Science & Industry

Why not make a simple alchemy. 10 armor plates make 1 intact armor plate for example. Numbers can be tweaked ofc.

I love the idea of creating more routes to acquire materials needed for any industrial process although, obv., it needs an attempt at balance.


One thing that I have been thinking about is combining the reprocessing of t1 salvage with PI in order to create the t2 salvage. Why?

Well there are the obviously in demand items by way of t1 salvage and the t2 equivalents are mostly also the in demand items as well. If salvage reprocesses in a similar way to ore then you would still end up with a mass of the basic stuff (aka trit and pye) and a shortage of the stuff used to create the in demand t2 items.

This would be a "bad thing".

So if we can get a nice little "black box" that takes the less demanded t1 salvage items (conductive polymer i'm looking at you) along with maybe some of the unused sleeper stuff and some PI stuff and combines it into the t2 salvage. You could, effectively, replace the in demand t1 salvage items with related component items from elsewhere.

Why PI and not manufacturing slots? Well, why not it will give us something else to do on planets and the necessary importation of materials (as well as export tax) would also marginally increase one of the minor isk sinks.

Sure, of course the stuff that's worth so little it's not worth hitting the sell button. Given, however, there's probably billions of units of it and millions produced, what you'll wind up with is t2 salvage parts being near worthless. It'll probably actually be the case that t2 rigs will be cheaper than t1.

Thought about this quite a bit last night. And I don't think there is any sort of silver bullet that will fix all of the issues.

The biggest problem I'm seeing are the imbalance of the rigs and the randomness of the drops, leading to stockpiles of crap and shortage of the good stuff.

What is brilliant about mining is that you know exactly what you are getting. If prices of trit goes up, everyone goes mining veldspar, as it's a steady source of Trit and easy to get. This leads to reduced price and less people mine veldspar.

The key there, is that it is perfectly balanced by the demand of the market. If there is a demand for Trit, you go and get it. There is no bottleneck other than how much you can get in a day, so the bottleneck is just people doing mining.

On the salvaging side, the building blocks are too racially themed. The circuits are probably what is closest to Trit, but after that it becomes highly "this component is only in these few things" rather than a portion of all salvage is in all rigs (which would lead to much healthier market).

So I think that all rigs/salvage needs to be broken into smaller blocks, which then are directly used in rig production, or in a secondary tier, basicaly manufacture salvage.

So yeah, In order to do this properly, I believe that the following has to happen;

• Re-design of the mechanics of Salvaging, make it less random, more player controlled (more sand-boxy)
• Re-balance the rigs (could be done seperatly)
• Possibly re-do the whole salvage components in general (in conjunction with mechanic changes)

This list is probably much bigger though, but I think those are the key points.

That is probably not going to fit within the Winter expansion, so something smaller has to happen in Winter, and I think just a simple boost in the components might do the trick for now.

Make it more like mining. So that you aren't getting random loot here, but that you are in control (based on market needs) that you go and get Salvage X, which you know comes from Wreck Y.

I think that is more Sand-boxy than how it is currently.

For industrialists its building sandcastles in the box, you're very specific on what sort of sand sticks and rocks you want and everythign else you dont like the occasional snikers bar or broken bottle.

To achieve this, you could be adding scripts/crystals to salvagers that increase the drop chance of specific salvage. With mining, you pick which roids you mine. And while the salvage distribution already leads to the situation where you salvage blood raiders and angels but ignore drones and serpentis, I don't think this is the right approach for salvage (and difficult for exploration).
So you introduce 6 scripts, each (drastically) increasing the chance of drop for 3 (4) specific salvage items. You can still balance different salvage types by the amount they drop. Smart players then can pick the script that is currently the most profitable.

just an idea:
salvage scripts (lots of them)
- scripts increase the chance for a specific salvage item and decrease the chance for other stuff.
- racial wreck are still taken into account, (you cant just suck 40 armor plates out of a small drone wreck :))

Like scripts for salvagers.

That would also help with 0.0 industry space where local rats drop only limited salvage and regions are forced to buy rigs from hi sec.

Certain rats still could have more chance to drop certain pieces not to make all space/npc equal.

For example sansha rat have 50% to drop tritanium bar where gurista only 20% if use that script.

Sorry, wall of text incoming...

I'm very glad rigs are being looked at! Manufacturing T1 rigs is one of my main sources of income at the moment, I've looked at doing T2 as well but it didn't seem worth the effort (reasons below).


I do like to do a bit of low-sec exploration, but mag sites are just not worth the time. I found one today and decided to do it (generally I don't, but it's been a while and I thought I'd give it another go). It then yielded a disappointing 1.75 mil in total (including loot & salvage from the rats)! I understand that I might have been just unlucky, but there's a reason I usually skip them... Considering the time it takes to find them (cov-ops) and then go get a ship to clear them (plus the risk due to low-sec) there should be some basic reward. I would've been MUCH better off mining Veldspar in high-sec (by a factor of at least 3)!
I forgot what the name of the site was, 4 or 5 of the 8 containers were empty, the rest dropped generic T1 salvage. Highest value were a dozen or so Tripped Power Circuit going for about 70k each. Also 2 rig skill books, which are sold by NPCs (and obviously have to be as those are kinda basic skills) and can therefore never be worth more than 80k or whatever it is...
Radar sites are far from great but gold mines in comparison (I'd say 15-50 mil each depending on luck). I haven't done any in high-sec or null (neither radar nor mag), so I can't comment on or compare those. Also mag sites require 2 specialist modules (salvager and analyzer) compared to just 1 for radar (codebreaker).

The reasons why I'm still only doing T1 rigs were already mentioned: Overhead & time required for making copies and invention itself, very few resulting runs, raw material price for production and resulting high final price leading to very low transactional volume.

Before I get into the issues of T2 rigs and how that can be solved (like being able to make T2 parts from T1 parts) let me first point to the significant problems with T1 rigs as I think they have to be fixed first or no satisfactory result can be expected. It has already been mentioned that the fixed drop ratios and the inability to pick a 'target' are the cause of the huge price differences for different salvage materials ('Bottlenecking'). Some suggested altering drop tables, but I don't think that can solve anything in the long run unless they are constantly (like every 1-2 months!) re-adjusted - and clearly nobody wants that (it's a lot of work and a self-regulating system is of course better). Eventually we will just end up with other bottleneck-materials! I will also think a bit about the different proposals (allowing alchemy-style conversions, scripts for salvagers, ...) and will post again if it results in a eureka moment or just coherent thoughts :)

The whole calibration thing is somewhat weird at places... Some rigs require so much calibration that it's just not worth using them. Their bonus might be better than that of their T1 counterpart, but I'd rather fit 3 rigs which are "ok" instead of 1 "good" and 2 "crap". The specialist ship problem has already been mentioned (cov-ops can't fit 2 gravity capacitor upgrades, using just one gives worse bonus than 2x T1). But these effects also exist for other probably less commonly noticed situations. If I want to build a L4 mission ship for max-dps as a Gallente pilot one of the obvious choices is a Dominix with 2x sentry dmg rig. Great, why not use a Navy Domi? Because it only has 350 calibration and can't even fit 2x T1 of those! And since there are no modules to increase drone damage the advantages over a regular domi in this case are slim at best. Side note: A T2 sentry damage rig uses 300 calibration, leaves 50 for 2 rig slots, so one WILL be left empty in this case (minimum calibration is 50 I think)!
Then there are other rigs that are just so totally useless (at the very least in comparison) that nobody will ever use them. This of course leads to a huge surplus in the salvage materials associated with them. Large signal focusing kit? Seriously? Who uses a rig to boost scanner modules speed of all things on a battleship? About 4 units were sold here in the last 3 months...

Then there is the obvious problem of shild vs. armor rigs. At the moment large armor resistance rigs or trimarks cost about 12 mil to make, close to 15 for aux nano pump. Shield extender/purger cost about 10 to make, but shild resistance rigs are about 172k each. The reason becomes quite obvious by just looking at the blueprints: ALL armor rigs rely on Armor Plates + Contaminated Nanite Compound, shield rigs are split between Malfunctioning shield emitters (resistance) and Ward Consoles (extender/purger). They also use only about half the amount (if that is responsible on the 10 mil vs. 15 mil difference in price depends of course on their respective drop rates and their respective usage/demand).
Both also use "generica" of course (materials that are used for various categories of rigs, namely BLC, CMC, FIC and TPC), in the case of the expensive shield rigs they account for about half the price.
Side note: why the hell is salvage tackle an armor rig?

As mentioned above, I'll post again with proposals of how to solve all those issues (and hopefully T2 in the same go).
This is also meant as food for thought to other readers, maybe someone has the all-solving idea :D

PS: It's GREAT to see a dev involving us so early and openly in the development of fixes for problems! Keep this up and the result will be much better than some of the previous 'fixes' :)