New Mining Character Day 11 - Salvaging

The basic skills necessary for salvaging were the fastest to train up. Salvaging in a nut-shell is relatively light on skill intensity. It's a good idea to train up the Salvaging skill as much as possible so that it'll take less cycles to salvage a wreck. Having good skills to boost your capacitor capacity and recharge rate is also recommended as salvagers eat up a lot of cap. I did not train any additional skills support skills though.

Just as a proof-of-concept, I went to Jita and bought a frigate that in my opinion was the most suitable one considering already-trained skills. I went with a Kestrel - Caldari frigate, primarily because it can fit 4 salvagers at once and offers 305 m3 of cargo space. The cargo space is not a big issue since salvaged materials only take up 0.01 m3, but it helps if you have a chance to take some loot from the wreck as well.

Salvaging is useful if you run a lot of missions. When salvaging/looting your own mission wrecks, your mission payout may at the very least double once you sell the loot. Otherwise, you can just warp through asteroid belts and salvage the wrecks that other miners leave behind. You can safely salvage the wrecks that don't belong to you, but be prepared for possible consequences if you take the loot out of a wreck that doesn't belong to you. Of course it's unlikely that a mining vessel will be equipped with warp scramblers, but the miner can always come back in a combat ship if you decide to linger in the system.

So, find a system very popular with miners and start warping from belt to belt. You'll find tons of wrecks to salvage! There are ships that are much better suited for salvaging than Kestrel, particularly destroyers are very good to use, not to mention the dedicated salvaging ship Noctis. The fit that I used on the Kestrel is as follows:

Kestrel Salvaging Fit

High Slots: 
4x Salvager I


Medium Slots: 
1x Experimental 1MN Afterburner I
2x Small Azeotropic Ward Salubrity I (shield extender)


Low Slots: 
2x Beta Hull Mod Overdrive Injector



The equipment in the low slots is for faster ship movement, but can be replaced with Expanded Cargohold if more cargo space is required. For asteroid belt salvaging I'd stick with overdrives. You can't use a tractor beam on wrecks that you don't own, so you have to fly to them fast.

You definitely won't get super-rich salvaging belt rat wrecks, but at times you'll be lucky to salvage something expensive. It's more or less hit or miss, and the more rare a salvaged item is, the more expensive it is on the market. Your success salvaging does not depend on the salvaging skill level though. The skill level only reduces the number of cycles it takes to salvage a wreck. However, you may be unable to salvage certain wrecks if your skill level is too low, usually it applies to larger wrecks: battlecruisers and battleships.

Salvaging in a Kestrel

After trying out salvaging the belts, the most annoying issue I encountered is the quickly-depleted capacitor. Running 4 salvagers at once, while decreasing the time it takes to salvage, also eats up cap like there's no tomorrow. This is primarily due to the lack of skills trained in the Engineering.

With the belts being rather empty, I have tried to go for something else. There was a DED complex active in the system. Any complex where there are rats to destroy is marked by a beacon in your overview. Most system will have some sort of a complex spawning. And if the system is popular, it's more than likely that someone has already warped there and destroyed all of the rats, leaving the wrecks just floating around. Most ratters don't salvage their wrecks, so it's a good bet that something will be left over.

Warping to DED Plex

Just as I suspected, there were lots of wrecks scattered around the deadspace complex. Time for some salvaging! This is a big of a variation on Ninja Salvaging. Usually Ninja Salvaging involves you scanning down mission runners and salvaging their wrecks right as they're running their mission. This is more of warping to the deadspace and hoping someone already destroyed the rats, but left the wrecks. I salvaged everything that I saw floating around and seeing no original owners present or anywhere around, I quickly looted the wrecks as well. The loot would disappear within less than 2 hours anyways, so might as well not let it go to waste!

Numerous Wrecks for Salvaging

After all was said and done (salvaged, looted and sold on the market), I gained almost 640,000 ISK. That's not much compared to mining for the same amount of time, but it's something else to do besides chipping rocks. And considering that the overall training time for salvaging is less than a day, a brand new character can earn a lot of ISK starting with salvaging. All training needed for a new character is Mechanics III, Survery III and Salvaging I.

Salvaging Haul (cost: about 640,000 ISK)

Continuing on with trying out career branches related to mining, the skill queue for today is:

- Jury Rigging III
- Refining IV
- Industry V (almost 3 days still remaining before completion)

If you're a little tired of mining, definitely give salvaging a try. You'll certainly get mixed reactions from mission and complex runners if you start salvaging their wrecks (or even some very possessive asteroid belt miners/ratters). Have fun with salvaging!