Miner. Delivery driver. Bounty hunter. Criminal. There are several sorts of loose professions in Star Citizen’s alpha right now, but one sort of profession that has a couple of planned ships but no actual implementation in-game yet: salvage. That gameplay loop, and the roadmap on how CIG plans to get there, was the topic of a recent video.
Salvage will involve four different pillars: hull scraping, siphoning valuable things like fuel, oxygen, or even data, removing components like coolers or power plants, and “the maw,” which literally involves crunching up the remaining ship’s skeleton for disposal. There are some fundamental systems that still need to be added to ships, such as having actual physical components that can be added and removed manually — ships released in the past 18 months to two years already have some access hatches of this sort, but older ships will need those features added, and then physical components will need to be included and a new power system will have to be added.
Incidentally, the introduction of physical components and power systems will link up with engineer gameplay, with multi-crew ships requiring a skilled engineer to manage power flow and ship subsystems; this form of gameplay is currently in the design stage.
Ultimately, the roadmap to salvage will take a series of steps: introduce the new power system, add physical ship components, release hull scraping, and then ship breakdown. There are also a variety of persistence hallmarks that need to be met so derelict ships and their relevant components stay in the same place, and the devs aren’t sure what parts will comprise the first pass of salvage will look like, but it’ll be iterated upon just as mining has been.
