Star Citizen Salvage – What We Know
welcome to some more Star Citizen, we have had some more information on Salvage Gameplay Plans as well as supporting systems that are currently being worked on from the Calling All Devs – The Road to Salvage.
Salvage is broken down into 4 different types:
Hull Scraping – removing the outer materials of a ship
Valuable Component Removal – Done by hand or via tractor beam
The Maw – Which is more like recycling the larger pieces of a ship and breaking it down.
Syphoning – the collection of precious gases like oxygen, liquids, fuels & even data.
There are various pre-requisites of those salvage mechanics some are being worked on now, others are planned.
Damage Tech will need some updates to reflect salvage mechanics.
Persistence work is required to have salvage sites spawn and have the correct information and materials attributed to each ship.
They need to create the actual tools for hull scraping.
Physicalized Component Tech is needed to allow for components to actually be removed. This is also part of the Repair mechanics, taking items out, fixing and/or replacing them.
The Maw type salvage they need to work out how to break the ships up into a state that can then be tackled and harvested by something like a Reclaimer, salvage charges might be an option to blast a ship into smaller salvage chunks.
Syphoning requires the room system to work correctly to allow for the atmosphere or contents or a container to be extracted. They also need to make sure that these systems work and can get oxygen and atmosphere moving around for Life Support to function.
Fuel tanks need and entry point for extracting or refueling.
The Updated Power Systems are being worked on now as is work on Physicalized Components.
This will have power move correctly between systems and pipes/connectors and fuses. It’s actually power and a few systems merged together called Resource Generation And Item Control (RGIC).This is important not only for ships and vehicles but also stations and structures. The new system looks after all resources, power, fuel, ammo or anything else that can be used, consumed or converted by a vehicle and their movement between systems too. Some components will generate or convert resources, some consume. It’s WYSIWYG for devs and players. This is going to make engineering as a role incredibly important as ships will quickly have a chain of failures is a vital system or connector goes down. The Design is done, they have done some prototyping and are working on the technical documentation for the system making sure it’s scaleable and appropriate, once approved they will start bring it fully to life.
There are 100s of Vehicle Items being completed and physicalized.
Ships have been being made ready for physical items with appropriate cupboards and item lockers.
Currently items shown in ships are “faked” in various ways.
Some items that are internal to a ship are actually technically outside of the ship or at least the system thinks they are.
Actually having the items in ships & having internal and external vehicle systems being able to communicate with each other.
You will be able to change items in a ship and this will have an effect in real time and it is also part of both repair and salvage as I said earlier.
It will take a while to get all the items in all the ships tho… as there are lots.
They said that Scheduled for Next Quarter (that would be July to September) is more work for Physicalized Components, tho they didn’t say if it was intended to be completed then or would take more quarters.
They will then figure out plans for hull scraping. They were trying to work out whether it was sensible to have hull scraping and physical components released at the same time to have salvage as a more developed system OR to have them separately as the systems come on line. They will continue to then iterate and add to the mechanic in a similar way to mining.
They are literally working on it BUT there is no hard dates for when the systems will be completed. That said they should be able to give us meatier updates now so we can see progress much more readily on those mechanics.
Also I suspect that the first iteration of “salvage” we have will be the removal of physical components by hand and then have Hull Scraping a little bit later and that makes sense more chronologically to me at least.