Salvage has turned into the ultimate powergamer role in the last couple of weeks, undertsandably so. You get one of (if not the) best eva suits available to crew, you’re practially allowed to collect and use contraband, and worst of all, you have a mini station with infinite air and power and security can’t even get to usually. I’ve seen people build mini science departments in the back of their reclaimers to make their own borgs. Autolathes and ammo fabs to produce guns and ammuntion for whatever reason. Participating in such levels of powergaming is completely unnecessary at best, and actively harmful to the gameplay experiece at worst.
In general salvage has had it too good with the QoL changes, and frankly I think the contributors went overboard with salvage content. I play salavge often and I really do enjoy the unique gameplay that the role provides, but it is at the cost of most others at the station. Most syndie salvagers will never complete their objectives (at least not on purpose) and will simply bide their time, collecting 10-40 TC worth of items from expeditions and wrecks, and use them to murderbone, or (more often than not) simply miss out on an oppurtinity to do quite literally anything before the shift is over. At this point all you have done is deny somebody else the ability to play a traitor and be genuinely disruptive (the thing you’re suppsed to be). But hey, at least you built an emagged protolathe. Great job.
I’ve seen people arguing that salvage should be removed outright, but I have a less harsh solution in mind.
1: Expeditions are too good for mining. Exped maps should be smaller (the non dungeon parts specifically, I don’t have a problem with the size of the dungeons themselves), and have less ore. Types of ore spawned should also depend on the type of planet you visit. An active volcanic region such as lava should have a lot gold and silver, but no uranium or salt for example. This would make it so salvage would have to go on multiple expeditions to mine a sufficient amount of ores. To counteract this expedition downtime should be drastically lowered to allow for more frequent but shorter, more focused expeditions.
2: The Reclaimer shouldn’t be an actual shuttle, it should be a stationary compartment, attached to the station that you can use to FTL, but nothing else. When I started playing SS14 salvage could only use the magnet to grab asteroids (later wrecks) and had to fly to them with jetpacks. This kind of magnet salvaging should be brought back to compensate for the loss of the shuttle. While I undertsand that the indepence and freedom granted to you by the Reclaimer is a very fun and engaging experience, it’s lately become way too easy to exploit for levels of unprecedented powergaming. Contrary to some others, I don’t think the “gamer loot” that salvage has easy access to is the root of the issue. If they didn’t have a shuttle that spends 90% of the shift hundreds of metres from the station where nobody could ever check on them they wouldn’t be able to abuse these items to such an extent.
I do agree that salvage being uninvolved with the station and making an independent paramilitary is, to put it in academic terms, cringe.
That said, I’m not entirely a fan of the first proposed change. Ideally, I would say you’d want impactful expeditions that give the station some resources and let salvage take a decent bit of time off after so they actually interact with the station. So a shorter downtime with worse expedition mining might not be the way to go about it.
Might even consider going another way, making full expeds rarer but have better loot (better for the station, not just better “gamer loot”), so they exist as a side thing salvage sometimes does to get a big break instead of the de facto default modus operandi.
The means by which salvage goes on expeditions being rethemed to some kind of lift or something similar to make it a permanent fixture of the station rather than a whole seasted shuttle is a bit of a buzzkill, but absolutely a reasonable idea of remedying the issues with salvage.
As a side note, asteroids should be viable and mining expeds shouldn’t be the prime method of getting ores.
I honestly don’t agree with this approach, i would prefer to make mining and exps a common job at anyone can do while salvage only does asteroids and wrecks rather at limiting the gameplay of a job at depends heavily on it for be fun while also increasing admin work as well (how would you even enforce this lrp, give salv the same standards at sec/command?).
And while i agree salv being self sustainable can be kinda bad it isn’t bad enough for do what DeltaV did, one way of avoiding this is stopping salv from taking the ore processors as that can actually fall into powergaming (no, no matter how much salv says it, they don’t really need the ore processor unless they really want to never go back to the station/ats). Other idea at comes to my mind for fix this would be increase the energy consumption of machines so shuttles in general can’t have a full factory without losing power. Hell once pirates are added salv will be a easy target if they never go to the station and that may nerf this strat too.
I’d like to express here that while this is a reasonable move, I’d like to note that Delta really went hard on the salvage hate and outright axed the shuttle with little to make up for it, so I really don’t think they are the best to be used as a model.
I’m gonna be honest, I completely forgot about the existance of minable asteroids. But I agree, making asteroid mining viable, and changing expeds to be more loot-focused would be a decent change.
Having the Ore Processor on the Salv ship is great, and should be taken every single shift. I can mine, and process all of the ore from one expedition. make all of the boxs I need, and Fulton enough mats to last the entire shift by the 8 minute mark.
Loot on expeds and debris should benefit the station not salvage alone. I think that could look like one-ofs of stuff Science can research, or even cool things they can’t research. Cloning is cool, what would analogous stuff for other departments look like?
Other loot should be for selling. Salvage used to be about filling the cargo shuttle with stuff to sell, and that was helpful to the station.
The problem I see with having salvage make shuttle is that we had before the reclaimer, and they spent all round making shuttles instead of making money.
I remember the old argument for letting salvage find gamer loot was that they needed an incentive to do their job. Remember when expeditions gave guaranteed loot on completion of an objective? Their gameplay became rolling for a katana reward or something and not doing their job anyway. Current expeditions have unknown loot, but it’s still gambling.
It seems that if you turn the role into an opportunity for players to gamble for loot or build shuttles, we’re just going to get players who only want to do those things to sign up for the role. Conversely, if we give players the opportunity to only do their job, then we’re going to get players who want to do their job. The other departments are like this, and they have their issues, but I don’t think anyone suggested handing out katanas to scientists for completing the nodes on an artifact, for example.
I feel the main issue with Salvage is that using a shuttle is just inherently a disconnected and independent thing. You can simply be far more efficient at your job if you just make your shuttle into a miniature station, because it’s a long process going back and forth.
When/if Lavaland becomes a thing with public mining, I wager a lot of these problems will disappear.
if we end up removing the shuttle, i’d love to see a sort of “asteroid magnet” that lets you drag the asteroid closer to the salvage bay, or into a salvage garage you make.
this shouldn’t be round start, make it expensive so salvage will need to mine if they want one.
(also the ‘draggability’ should probably be determined by grid size, so like if the astroid is larger than the grid that the “asteroid magnet” is on, then the “asteroid magnet” 's grid will be dragged to the asteroid instead of the asteroid getting dragged to the magnet’s grid… if that makes sense)
and on the topic of mining, I think the reason that expedition mining is probably so prevalent is both that it’s easier and in my opinion feels better.
Current asteroid mining to me feels slow, sluggish, and satisfyingly. Which to me is due to ore being so spread out on asteroids making it hard to find. With this and the fact that you don’t instantly break the ore and rocks make the whole asteroid mining slow and slugging to me.
Compare that to expedition mining, where ore is easy to find, and fast to mine making it more satisfying for me.
My solution to this would be to increase the amount of ore on asteroids, or make them smaller, and make the rocks easier to mine or give us an unlock-able tool that makes them easier to mine(yes i know the drill exists, but that still has the same problem of not feeling satisfying to me).
but with this, I’m not saying to remove asteroids having specialized contents, i don’t have a problem with that, it’s just the distribution and mining speed that bugs me.
(god i hope i didn’t mistakenly repeat the same thing five times over)
alright, I thought up a solution, its easy and quick… make the ore processor take HV or MV wires and too much power for the salv shuttle to handle. Salvage can’t make a mini factory on their ship and are forced to come back to the station. Forcing them to come back gives them more of an incentive to go to med rather than just stockpiling meds. It gives cargo, the qm, and sec a chance to inspect the stuff they have gathered and take action. oh, salv has a bag full of syndicate gear? an emaged lathe? any other contra? Because Salv has to come back to drop off their ores rather than just sitting in space doing everything they need to do their actions are not external to the station, but completely visible to all of cargo and crew.
