Salvaging

Salvaging essentially means stripping down a spaceship or station for all of its resources, taking down hull pieces, walls, wall mounts and facilities and turning them to scrap materials. The acquired scrap materials can be transformed back into usable resources using the Recycler facility.

Salvaging derelict spaceships and stations

Spaceships and stations can be marked as derelict, meaning they are abandoned and left behind or all of their crew died on board. Once a spaceship or station is marked derelict, it is possible to salvage them.

There's a pre-condition for salvage to take place. It needs to be completely explored and void of aliens or crew members from other factions. Basically it needs to be a explored and deemed a safe working environment for your own crew members.

Once you encounter a derelict ship or have boarded an enemy faction ship and made it derelict, salvaging works using these steps:

1. Select the derelict ship.
2. Open up the salvage tab in the ship selection screen.
3. Select which type of resources you want to salvage for.
   1. The availability for each resource type will be shown. If availability is low it means it will take a lot of work to find resources of that type, as the chance for such a scrap resource to be found from dismantled facilities is low.
   2. Turn on the toggle for each resource type you want to salvage.
4. Ensure your crew members and shuttle are UNDRAFTED. Let them work automatically.

It is possible to set individual priorities for crew members to prioritize working on a derelict ship. This allows you to create salvage teams, although this is not a necessity since it will all work automatically as well as long as shuttles are not drafted and blocking the airlock, and the crew members are also undrafted and left to work automatically.

The Recycler

Transforms scrap materials into a variety of usable resources. Releases heat and is noisy. Enclose with walls and a spacesuit door to ensure a safe working environment.

The Recycler is a key facility in turning the salvaged scrap materials back into usable resources again. All of the scrap materials can be hauled to the Recycler, and it can be assigned to produce various building blocks from the scrap materials.