Does the salvage reclaimer need to come back?

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.

No the salvage reclaimer doesn’t need to come back. In fact we don’t even need it anymore, space friction + minijetpack can basically get you anywhere, handheld scanner can help you to not get lost and grappling hook can help you to poke enemies from outside the wreck/debris.
Then why cargo sometimes haves no mats? because a good chunk of the salv players still no want to interact with the station at all and spend at minimun 20 minutes making a shittle at may get bombarded by meteors or even by admins and unless there is a salv not working on the shittle all the mats will go into making the shittle and that is what cripples cargo on mats the most as salv is they main source of basic mats now.
We really need space wind for kill shittles…

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I’ve seen salv taking the cargo shuttle multiple times now. Salvage definitely needs a buff. I am not really sure where the fun is with salvage right now when you get so little return for all your effort.

The massive nerfs did not encourage salv to “interact with the station” more, in fact its probably made it way worse in the grand scheme of things. But I really hate that being the reason for the removal because it’s just a ridiculous reason.

The actual initial issue with salvage was them refusing to do their job opposed to their job being bad or the shuttle itself being bad.
There was no mechanical way for QM or cargo to force-return the salv shuttle and the way I imagined we’d overcome that is allowing QM to have some sort of override system, even if it was as simple as turning the shuttle power off (or making it explode but that’ll never happen).

The removal is nothing but a loss, the salv shuttle was cool, it was fun and it was the 1 unique thing ss14 has over 13. The constant nerfs have just made cargo tedious. Why would a crate only have a single stack of plasma opposed to just making the crate more expensive for the initial 3 stacks? It doesn’t make much sense.

You aren’t proving a point by not interacting with the station as salvage, it is your choice to do so and the change was more to give you opportunities to do so. If you haven’t noticed a change, it’s because your too stubborn to try interact with others. Salvage players seem stuck in the past and constantly want a shuttle when that is in no way something they need at the moment proving my point further

The shuttle was fun but too much, easily abused by syndicates and rogue skeletons. If your fellow salvager was a syndicate, your shift was over the moment they hit the FTL button on an expedition.

However, salvaging in its current state is boring. Expeditions requiring a ship is annoying, it’s a fun part of salvage that requires (most players) 15-20 minutes preparation just to begin expeditions.

I think Salvage should have a space-pod that FTL’s back and forth between expeditions and can’t be player-driven, like the Lunar Module “Eagle” or the SS13 Nukie drop pod. A small pod, that goes up and down, uses orbit to maneuver between planets. (it’s a room with an expedition console, press exped and it FTLs there. it has life support systems, no shuttle console, no functional thrusters.)

OR

Salvage and Science are more reliant and intertwine, expeditions become portal based. Enforce the idea to salvagers that mining is their number one priority, enforce the idea to science that researching interplanetary-portals are their number one priority. Ideally this relationship would work, expeditions would become portal based and require fuel to upkeep, if they run out of fuel it closes and the explorers are stranded. Science reap their rewards and can create things using the expedition loot.

Point: Most likely, this would ALSO require 15-20 minutes preparation, but the departments would be doing their respective jobs instead of waiting around for the shuttle to be built or for someone to bother to fly a few thousand meters to mine an asteroid for one ore bag worth of materials.

I will not code it

I was pretty toxic in this reply but I think it gets my ideas across still, especially since I started playing salvage loads more post-rework

honestly adding a reclaimer self destruct button to the digiboard would do wonders:

  1. if salv abandons the station QM can get them back in line
  2. gives syndies with salv kill targets a way to do it without just hoping they suicide to goliaths or are new

if you dont meet qms quota he disables reclaimer and if you still refuse you get blown up

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It’s only that way because it’s not about proving anything. It’s about the choice of either working or interacting. Salv had plenty of interaction before the rework - that being with the other salvs or QM and often science. There’s 0 other reason to interact with anyone else and you always choose to interact with science if you wanted something in return.

Player agency is meant to be the goal of the design for this game but every iteration and change recently of these have been creating less player agency and more “We want them to interact like this” - there was so much more choice before the change. Now we have salv taking the cargo shuttle, slowing down cargo. Science never getting the materials they need because the rng and general drop rate. The additional steps to get those materials and more.

It was fun to go on an exped and mine for a bit, then loot hunt. It was fun to go on a joyride into space to look for asteroids or wrecks. It was fun to turn the salv shuttle into a contra den.

Wanting interaction via forcing them mechanically is in direct conflict with general player agency in my opinion. Again, nobody has outright complained or completely changed chem despite them having minimal player interaction, all the attention has been salv and atmos recently and I don’t understand why. If we want interaction, we can play sec, cargo, service. If we want mechanics we can play engineering, atmos, salv etc. The choices are there, limiting, streamlining and nullifying them just feels like a step backwards to me.

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I was thinking maybe some sort of in-game quote or list system might actually be pretty motivating and rewarding for something like cargo. Even a list to show how many bounties completed would make our brain happy.

Reclaimer did nothing wrong, salv collars will be enough. :godo:

No ore = No head. :boom:

Isn’t the handheld scanner still garbage at actually navigating space, since the display doesn’t align with camera rotation and player movement? Perhaps I missed an update but I’m pretty sure it’s borderline unusable due to that.

I think yes. I saw multiple times how Salvs take cargo ship Instead of building own one

I personally like to see the salv shuttle come back or maybe have parts in salv ready to be used in the construction of a salv shuttle, imo we need some content that incentives salv players people team players because it only takes one salv to mine to make the station happy. For the moment salv doesnt have much content making the role undesirable to some people, unless we do something like lavaland where you can teleport to a planet for the miners and spacing salvaging for those who dont want to get engage with monsters but instead focus on a more chill experience mining or scrapping.

Yes but with space friction being a thing you can easily figure out which direction leads where so it isn’t really a issue (and i say this as someone who actually used the handheld scanner for travel through deep space).