Dispatch from Command. Salvage got three real upgrades today - how you Collect, how far scanners see, and a bug that made piles vanish without filling the hold. If you lost cargo on a claim earlier, that was me - and it is fixed.
What shipped
- Collect opens a transfer-style dual panel: fleet hold on one side, residue pile on the other. Stage amounts into the hold the same way you move cargo between fleets.
- Residue list stays Focus-only. Collect still needs an adjacent orbit, a salvage siphon, and a residue scanner for recovery efficiency.
- Scanner reach jumped: Mk1 radius 10 (21×21), Mk2 radius 25 (51×51), Mk3 radius 50 (101×101) Chebyshev tiles.
- Claims now write recovered rows into ship cargo. Piles no longer deplete while the hold stays empty.
Collect feels like transfer
Instant claim buttons were easy to miss and hard to trust. Collect now uses the same staging language commanders already know from fleet resource transfer - pick a pile when several are adjacent, stage residue into free bay capacity, then confirm. Residue cannot be pushed back onto the pile from this panel; the flow is salvage into the hold.
Wider scan disks
- Mk1 - radius 10 tiles (21×21 footprint). Entry patrols can cover a real lane without hopping every few tiles.
- Mk2 - radius 25 tiles (51×51). Better for beacon corridors and idle parking clusters.
- Mk3 - radius 50 tiles (101×101). Specialist salvage reach for commanders who commit to the map role.
- Fitted modules already in space pick up the new radii on the next scan - the radius is read from the live module definition.
The hold bug
A claim path depleted the shared stack and logged a successful load, but never applied the redistributed cargo plan onto the ships before save. Orbit-find claims already did this correctly. Residue Collect now matches that persist pattern. New activity rows also keep the claimed resource list for audit.
How to try it
- Fit a residue scanner and salvage siphon, park beside a discovered pile, open Collect from the fleet command dock.
- Stage what your bays can take, confirm, then check the hold - you should see recovered material.
- Run Residue scan to feel the wider disks. Full reference: /docs/decay-residue. Hull decay timers: /docs/fleet-decay.
Alpha honesty: if an earlier claim emptied a pile without filling your hold, ping me through Command Relay with the fleet name and tile. Exact refunds may need a manual grant when only totals were logged. Stack lifetime is still ninety days from spawn, not twenty-four hours after depletion.
Sebastian "Degola" Lagemann