Ship Salvage Guide

Here we'll review how to scrape, fracture, and disintegrate ships with your salvager. To begin, you'll need:

• A salvage ship (RSI Salvation, Drake Vulture, etc.)

• Handheld tractor beam for moving boxes

• Food and water

The easiest way to get started with salvage it to take one of the salvage rights contracts. If you're just starting out, you'll only have one to choose from. After you complete this mission, you'll have a wider selection available to you. All the salvage rights contracts charge a fee, so these aren't ideal for maximizing profits, but they're the easiest way to quickly find wrecks you can salvage and learn the ropes.

Once you have paid for the mission it will show under your ACCEPTED tab. Note - there is NO reward for completing this mission. All of the payout comes from the materials you collect, so make the most of it!

If you have the space, collecting the weapons and components from the ship before you salvage it is a great way to make extra money! EVA over, and sit in the pilot's seat then use [right alt] + [k] to unlock the weapon and component ports on the entire ship so you can pull them with your tractor beam

*S3 components cannot be moved by tractor beam. Only S0, S1, S2 and components can be moved by players*

​Switch to the salvage operator mode with [middle mouse click].

Activate your scraper modules with [left click] and begin hull scraping by simply getting close to the wreck and pointing at it (be careful not to run into it!)

Scraping the hull yields you Recycled Material Composite (RMC), a very high quality and high value resource for you to sell for profit or use in crafting.

If your ship has two scraper modules (like the Vulture) you can move them closer or further apart with [scroll wheel]. The percentages in the circles on either side tell you how much of the scraping area still has hull material left. In the photo below, the left scraper is over an area of the ship that has 38% of the scraper's circle occupied by hull, and the right scraper has 15%.

As you scrape more of the hull the contract's completion bar will decrease, indicating how much hull material is left for you to scrape on the ship.

You do NOT have to fly your ship around just to aim the scraper beams, you can enable gimbals by pressing [G]. Turn gimbals off to lock the beams at that angle by pressing [G] again BUT BEWARE - this will cause your ship to begin turning in the direction of your mouse!! Press [left alt]+[G] to reset the gimbals back to center.

You can also toggle each salvage head on and off independently with [right alt]+[A] for the left and [right alt]+[D] for the right.

The contract will complete even if there is just a tiny bit of hull material left on the ship. As you can see in the photo below, there is still some hull left on the ship but the salvage claim has completed.  You can also abandon the contract at any time for no penalty should you decide you're finished with the wreck, even if there is material left. (You should fully complete your very first contract though to ensure you unlock the rest of the salvage claim missions afterwards).

While salvaging, your ship has an internal buffer that fills with the material you collect. You will have to periodically eject the material from the buffer and place it into your ship's storage. Certain ships have an automatic filler and ejection system that places your crates directly into an onboard storage rack (RSI Salvation or MISC Fortune) but others require you to manually move the boxes from the packaging station and onto the ship's cargo grid (Drake Vulture or Aegis Reclaimer).

Make sure your filler stations are ejecting boxes as you go! Any material collected after your buffer fills completely is lost!

​Regardless of the ship, the screens of the control panels are all similar - simply choose which material to eject and the ship will fill the box and eject it from the filler station. Use the auto-eject feature if you want the ship to automatically fill and eject boxes as you collect material. If there is not enough space for the filler station to eject the box then it will fill it but hold it inside, and the auto-ejection will pause. This is a great way to get *one* more box of material collected when the rest of your ship is already full ;)

Structural Salvaging

After you have finished scraping as much of the hull as you want, or there is nothing left to scrape, you can either abandon the wreck or move on to fracturing to perform structural salvage. This two step process of FRACTURING then DISINTEGRATING the ship will yield you one of these three materials:

• Rubble

• Pieces

• Salvage

Which material your ship collects during structural salvage depends on its size category (see the introduction page for more information). You can then refine these materials to produce Construction Material (CM) for sale or for use in crafting.

Some ships are better at structural salvage than others! For example, the RSI Salvation is so small that while it *can* perform structural salvage, doing so is NOT very efficient and it will fill your storage very quickly with much lower value material (when compared to RMC). Conversely, the Aegis Reclaimer is far less efficient at hull scraping, but yields Salvage material from structural salvage (the highest tier of the three) with particularly high efficiency.

To perform structural salvage, simply activate your fracturing field with [right alt]+[W] and aim at the ship. You will have to adjust your position and aim to get the green progress meter in the center completely full. The meter will increase or decrease depending how close you get to the "sweet spot".

Once the fracturing has completed the ship will break apart into several smaller sections. Deactivate your fracturing field with [right alt]+[W]

Approach one of the broken sections and activate your disintegration field with [right alt]+[S]. This is very similar to fracturing - adjust your position and aim point then hold there until the green meter fills entirely. You can usually get roughly a ~15% bonus to the disintegration speed in the "sweet spot".

You can leave your disintegration field powered on until you have finished disintegrating all of the sections of the ship you're looking to salvage. As you disintegrate a section it will disappear into a field of dust and flow towards your ship, automatically being collected into your ship's buffer. Make sure your filler stations are ejecting boxes! Any material collected that exceeds your buffer's available space is lost!

Turn off your disintegration field with [right alt]+[S]

After completing your first salvage claim mission you will have many more to choose from. Be sure to check the locations carefully before accepting the missions to avoid paying for a salvage claim on the other side of the star system! There WILL be others much closer to you to choose from.

Be aware that salvage ships are not all created equal - each can only fracture ships up to a certain size, so if you buy a larger (and more expensive) ship's salvage rights while using the RSI Salvation then you'll be able to scrape the hull, but not fracture it, cutting out a sizeable portion of the profit from the claim you paid for. Each salvage ship has different maximums for which ships it can fracture, and those are subject to change, so as you use your salvage ship more you will learn what you can and can't fracture.

Now that you've gotten the hang of salvaging with your ship you can either continue paying for salvage rights, or find salvage out in the verse! The easiest way to get ships to salvage without having to pay for claim rights is to partner with a friend who likes ship combat and have them "create" more salvage for you! They can accept PvE ship bounty missions and clean up all the enemies, then have you jump to their location and clean up the mess! (I recommend taking bounties in space, not in atmosphere, so you can salvage the ships more easily).

Once you're finished with your salvage session, or your ship's inventory has filled, it's time to unload!

Get all of the boxes off your ship (including ejecting those still in the buffer!) and loaded on the freight elevator. If you want to refine your rubble/pieces/salvage then head to a station with a Refinery (you will see REFINERY SERVICES listed under their amenities in the Star Map).