TLDR: Add the ability to get minerals by salvaging wrecks, resulting in a limited and dynamic source of otherwise unavailable resources. Would require dedicated fit / ship choices to allow it to be profitable as its own discrete activity.
Industrial Salvaging: Tear a wreck apart, resulting in scrap that can be reprocessed into minerals.
Scrap:
Similar size and mineral density of ore.
Variety of scrap items that reprocess into different combinations of minerals.
Type and amount of scrap dependent on ship size / tech level.
Total scrap possible limited to some percentage of build cost (50%?)
Options
Use same cargo bay as ore?
Industrial Salvager - Salvage module that produces scrap in addition to current salvage. Some options dependent on development and balance could be:
m3/s appropriate for current mineral faucet needs / time investment
Limited by powergrid / ship requirement to prevent all-in-one ratting / salvaging without significant sacrifices.
Industrial Salvage Drones - Salvage drone that produces scrap in addition to current salvage. Some options dependent on development and balance could be:
m3/s appropriate for current mineral faucet needs / time investment
Limited by Bandwidth / m3 (similar to excavators) to prevent all-in-one ratting / salvaging without significant sacrifices.
Other options I believe would enhance salvage gameplay:
Suspect on salvage (similar to looting)
Wrecks decay into a debris field after X hours. Debris field continue to decay for Y hours resulting in lower yields the longer they remain. Larger ships last longer.
Debris field may be collected (using tractor / mobile tractor) and salvaged for scrap without triggering a suspect flag.
Salvage probes. Find wrecks / debris out in space.
Fitted modules dropped in wrecks to require a standard / industrial salvager to recover.
NPCs that hunt salvage and compete with players / clear leftover wreck fields.
Why?
It seems silly that these giant space ship wrecks just disappear. Salvaging by players and npcs offer an explanation as to where all these ships go. Controlling and mining out a giant titan battlefield seems interesting and thematic.
Resource redistribution left an opportunity to fill back some of what was taken away with a more dynamic, thematic, and interesting way to gather minerals.
That is defiantly a fair point. Gun / done goo mining was a problem. I cant remember the dev response but I would image the problem was the lack of time investment for the minerals. You basically got them for free as a part of ratting, thus the total and type of reward was out of line with the activity and time investment for it.
In this scenario, you need a dedicated ship and an additional time investment on par with mining. Because of that, I dont think it would be fair to count them as a reward for the ship kill, so I donât believe it would cause the same problems.
Though, if you mean that getting minerals from wrecks is not appropriate to the lore of game, I would disagree, but that is a valid perspective.
And if salvaging becomes a significant source of minerals, it too will compete with mining. Thatâs unavoidable.
So perhaps the idea is workable by seriously reducing the minerals available this way, similar to how reprocessing mods is heavily nerfed. It goes without saying that the amount of minerals be less than the reprocess amount of ships (50%), so mining from a wreck should be significantly less than that.
So the problem with making it easier to salvage is it actually ends up undermining the profession itself. It happened in incursion already. When they released the noctis and the MTU salvage prices dropped so drastically that most mission runners stopped salvaging alltogether and instead blitzed missions. Furthermore, those of us who were stealing salvage for our income stopped caring about the salvage and instead directed our focus to ransoming and killing mission runners for isk.
The best thing CCP could do for salvage is actually make it harder to obtain while ALSO making it a larger % of a mission runners income (bounties have needed nerfs since around the same time because of incursions). This would make salvage worth more, make mission runners actually have to play the game as opposed to being AFK, and provide much more emergent content because you would have valuable, stealable assets as a conflict driver.
I like this idea. I agree, getting one burned whatever circuit and a scrap metal out of a BS wreck is silly.
To counter some of the concerns about salvaging overtaking mining, CCP could balance it by adding small packets of minerals to the loot tables, and slightly adjust the value/drop percentages of values for wrecks. So, instead of getting just a few burned circuits, some metal scraps, and a sensor booster out of a battleship, you might instead get a few burned circuits, some metal scraps, and a small bit of noxcium(or whatever part of the table that didnât drop). This would allow small bits of minerals to be gathered, and also lower the other things being dropped over time.
Granted, a simpler solution might just be to layer in a couple more kinds of metal scraps with varying reprocessing values based on the type. Shrug. But yeah, Iâm cool with making salvaging great again.
Indeed, this was the reason meta 0 mods were removed from drops
i am in favour of adding a salvage probe however, so people can salvage the abandoned wrecks left in space, just have the probes be âdisruptedâ by nearby ships so they only really work on abandoned fields, just blame it on the active power signature of the ship overwhelming the trace amounts of power detected in wrecks
For active mission sites you can just use combat probes easily enough
Itâs worth clarifying: are we talking player wrecks only? Or are we talking npc wrecks too?
Because i am vehemently against getting minerals that âdonât belongâ out of systems of particular sec status.
I shouldnât be able to extract Nocxium out of NPC wrecks in hi-sec, nor trit out of NPC wrecks in null. If we did it would completely undermine the co-dependance CCP are trying to create between different areas of the game.
That âcodependenceâ idea is fundamentally flawed and should be obliterated at the earliest opportunity.
Why?
How easy is it for random newer-bro high sec player to get low/null materials without paying major market mark ups? Not? Yeah⌠just another way the new-bro gets pushed out of industryâŚ
How easy is it for random nullbear to set up a HS mining corp and supplement their already much larger and more capable industry wing? Not hard at all? In fact, theyâve all already got one? HmmmmâŚ
Plus, itâs just another false, arbitrary system that has no basis in logic or reason. What? This system is .5 and this one is .4 and there are magically not a single one of these rocks in this system even though theyâre physically right next to each other?
Spare me. You canât even build many of the drones without needing âhisec excluded minerals.â