Board derelict ships and abandoned stations. Strip hulls for materials, recover lost technology, piece together flight logs that tell stories of what happened out here. Every wreck is a time capsule. Some hold secrets worth more than scrap.
Salvaging is the art of turning forgotten wreckage into valuable resources and knowledge. The star map is littered with derelict ships, abandoned outposts, and debris fields from eras long past. Each one holds materials, components, and data waiting to be recovered.
Unlike mining, which is predictable and systematic, salvage is driven by discovery. A routine hull-stripping job might reveal an intact nav computer with coordinates to an uncharted system. A corroded cargo bay might contain prototype components that went missing decades ago. The value of a salvage run is never certain until the work is done.
Two primary approaches exist. Hull stripping extracts raw materials from the outside of a wreck, steady and reliable. Interior exploration means boarding the derelict to recover components, data cores, and flight logs from within. The real finds are always inside.
Four ways to pull value from a wreck — from safe hull-stripping to the deep finds buried inside.
Use salvage lasers from your ship to scrape materials off wreck exteriors. Density indicators show material richness across the hull surface. Yields recycled composites, raw metals, and structural alloys. Safe, predictable, and a good baseline income.
Dock with a derelict and explore its corridors. Search compartments, access terminals, open sealed cargo bays. Environmental hazards like hull breaches and power failures add challenge. The deeper into the wreck, the better the finds.
Extract intact ship components: engines, power cores, navigation modules, life support units. These are worth far more than raw scrap. Recovered components can be installed on your own ships or sold at stations for premium prices.
Access ship computers and flight recorders to recover data cores, encrypted logs, and navigation charts. Some data reveals hidden locations on the star map. Some fills in gaps in the historical record. Some is sought after by factions willing to pay handsomely.
From scattered drift debris to ancient wrecks that predate any known faction.
Scattered wreckage from old shipping accidents and decommissioned vessels. Common materials, easy to strip. Found along major travel corridors. Good for building up a stockpile of basic materials without much effort.
Abandoned vessels drifting in open space. Intact enough to board and explore. May contain cargo left behind, personal effects, flight logs. Each one raises the question: what happened to the crew? The logs sometimes answer that.
Entire outposts left to decay. Multiple sections to explore, with storage bays, research labs, and command centers. Larger finds, more data to recover. These sites take multiple trips to fully salvage.
Ships and structures from the earliest days of expansion, or older. The technology inside is outdated but historically significant. Occasionally, something is found that does not match any known manufacture. Builder artifacts have been recovered from the oldest wrecks.
Every derelict tells a story. Flight logs record the final days and hours of a crew. Cargo manifests reveal what they were carrying and where they were headed. Personal terminals hold messages that were never sent. Salvage is as much archaeology as it is resource gathering.
Some wrecks are straightforward: engine failure, navigational error, systems decay over decades of drift. Others raise questions that the logs do not fully answer. Ships found far from any charted route. Stations abandoned in apparent haste with systems still running. Cargo bays emptied of everything except one sealed container nobody could open.
And then there are the ancient wrecks. Ships so old their design language predates any known faction. Hulls made from alloys that modern refineries cannot reproduce. Components that still function despite centuries of exposure to vacuum. The Builders left traces everywhere, and the oldest wrecks are where those traces surface most often.
Three vessels scale from a cheap entry-point scavenger to an industrial reclaimer.
A small ship with a basic salvage laser and tractor beam. Can strip hull materials and tow small debris. Limited cargo space but fast and cheap to run. The entry point for salvage work.
Purpose-built salvage vessel with cutting lasers, expanded cargo bays, and a docking collar for boarding derelicts. The standard tool for serious salvage operations. Can process wreckage on-site for more efficient hauling.
Industrial-grade salvage platform with massive cargo capacity and a built-in processing bay. Can break down entire wrecks systematically. Expensive to operate, but a single run on a large derelict can fund operations for days.