth far more than raw materials. Rare components are used to upgrade your own ships.
Hack into ship computers and flight recorders. Recover data cores, encrypted logs, navigation charts. Some data is valuable to factions, some unlocks hidden locations on the star map, some is part of the main story.
What's Out There
Aftermath of NPC fleet battles. Safe, common materials. Respawns regularly. Good steady income.
Abandoned vessels drifting in space. Medium risk — may have active security or environmental hazards. Interior boarding possible. Better loot.
Massive ships like The Carthage. Dungeon-level content. Multiple decks, boss encounters, unique loot. Group recommended.
Wrecks near the Anomaly Zone. Reality distortion effects, unknown organisms, Builder-tech fragments. Highest tier salvage — and the most dangerous.
What You Find
Raw salvage is predictable — metals, composites, scrap. But the real value is in what you can't predict.
A data core from a Nexus Corp research vessel. A weapon prototype that Calloway thought they destroyed. A flight recorder from a ship that vanished 80 years ago. Builder fragments embedded in a hull that shouldn't exist.
Every wreck tells a story — and some stories are worth killing for.
Salvage Ships
Your starter salvage equipment. Handheld hull scraper and basic scanner. Slow but free. Works on small debris.
Dedicated salvage vessel. Tractor beams, cutting lasers, cargo for stripped materials. Can dock with derelicts for boarding. The standard salvager.
Industrial-grade salvage ship. Can process entire wrecks. Massive cargo capacity. Built-in refinery for on-site processing. Expensive but prints money.