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Salvage: Postmortem

:::info AKA: Is Salvage Salvageable? ::: I am writing this document not with the intention to propose some new grand plan for salvage or to argue for its demise but rather categorize my many issues with salvage and its implementation in the overall game as someone who has played way too much of it. Seeing as there is renewed interest in salvage’s future, or perhaps lack there of, and I have probably played salvage the most out of any staff member I figured I might as well make this document to help shed some light on how I see salvage currently. I will not be going deep into the history of salvage as my focus will mainly be on what I have personally played, seen, and experienced.

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Why are we here?

Salvage currently does not work in normal space station round flow. This appears to be an ancient issue as “Salvage not mining” is not exactly a new meme. The vast majority of salvagers do not provide little benefit to the station and act independently of the goings on of the round. They are effectively the least interesting implementation of hoarders and murderers being employed by the station. Currently salvage sits on one of the most integral jobs for roundflow, resource acquisition and distribution, but is given many reasons to not do that job and end up heavily rewarded for it. The main question is why? What specifically lead to this outcome? Who or what do we have to blame. I have taught a lot of new players the ropes of salvage and from my experience, I believe we the developers are to blame. Salvage is a surprisingly obtuse job and not only does it not provide any mechanical teaching to players, it often points them in the wrong direction or just straight up punishes them for not having meta knowledge more so than other jobs. How is a new player supposed to find out about the VGRoid? How are they supposed to know that the wreck they pulled in has 10 turrets behind that locked door with no loot behind it? How are they supposed to know that scrap is valuable? (I see a lot of new salvagers walk over scrap because they intuitively think “This is worthless”) To put it simply I believe we’re here because salvage has been horrifically designed with a focus more on content over actually good mechanics. But perhaps this was already known.

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Which mechanics are bad?

All of them. Hyperbole aside, I could and will be breaking apart each mechanic and explaining why it sucks from both a new player perspective and a veteran’s perspective. Much of my reasoning will involve referencing other parts of salvage so I think it’s important to get the most important mechanical issue out of the way.

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Feature bloat!

Salvage is secretly like 5 not very fleshed out jobs stiched together just well enough to make it seem like one well fleshed out job. You have expeds, the VGRoid, the magnet, bounties, and shuttle building. I consider this a mechanical failure because every single one of these features is extremely lackluster in implementation, and fails outright while also making eachother worse in the process. The number one thing I can take away from current salvage is that holy fuck it needs to be trimmed down. There’s just far too much to do and most of the stuff you can do is actively bad for the department in one way or another. If salvage is to be recovered, more than anything someone needs to be going nuclear on salvage feature PRs to prevent this problem in the future.

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The Magnet

I’m getting the magnet out of the way first since it’s the first thing any new salvager will successfully use. The magnet is arguably the best tool salvage has to completely waste their time. That sounds harsh but I wholeheartedly believe it to be true, most optimal salvage strategies completely ignore the magnet and skip to other options. I know I am not alone in this because I have played with and am friends with some of the top salvagers on the current playtime leaderboard and I learned this from or alongside them. So is the only issue with the magnet that it’s been feature crept into uselessness? No! If that were the case we could really easily fix salvage but unfortunately the magnet also has massive issues in its current implementation. There is a second side to the statement of “the magnet is the best tool salvage has to completely waste their time.” In addition to being outclassed for actually doing your job, it’s the best tool for ignoring it and acquiring gamer loot as well!

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Wrecks

Wrecks are premade dungeons which magnets can pull in that lock the magnet down and provide primarily gamer loot that’s useless to normal salvaging duties and minimal resources. They are predomantly chosen by new players who choose wrecks because they sound cool (Who wouldn’t choose a dungeon if given the option?) and by more experienced powergamers who are gambling for some of the more powerful items they can offer. Wrecks are problematic since they teach new players that powergaming is so integral to the job that it’s given equal weight to resource collecting, and reward powergamers by giving guaranteed recognizable dungeons to get loot from. Even worse is that since the magnet can only pull in one thing at a time, if one asshole wants to just pull in wrecks all day you don’t get to use the magnet! You will see salvagers pull in wrecks, check the mass scanner and then not go on them because they know the loot is ass, wasting everyone’s time. This is primarily why optimal salvage gameplay ignores the magnet, but the other two types of pulls aren’t perfect either.

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Debris

Debris is probably the most useful magnet pull. It gives items you cannot get elsewhere (mostly because loot generation on the VGRoid has been broken a while and going to random space debris is not typically feasible or worthwhile). The issues with debris mostly come from the fact that they’re not fun. Which can be stated about the magnet as a whole but I’m getting ahead of myself. Debris spawns some fractal tile generation in space of tiles with a couple walls and a lot of broken scrap to pick up. Littered with landmines and fish. What makes debris not fun is well, it’s just some fractal tiles with scrap and fish. The gameplay loop consists of shooting weak, dumb, glow in the dark enemies who are of no threat to you and avoiding landmines that instantly kill you to pick up items and put them in boxes, and that’s if you’re lucky and those threats actually spawn. Debris is 52 card pickup the game. And because debris is typically a flat surface it’s uninteresting to even explore. With premapped wrecks there is at least some fun is going through cooridors and having to worry about what’s around the corner, even if you know what’s there. With debris, you know exactly what’s there because there’s nothing to block line of sight other than darkness, and what’s there is stuff to pick up and then shove into a locker. New players also typically don’t understand that the scrap is the valuable stuff. I’ll often see them trying to deconstruct the few walls out there or looking in lockers for anything valuable. This is laregly because scrap is usually visually uninteresting and it’s also literally trash. Isn’t the point of salvaging debris to be looking for stuff that isn’t trash? I understand scrap gives lots of materials for gameplay reasons but that gameplay genuinely sucks and intuitively sucks as well. This being the magnet’s strong point really shows just how badly designed and implemented the department is.

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Asteroids

Asteroids are pretty simple in their issues so I won’t dwell on them long. Enemies don’t spawn on them so there’s no tension which removes any fun there could be with exploring them. VGRoid is bigger, has more ore and when its gibtonite explodes on the VGRoid you typically get to keep the ore instead of it flying off into space. Despite this they’re easily the most fun pull because there’s something satisfying about breaking through rock with a pickaxe and getting ore and the vibes are nice. One could also say that’s the absolute bare minimum in terms of “fun gameplay” and I can’t argue with that.

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VGRoid

I’m doing the VGRoid next since I have brought it up twice now and it’s also a big hunk of rock. The VGRoid is technically two things, dungeon and rock but they’re smooshed together so when doing the roid you’ll often find yourself switching between them naturally. The VGRoid is the best place for a salvager to go if they want to do their job optimally. Which is a problem because it is very far from the station and not communicated at all to new players. What makes the VGRoid the optimal place for salvage to operate is that it has a ton of ore to mine and salvage primarily should be bringing in ore. Cargo can easily get tons of basic materials on their own so salvage focusing on ore typically yields better results. This isn’t always the case because debris can sometimes be better on WarOps where basic mats typically run dry fast, but even in that scenario you’re still going to want to mine and if it’s not on the VGRoid then you’re not playing optimally. Not only that but the VGRoid is also just the most fun way to play salvage in my opinion. Typically I’ll teach new players how to navigate in space and find the VGRoid then I bring them there to show them the ropes. I frequently get remarks about how much more fun the VGRoid was compared to just magnet stuff, or whatever else they were doing and I don’t think that’s entirely driven by new thing being more fun than old thing. The VGRoid has vibes that the magnet and expeds cannot match. It’s dark, moody, there’s potentially really dangerous monsters around every corner that require a variety of methods to deal with, and it’s rewarding in a way that feels good for you and the science team you dump materials onto. Of course that doesn’t mean it’s without problems, chief among them being that the existence of the VGRoid is not communicated to the player. If you want to reliably get to the VGRoid every round, you will typically need to use the cargo shuttle or at least the cargo shuttle console. A new salvager, is likely not going to be taking the cargo shuttle and exploring space for the potential of a big massive dungeon, and likely isn’t going to be using that console to scan for objects and selecting the one with the funny name of the dozen’s presented, then flying to it with their jetpack blindly after writing down the coord in their PDA. Hell most salvagers don’t even know that last trick, I taught that trick to some of the players who top the leaderboard for salvage. Saying the VGRoid is poorly communicated to new players is contender for understatement of the entire project. On top of that the distance to the VGRoid is unmanageable, it puts salvage a mile away from the station with no good line of contact for massive chunks of the roun which is self explanatory in its issues. And while I swear behind the VGRoid being the best content salvage has to offer, it isn’t particularly great either. Code rot has claimed it, but even before that, looting the dungeon was often done for gamer loot and still has the same 52 card pickup issue as debris. Not only that but the VGRoid is way too big for its own good and that content is also very samey. It has basically no variety and giving it more content only benefits less than 5% of people playing a round. It already has more to explore than can be done in a single round by orders of mangnitude, so expanding on that would be worse for the game as a whole even if it would be more fun for salvage specifically.

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Shuttles

Shuttle building has been a disaster for salvage gameplay. I’m not one of those people who thinks that salvage needs the reclaimer. I played downstream on servers with the reclaimer and it’s addition doesn’t address anything expect making the VGroid and Expeds easier to get to at the cost of removing all friction of movement in a job where friction of movement is your primary gameplay loop. My issue with the shuttle is that it’s a great way to waste a salvager’s time. If one doesn’t have an optimal shuttle building route for the map they’re currently on, they’re probably going to spend more time building the shuttle than time saved by getting the shuttle. This usually results in one salvager experiencing a different, more boring flavor of not playing the game, while the rest of the team does whatever the fuck. On the flipside, if you do have an optimal route, it’s boring as fuck! Building a shuttle every shift is the antithesis of fun. And your reward is that your cool movement tools are made obsolete. Awesome! Shuttles do not work period in salvage, period. Any implementation where they would work would require such massive overhauls to shuttles that it’s not worth the effort. And the concept of doing a tedious task to ignore fun movement tools is awful. Not to mention the fact that is salvage gets a shuttle, you will never see them again. They now have a self sufficient mini station that will only show up when evac arrives. A lot of headache could’ve been saved by seeing the reclaimer not working and just ripping shuttles out of salvage completely rather than half assing it with “Well what if they worked up to a cool shuttle?” I could go on but I think for my sanity and yours, it’s safe to say that salvage and shuttles have been proven to not work many times over and there’s no point in beating a pulped horse.

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Bounties

Bounties are a relatively new addition to salvage that I was lucky enough to experience be introduced. As a result I have a very good frame for before and after bounties. Bounties attempted to bridge the disconnected parts of salvage together by offering a board which gave monetary rewards for doing salvage tasks from salvage’s various gameplay loops. They failed completely. Bounties, in my opinion made salvage far worse after they were introduced. I gave them a very solid chance, and tried them out for a few months after they were introduced to get a solid and complete opinion of them without any knee-jerk bias, so I have a lot of opinions on them. In theory bounties could work but the issue with their current implementation is that they’re boring and another disconnected distraction. Salvage’s bounties are the same every round, the order is the same, the rewards are the same, the items you need are the same, and they give a ton of cash. In addition they’re varied such that a salvager has to do a little bit of everything: debris, mining, wrecks, and VGRoid to complete all of them. However, the issue comes from what you’re selling. The majority of the bounties are ore and scrap and you have to turn them in to progress. This means rather than connecting all of salvage’s disconected gameplay loops, it effectively doubled them. Now each option has two options: Salvage for materials, or salvage for cash further splintering salvage. This is reinforced by the fact that you have to do the majority of the bounties to progress on the bounty board and there’s a lot of them. You have to choose bounties or materials cause if you try to do both you will do neither. Not only that, but cash is also a lot more specific to cargo than materials which makes salvage a lot more insular. Typically salvage will do the easiest two bounties shift start, use the cash to buy guns, medicine, and jetpacks, and then dissapear forever. Worse is also that it locked a lot of random salvage loot behind bounites. Crusher weapons, spare PTKs, mining hardsuits, are locked behind the bounty board where before you could rarely find them when doing debris pulls. This breaks the flow of a salvager being rewarded with better equipment by doing their job. I understand it was intended that bounties would be the new flow but again, they failed completely. Not only that but those items are still available on premapped wrecks which means people who just do wrecks all shift get rewarded while salvagers who actually do their job get jack shit. Not only that but bounties are just, extremely unfun. You have to do them in a specific order which means there is an optimal predictable linear order to completing them. This takes an already samey gameplay loop and punishes you for deviating from the specific order it wants you to do it in. In addition, it’s a lot less fun to sell bounties at the ATS compared to showing off your ore to cargo or science. Also one of the bounties is for a big carp, which is a rare spawn meaning there’s a decent chance even if you rush bounties you just get walled by RNG and get to have even less fun. Side note but bounties are so underdone that just this month players noticed that the sell computer isn’t showing the correct sell price for them and players assumed that meant they weren’t selling for the correct price. This has been a bug since it was first added, and it amazes me that the impact of bounties is so minimal it took this long for people to notice it, and they haven’t realized it’s purely visual.

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Expeds

Saving the worst for last. That’s perhaps a bit harsh, expeds are pretty fun all things considered. They have good music, good environments, dungeons are always fun but the issue with expeds is they have negative reasons to exist. Expeds are an amalgamation of all the other bad offerings of salvage into one singular completely disconnected gameplay option. The exped computer does not communicate that you need to insert the disk into a shuttle, nor that you’re expected to build your own shuttle. The loot on expeds is primarily gamer loot, so much so that ore generation was and may still be broken on some of the maps and nobody has cared. Some of the maps are a completely worthless waste of time and offer nothing of value to anyone, literally just noobtraps. The other maps offer loot so blatantly overpowred that I’ve seem maints think I’m joking when I tell them they can spawn full hyperzine injector kits. They remove salvage from the station for 15+ minutes, and again only one can be done at a time but at least they’re not as disruptive as hogging the magnet. And because I think it’s important to reiterate, you need a shuttle to go to them. You must either steal the cargo shuttle or build you own neither of which are good options. While expeds are cool and the vibes are sick, there’s nothing to justify their existence, and they have the same catch 22 as the VGRoid, but tuned up to 11.

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Where does that leave us?

Honestly it doesn’t leave us with much. The vast majority of salvage content fails at a basic level of game design and most of it is slop or just not fun. Why do people play it then? Why do I still play it then? Am I just stupid? Maybe, but I do think there is some stuff that does or did work depending on if it is removed or not. Firstly, it’s really fun to deliver a ton of ore you mined to science. The end result of mining and bringing a box full of goodies to department, starting a conversation, and being given goodies in return is ideal space station departmental cooperation. Cargo wishes it could be this. Salvage is also the only department in the game where science’s research actually helps their job in a meaningful way. Mass scanners open up your options of exploration and efficiency hugely. Mineral scanners make mining significantly faster since you can prioritize gibtonite veins and clear out massive volumes of rock. Jumping off into the void of space to land on a wreck is extremely fun. Being armed with a fire extinguisher, grappling hook, and gps at roundstart is genuinely engaging. It’s the right kind of friction where it forces you to think and plan ahead. Salvage excels in just fun movement mechanics in a way no other department can. The progression is/was phenominal. I say was because bounties made it worse, but being able to find tools that make your job a little easier by doing your job was always fun. Going to the VGRoid and fighting a goliath for their hide is very fun. The vibes are also very strong. One thing we lack significantly compared to ss13 is vibes. A lot of that is sound design based where ss13 just flat out beats us in every regard tragically. Salvage manages to stand out though. When you’re drifting in space and title2 or drifting plays, when you hear meteors hitting the station in the distance, the eerie emptiness of it all just works for salvage. Not to say it cannot be improved (It 100% can) but salvage has the best vibes of any job in the game and it isn’t even a contest.

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Life or Death for Salvage

I don’t want to propose anything new for salvage as I have too much on my plate already to babysit it. Anything I’d propose I wouldn’t have the time to implement, simple as. Going over everything, I can see why salvage has so many haters, and a lot of it is deserved. This post-mortem retrospective helped me categorize all the things that have irked me about salvage that I’ve kept quiet about. But at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to hate salvage. For all its many many many many many MANY flaws, there were still aspects that shined through the darkness. Truthfully I don’t see the current iteration of salvage being able to live on. I think writing this now has cemented that more than ever, but I also think it would be naive to say that salvage cannot ever work as a department. There is a glimmer of hope I see looking at the aspects I like about the job. The interdepartmental cooperation, combined with the fun to learn movement mechanics, and good vibes are the core that make salvage fun for me. These aspects do not go against the core design principles of the game either, the difficulty comes from how do you design the job in such a way that promotes the good without falling for the same pitfalls as old. At the same time, maybe there isn’t a way forward. The aspects of the job I like cannot hold themselves up alone and I don’t have an answer as to what will replace their foundation when the old one is removed. So is salvage saveable? Maybe, but I certainly don’t have an answer as what can save it or how it can be saved.