This is going to be a shorter blog post – I’d just like to talk about refactoring one mechanic to work a little differently, since I think it’s an interesting one, and thinking it through gave me some trouble.

One of the things you do in the game is go to the fringes of the Sector and “salvage” various derelicts – abandoned stations, Domain-era probes, and so on. It’s a good source of valuable materials and lost technology. With the next release, salvaging will become even more important, since it’ll be the primary way for the player to get ship and weapon blueprints that in turn feed into the manufacturing capabilities of their colonies.

First, a quick look at how it works now:

• Each derelict has a “salvage difficulty rating”, from 0 to 100%
• And based on that, also a required amount of heavy machinery and crew to carry out the operation
• A “Salvaging” skill lets the player salvage higher-difficulty derelicts
• If the crew of rating requirements aren’t met, the player has the option of blowing up the derelict and scavenging through the resulting debris field
• Bringing along Salvage Rigs (a type of ship) increases the amount of salvage by up to the difficulty rating of the derelict

This is definitely workable. The main issue is that the amount of salvage without investing points into the skill is too low, but that can be tuned because it’s just a numbers issue. Or… is it?
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