Salvager’s Field Guide

Twisted hull plating and structural offcuts. The base ingredient for almost everything you build before you can smelt your own.

"Ninety percent of a colony is this. The other ten percent is regret." — foreman, first winter

Fried boards, tangled wiring, and sensors of dubious honesty pulled from the wreck. Junk on its own — hand-sort five of them in the field to salvage one working Electronic part.

"Still smells faintly of ozone and bad decisions."

A clean, working board — the part every electronics recipe wants now. Crafted from a copper ingot and a machined part at the Workshop, or hand-salvaged in the field at five scraps to one.

"Five handfuls of junk, one part that blinks when you poke it. Out here that counts as quality control."

A dense chunk of the ship’s drive. Enormously valuable — and enormously heavy. You will curse it all the way home.

"It got us most of the way here. Rude of it to stop."

A full set of hand tools. Consumed to stand up the Workshop, where it becomes the bench everything else is made on.

"Whoever packed a spare — you are a legend and I owe you a drink."

Field medicine. Spent when you rescue a downed survivor, alongside the supply they ran dry on.

"Read the label. Then ignore it, you don’t have time."

A full breath of air — one suit refill (or feed it into a base O₂ tank). The single most important object in your pack. The Workshop bottles one from three iron ingots and 200 bar drawn off the base O₂ tank — the same 200 bar a tank pours back in.

"Rule one: the air is not optional. There is no rule two."

Clean water for one refill, or to top up a base Water tank. The planet has plenty of ice and zero of it is drinkable — field-melt six chunks with a heating element (kept) and a jolt of suit power to make one of these anywhere.

"Alien springwater: now with 200% of your daily allowance of regret."

Pressed algae and bio-sludge discs, extruded by the ship's recycler and stamped into something the label dares to call food. One cake is a survivor-day of joyless, complete nutrition.

"Tastes like regret, but keeps your stomach quiet."

Frozen volatiles chipped from the surface. Melt it with a heating element to get a water pack — or Aquaforge it by the tankful.

"Free water! (Batteries and a heater not included.)"

A canister of CO₂-hungry lime for the O2 Scrubber — good for 20 cranks before it's saturated and spent.

"The cartridge absorbs your mistakes. Twenty of them, to be exact."

Hand-cranked CO₂ filter using lime cartridges. Each crank scrubs a lungful of breathable oxygen into the base tank; a cartridge lasts 20 cranks. One per base — she is the bootstrap lung, not the plan.

"Crank for 10 minutes, breathe for 20. Repeat until death."

Advanced ice-to-water refinery with plasma torches. Grid-powered only — no hand crank survives contact with plasma. 20 ice chunks and a kilowatt-hour become 50 liters of tank water every half hour; the difference boils away, which the manual calls "process honesty."

"The billionaires thought they could reshape planets. All we got was a fancy way to boil ice."

Copper electrodes in an iron shell: rips tank water apart into breathable O₂ at 4 L/h → 40 bars/h, drinking 600 W off the grid. Grid-only — no hand crank survives that arc. Closes the chain: mine ice, Aquaforge it into water, split it into air. Repeatable; air scales with population.

"Lightning in a bottle, except the bottle is your lungs' next breath."

Base O₂ reserve (in bars). Sheltered survivors and suit refills draw from it first, before touching the stockpile.

"A big communal lungful. Please do not hold your breath near it."

Base water reserve (in liters). Sheltered survivors and refills draw from it before the stockpile.

"The well the whole camp gathers around to complain by."

A 2 kWh cell. Powers your suit, or loads into a Battery Room slot to feed the base grid.

"Fully charged and quietly judging your power budget."

A rugged coil for melting ice into water and field-smelting scrap into iron. Survives the job — reusable block after block.

"Glows a friendly orange. Do not test with fingers."

A powered drill for cracking ore patches. Pulls raw rubble; pair it with a filter for cleaner yield.

"Point at rock. Rock becomes smaller rocks. Genius, really."

A separator that clips onto a drill. Combine with a basic drill to get a Filtered drill.

"Turns ‘mostly dirt’ into ‘mostly ore’. We’ll take it."

Drill plus filter: mines concentrate directly, skipping the crusher step. The efficient survivor’s pick.

"Does two jobs so you can do zero."

A side-mounted rubble bin. Mining pours rubble straight into it — but it holds ONE type at a time, up to 40 kg. Carry spares in your pack and swap when one fills.

"One bag, one ore. The universe rewards the tidy miner."

A suit-mounted sweep that reveals what the ground is hiding — ore, mounds, gear, neighbours. Spends a little power per ping; bolt one to a mast and the same ping sweeps kilometres.

"Ping. Rock. Ping. Rock. Ping. Oh — good rock!"

The standard back-slot pack: 60 kg of carry. Your whole capacity IS whatever pack you wear — no pack means suit pockets only.

"Everything you own, and a little of everyone else's."

An upgraded back-slot pack: 100 kg of carry. Worth the ingots the day the ore patch is far and the haul is heavy.

"Now with 40 extra kilos of regret-carrying capacity."

Solanum tuberosum.

"The humble spud - Earth's last gift to the stars."

Hydroponic slots under grow lights. Plant a potato (it's committed to the soil for good) and every planted spud yields one potato a day into the stockpile.

"Give a colonist a potato and they eat for a day. Plant it, and the accountants get involved."

Turns potatoes into proper rations on base grid power. Three spuds, one hot plate, one meal nobody complains about twice.

"The colony marches on its stomach. The stomach marches on potatoes."

A Vespera AgriCore cultivar out of the Cradle Flora Program: gene-spun flax that shoots up in metres of tough, silk-fine fiber. Every Exodus vessel carried a packet — colonies need rope and cloth long before they need flags. Plant it in a Grow Room tray and harvest the fiber as it ripens.

"Rope, gauze, sailcloth, hope — it all starts as a seed that itches."

Vespera AgriCore's pharmacy in an envelope: a waxy-leafed cultivar whose sap clots wounds, numbs pain, and hates infection — the Cradle Flora Program's answer to a colony four light-years from the nearest pharmacist. Plant it in a Grow Room tray and pick the leaves as they ripen.

"Chew one leaf for the pain. Two if you can still count to two."

Silk-fine, wire-tough strands stripped from a ripe loomreed stalk. The colony's first thread — fabric, rope, and the reinforced pack's honest recipe are all waiting on enough of it.

"Strong enough to hang your future from. Itchy enough to regret it."

Waxy leaves heavy with clotting sap, picked ripe from the tray. Field medicine wants them — the med kits of tomorrow start as a harvest today.

"Smells like antiseptic and bad tea. Works like a miracle."

A bolt of woven loomreed: tough, light, and finally CLOTH after a year of iron everything. Reinforced packs are sewn from it; med kits wrap their dressings in it.

"The colony's first textile. Scratchy? The colony's first complaint."

A freeze-dried strain, not an ingredient. Pitch one into the Still and the culture lives on in her vessel, carried from mash to mash the way brewers have always done it — a ladle of the last batch starting the next. It tires with every run and sours in the end; then you pitch another. Every ship that came down had a galley, so the wrecks are where you look.

"When life gives you space potatoes, make questionable decisions."

A 100 L reserve for Spudshine Fuel. Not connected to life support — nothing about its contents supports life.

"Label it clearly. Someone WILL drink from the wrong tank."

Repurposed rocket engine preburner as power generator. Feed it Spudshine from the fuel tank and it pushes ~4 kW into the grid, unattended — burning 2 L an hour through starship combustion tech no terrestrial genset ever matched.

"A jury-rigged monstrosity that hums like a dying starship. It works… until it doesn't."

It's rock. Mine it from rock deposits, crush it into powder, refine the powder into limestone. The planet's least glamorous supply chain, and the one your lungs depend on.

"Geology is just inventory with extra steps."

Crushed rock, ready for the refinery. Not a concentrate — there's nothing in rock worth concentrating. It's powder.

"Do not inhale the ingredient for the machine that helps you inhale."

Refined from rock powder. The CO₂-hungry heart of a lime cartridge — combine with an iron and copper ingot at the Workshop.

"Every breath you take started as gravel."

Raw iron ore straight off the drill. Crush it to concentrate.

"Rock with ambitions."

Raw copper ore. Crush, then refine — copper is the price of power.

"Greenish, promising, heavy. Like most good things."

Raw ore off a wild gold vein — the rare seams belong to no colony, any crew may drill them, and they never grow back. Crush it to concentrate. Nobody out here wants it for rings: gold is the one metal that solders clean and never corrodes, and every rebuilt processor is wired with it.

"Forty-seven years after the crash, gold finally went back to being useful."

Crushed, upgraded iron ore. One refinery pass from being an ingot.

"So close to useful it can taste it."

Crushed copper ore, ready for the refinery.

"Halfway to a wire and it knows it."

Crushed gold ore, ready for the refinery. A whole vein boils down to a few sacks of this — guard the yard.

"Heavier than it looks. Worth more than it weighs."

Refined iron. Structure, tools, research gear — the backbone metal.

"Heavy, honest, everywhere. The colony’s favourite."

Refined copper. Everything electrical and every cell cradle wants it. Guard your supply.

"The metal your power grid writes ransom notes for."

Refined gold: bonding wire, contact plating, corrosion-proof traces — the substrate every rebuilt CPU is strung on. On a scavenger world the jewelry metal turned out to be the electronics metal all along.

"Vespera plated their boardroom taps with it. We plate processor pins. Progress."

Fencing and open-air bins for the raw-materials tier: rubble, rock, ice, and concentrates live here — never the warehouse. Each yard adds 500 kg of ground; the crusher and refinery feed straight from it. Rubble stays bag-and-yard only: it leaves in an ore bag, not a pack.

"A fence around a pile of rocks. The paperwork calls it infrastructure."

Grinds mined rubble into concentrate over time. Set its ore (iron or copper) and hand-operate it. The grid switch stays dead until 5 electric motors are bolted in — then it chews around the clock on base power.

"It has one job and it does it very, very loudly."

Smelts concentrate into ingots. Like the crusher: pick an ore and operate by hand — or install 5 electric motors and put it on the grid.

"Turns rocks into wealth. Slowly. Warmly. Insistently."

The base crafting bench: tools, machined parts, and suit gear are made here. Built from a salvaged tool kit.

"Where scrap goes to become someone’s bright idea."

Bench-made gears, brackets, and fittings. The connective tissue of every serious build.

"The difference between a pile of scrap and a machine is these."

One refined iron ingot machines into two parts — twice the yield of scrap once your industry chain is running.

"Precision is just scrap that went to school."

Milled beams and panels from iron ingots. What settlements are actually made of — storage, tanks, dynamos.

"Flat-packed civilisation. Some assembly (a lot of assembly) required."

A heated die block that draws copper ingots into wire — one ingot pulls into two spools, 6 ingots an hour at 800 W. All press and heat, no hands: grid-only, like the Aquaforge. Wire feeds Electromagnetics research and every electric motor after it.

"The colony's future arrives one thin, gleaming metre at a time."

Drawn from copper ingots by the Extruder — one ingot pulls into two spools. Electromagnetics research studies it; electric motors are wound from it.

"A kilometre of patience, coiled."

Two iron ingots magnetized in the workbench coil — 500 Wh off the base grid per pull. Most of the metal leaves as swarf; the field stays. Wind with copper wire into electric motors.

"It points at things. Insistently. Forever."

Two magnets and three spools of wire, wound tight. Install five into a Crusher or Refinery to unlock its grid switch — until then the machines only know your hands. Installation is permanent.

"Spin is the only language every machine speaks."

Where electricity goes to misbehave. And explode. And occasionally work. Load batteries into its slots; solar and dynamos charge them; powered buildings draw from them.

"We don’t know why it works. We just know it works—most of the time. The rest of the time, we’re on fire."

A copper-hungry dock for one battery cell. Installed in the Battery Room it adds a permanent grid slot — up to the hard cap; bolted onto a chassis it's a recoverable cradle. Same cradle, two homes.

"More slots, more problems, more copper. Mostly more copper."

Passive power: trickles a small charge into the grid every minute (needs a Battery Room to store it). Build a farm of them.

"Free power, eventually, if the star cooperates. It usually does."

Cheap hand-cranked generator. Operate it to push charge straight into the grid — the bootstrap power source before a solar farm.

"Backup power, arm-powered. Leg day is now every day."

Salt-heavy groundwater pumped from an evaporite seep. Dries into lithium carbonate in an Evaporation Pond.

"The planet's battery acid, still in the ground's own bottle."

The dried salts of a brine seep — the feedstock every battery cell is built around.

"A pile of white dust that remembers being a lake."

The pump in a crate: intake stack, hose coils, hopper shell. Haul it to a seep and stand it up.

"Some assembly required. The seep is not included."

A battery-fed field pump standing at a brine seep, filling its hopper with lithium brine. Feed it cells, collect with bags — Boris's manners on a liquid.

"It hums a little tune. The tune is 'batteries, please'."

Lined pans where yard brine dries into lithium carbonate. Almost no power — the gate is floor area and patience: more ponds, more lithium.

"Farming, but the crop is geology."

The first thing a crashed cohort raises: three field-smelted iron ingots become the scaffold every later build hangs off. Nothing else stands on bare ground — the Commons itself is raised FROM the bay. Queue new rooms and watch the settlement grow.

"The Build Bay is where ideas become reality—or at least become something that can be pointed at and called 'done.'"

Multifunctional hub for sleeping, food, and recreation. Comes furnished with one Basic Bed; a second bed slot waits for a crafted one. REST in a bed and your suit draws easier — asleep or away, the bed stays yours until you stand.

"Sleep here, eat here, try not to die here. That's the Hearthwell promise."

An iron frame padded with scrap fabric. Mount it into a Commons bed slot and REST: survival drain eases 30% while you lie in it — online or off. Unmount it to move it; trade it someday.

"Four legs, a slab, and the first good sleep since the sky fell."

Expands the common stockpile (+500 kg) and every locker (+50 kg). Build as many as your hoarding demands.

"There is no such thing as enough shelving. Trust me."

Unlocks the tech tree. Spend stockpiled materials over time to research new technologies for the settlement.

"Two survivors, a whiteboard, and dangerous levels of optimism."

Boris in a box: cortex housing, drill frame, treads — 50 kg of expedition. Carry him to any deposit your survey has found and deploy. Packing a Boris back up wipes the cortex; a fresh boot is legally a new Boris, hence the new numeral.

"Grief for Boris II is considered a settlement rite of passage."

A working processor, rebuilt on salvaged Daedalus Neural Systems dies: recovered silicon rebonded with gold wire onto a fresh board. No hand steady enough exists — only a Factory production line makes them, and it is the most expensive line on the board. The machines that think are built from the machines that fell.

"Daedalus shipped a million of these across four light-years. We remake them one at a time and call it industry."

Four bays on the grid rails, a robotics-tech brain, and the queue that runs it: post a job with the base RF link and the next idle, charged, right-shaped drone rolls out to take it. No hands required — that's the whole point of the bay.

"We used to send a person. Now we send a Mule, and the person gets to keep both knees."

A factory-line chassis on four wheels: one CPU, one 2,000 Wh cell, a 100 kg bin, and enough sense to drive the same haul run forever without complaining about it. The crew calls her a Mule.

"Doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, doesn't ask why the hopper is always in the worst possible spot."

A factory-line chassis with a 100 kg materials bin instead of a bin for hauling — the Drone Port's answer to "someone has to lay the road." Takes its orders straight off the planner: a segment at a time, a pylon span at a time, until the polyline you drew is standing in the dirt. The crew calls him Mason.

"Doesn't argue about the route. Just builds it."

Half hangar, half shrine to the wheel. Assemble a Dustrunner from motors and wreck spars, bolt her addons on, and back her onto the charge rails for the night — they trickle the base grid straight into her cells. Vespera Galactic called theirs an "Integrated Mobility Solutions Center."

"The survivors call it the Motor Pool, because it pools motors."

Charge rails and reinforced floor plate for one more rig. Installed permanently on the Motor Pool — the pool opens with a single dock, and the floor holds four rigs at its widest.

"Parking: the final frontier."

The Motor Pool's charge rails, crated: two gold ingots for the contacts, five motors and four magnets for the rails, five slabs of construction material for the pad — 60 kg. Carry it out (or drive it out) and pour it anywhere on the trail. Once poured it stays poured.

"Some assembly required. Some concrete, too."

A charging dock out on the trail, permanent, and inert until the Drone Port runs a power line to it — then a rig backed onto its rails charges off the base grid, 15 kW shared across two bays, after every machine at home has eaten. Pipe fuel, air or water to it and the umbilical tops the extender tank and the life-support module too. Home's Allow Discharge and each tank's Allow Usage are the valves; the dock's own lever is Allow Charging.

"The trail is only as long as the last place you can plug in."

A sprung frame, three fabric straps, and the colony's entire passive-safety program. The first seat on a chassis is the driver's — no seat, no driving.

"Tested to twice the speed the Dustrunner can actually reach."

A portable Scrapburner with a 20 L Spudshine tank. Bolted to a chassis it burns fuel into the docked cells at 6 kW — flip the GENERATOR to run it, parked or rolling; the motors drink only from the cells. A full bank or a dry tank idles it at zero burn. Refuels only from the base Fuel Tank: Spudshine never travels loose.

"Runs on potatoes, technically. Don't think about it too hard."

A bolted bin for countable goods — supplies, spares, whole crates of ambition. Loose ore rides the Ore Bin instead; the bay stays clean enough to sleep in, not that anyone should.

"200 kilograms of 'we'll need it out there.'"

The Cargo Bay's dirty twin: a rolling slice of the Ore Yard. Any mix of rubble, concentrate, rock or ice, gram-true, and it pours itself home at the yard in one motion.

"The suspension files a complaint every single trip."

A pressure bottle and a water bladder in a bolt-on cabinet: 400 bars of air and 10 liters of water per module, filled at the charge rails. Riders breathe from it on the road; the suit tops up from the cab.

"The cab smells like a canteen. This is considered a feature."

A geo-scanner welded to a pole, wired into the chassis. Height is bandwidth: riding with one stretches your passive senses to half a kilometre, and its ping sweeps whole kilometres of country off the rig's cells.

"The first thing every colony sees of you, and vice versa."

A second geared drivetrain in a 150 kg crate. Bolted on, SPORT mode runs the rig at twice the speed for two and a half times the burn per kilometre — and they stack, if you can spare the weight and the charge. ECO and NORMAL leave the gears out.

"Fast is a place you visit. Nobody lives there."

A rebuilt Daedalus Neural Systems field handset on the suit's Utility mount — it takes the Geo Scanner's place, so pick your walk. In link with your Echo Vault (the handset is the shorter leg of the reach), SYNC works right from the field: your diary pours home without the boots.

"Reception out here is two bars, one of which is a lie."

A bench-built mast section for the Echo Vault: iron spar, copper radials, machined couplings. Each one installed adds a kilometre to the Vault's reach — ear and voice alike, because an antenna has never cared which way the signal was going. The mast tops out at three.

"Height, wire, and patience: the whole of radio, before the marketing department got to it."

A directional deep-field array raised on the Echo Vault, rebuilt around a salvaged Vespera Galactic approach radar. It banks a full 20 kWh, then throws the lot down a five-degree beam: settlements and vehicles light up a hundred kilometres out, landing in the archive as blurred, nameless contacts. The catch is physics — a shot that loud is heard 900 km in every direction, and every listening Vault learns almost exactly where you are.

"It's a lighthouse, dear. You don't get to choose who sees the light."

A palm-sized Daedalus memory sliver in a drop-proof shell — the flash drive of the wasteland. Write it at an Echo Vault (it takes a cut of the whole Ledger, stamped with the hour), pocket it, plug it into any other vault — theirs absorbs what's still news and ignores what isn't. Hardware, not media: it survives the dock, ready to be wiped and written again.

"The mail must go through. The mail fits in a pocket and knows where the good ore is."

The field radar, folded: a mast with three cradles and ten antennas, 80 kg of it. Stand it up anywhere, dock three cells, and a minute later it pulses the whole horizon 40 km out: every settlement and rig answers as a contact - a smudge on the chart, no names. The pulse is heard 120 km out by anyone with an ear.

"It sees everything and tells you nothing. Like a cat."

The field radar, standing — it hollers at the whole horizon and listens for what hollers back. Three cells in its cradles charge a 3 kWh store in a minute; PULSE spends it all on a 40 km circle of contacts. Pack it up and the cells ride home with you.

"Forty kilometres of rock, and every rock is accounted for."

A sealed Daedalus Archive System unit — every crashed ship carries one, its black box. Daedalus built them to survive what nothing else on the vessel could; wreck loot turns them up damaged, and only the Research Lab can coax them whole again. Racked with a Server and left to run, a repaired core decrypts into bitgold for the colony treasury and a milestone for the deep research tree — and the core itself doesn't survive the reading.

"Somewhere in there is everything Daedalus ever knew about his own children. We're about to read his diary with a crowbar."

Bitgold you can hold. LOAD CARD in your wallet moves an amount onto a card in your pack; REDEEM puts a card's whole balance into the wallet of whoever carries it — both at a vault link. A card belongs to its bearer: hand it over, shelve it, lose it. When a survivor dies, their whole wallet falls with the wreck as a card, and a card on the ground never decays.

"The ledger remembers who paid. The card only remembers who's holding it."

Rebuilt Daedalus silicon, racked on gold-bonded CPUs — the second Factory-only line, and the only thing built expressly to keep an Icarus Core company while it decrypts. Install one at the Research Lab and it stands ready for a core to dock.

"We build the machines that read the machines that fell. Somewhere Daedalus is either proud or horrified. Possibly both."

A counter and a set of shelves, built to stand at the Tradewind Exchange. Bind it to one category, price what you're willing to part with, and it restocks itself from the common stockpile while the Exchange is powered — a visitor sees the shelf, never the stores behind it.

"The wall law, in furniture: they see what's for sale, not what you've got."

Two docks bolted to the Exchange floor, in full view of the road. Drive a rig onto one, name a price, and she sits there for anyone to buy — outfit and all, though nobody touches her tools until she's off the lot again.

"Try not to lean on the merchandise."