Personal opinion: probably? But not the same as before.
So the reclaimer shuttle for salvage was removed in this PR
I didn’t like the idea of it at first but I wanted to see what would happen. Fast forward a few months later, a lot of cargo crates got nerfed making things more expensive and others more expensive with less in return or just same price and less in return.
Here we are now. Mats is a struggle. There’s several rounds as Sci where we have no mats and we effectively just tear the station apart. Plasma is WAY too much for 1 sheet of it now, 2k for 1 sheet of plasma. That’s 2 anoms and even hoping they’re good ones and in a good spot also let alone we find the damn thing and them being an infection where people might not want it. I end up getting better luck finding plasma sheets laying around the station instead of asking cargo.
Med ends up needing mats too later in the round (and you better hope you don’t get 400+ of burn or brute because they will morgue you and not even bother anymore) and Engi might need them slightly mid round too. Chem will eventually need a chemvend restock. God forbid Sec needs steel, plastic and whatever else for war ops. Even when they need to buy trackers, mindshields if it’s revs or whatever other reason, and maybe even buy guns.
On the other hand, I’ve had a few good rounds where I see cargo actually have money. However, even if they do have money it doesn’t seem they get to use it too freely as they did before. No more lucky lotto crates and no more fun crates of stuff. The money has to be going to essential departments and essential things. Very rarely have I seen them get non essential crates such as toy chests for example; and by very rarely I mean twice.
On the PR I saw someone mention cargo getting rich 30 minutes into the round. 30-40 minutes into a round is effectively the general “mid-round” point for a lot of servers. If cargo is rich by a mid round point doesn’t that mean they’ve done well? Shouldn’t you be happy? The only issue I see here is depends on how much “rich” is. With current prices; 100k? Yeah, theyre somewhat rich. 50k? Eh, with all the nerfs and price inflation that can be gone in the blink of an eye.
Salvage can still make their own shuttle if you really don’t want cargo getting insta rich or having enough mats to last the round, BUT at the very least you should give them the items to do so. Not every station has a shuttle building area. Also, they’re likely to call over engi’s to help them, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it just shows if you want a shuttle built faster/at all you’ll need that engi experience/tools to do so. You can even just give them back the shuttle and just not have expeditions anymore. The other side is also that expeditions were quite fun and made salvage unique, no? Magnet is cool and all but honestly being away from everyone for a bit and fighting a dungeon was pretty cool. And yet another thing you can do is give them the outline of the shuttle and have them put everything else on it. They’d have to do the air, power, thrusters, but at least they got the outline back…and then you circle back to the engi experience needed.
I know I seem far more talkative on giving it back and I admit I am. However, I just can’t think of any real negatives to not bring it back to some capacity. The PR didn’t like how salv would just leave the station and maybe never return. Maybe just give QM a computer to turn off both cargo and reclaimer shuttles then and have that computer take full control of the shuttles? Just like how RD can disable or pop out the brain of a borg.
Dunno. Wanted to see what everyone’s thought about the cargo/salv situation now that it’s been a few months. This thread is effectively my experiences.