General guidance and advanced trickery – and a bunch of stuff that Shipbreaker doesn’t really tell you as of Early Access release.
Useful Tips and Tricks for Beginners
This is a pretty barebones guide based on observations i’ve done so far, prob will update it to be more polished over time.
Basics
- Right click while holding onto a thing with grapple to reel it in (or you)
- Objects below 250kg are easily movable without imparting inertia onto you
- Combine two facts above to easily tear stuff out of cockpits for example – computer panels and such are worth a bunch of money. Hold onto a wall, grab onto a computer until it detaches, then tap right click to make it zoop towards you. Release left click to let the object float, then grab onto it when it’s got a clear line into the barge.
- Generally speaking, objects are valued in Barge > Processor > Furnace order. Barge’s mostly objects like machines, Processor is physical objects like panels, and furnace is for scrap and other trash.
- You can hold onto things with Z and X (left and right arm respectively), this is super useful for clambering around ships and such without using your thrusters, and to throw things away from the main ship with the charged push once you unlock it.
- Definitely grab onto something if you’re using charged push of more than level 1.
- With the sound resynth upgrade, holding onto things lets you listen on them. Fuel lines make a wooshing sound if full. Lines also have glowing lights on them if they’re filled.
- Grapple “pushing” the salvaging rig or Jax can be used to throw yourself around way faster than thrusters will let you fly. Combine this with the grapple reeling.
- Braking is faster than accelerating.
- Press V to disengage all current tethers.
- Stinger (normal laser) sucks except for precision work – it completely destroys whatever you point the beam at. Really useful for cutting the useless aluminum panels lining around the Mack’ cockpit door.
- Tethers are your friends, use them a lot and just replenish them from the supply station, they’re cheap. A single nanopanel is worth about 100 tethers.
- By the way, you can toggle scanner modes by scrolling up and down. Useful when you don’t want to cut that fuel line.
- Suit Integrity upgrades reduce impact damage and the threshold to take it.
Pizza cutters are a scam, just use kitchen scissors to cut your pizza.
Disassemblies of specific parts
Thrusters:
- Pop off the thruster covers on the outside before entering ship
- Disconnect all fuel lines
- On Mackerels, this is just yellow-lighted lines in the crawlspace. The fuel tanks have a switch that can be used to pull all the fuel back in
- On Geckos, this can only be done non-destructively by using the engineering console with a Utility Key near the reactor, because the purple-lighted lines connect to the reactor and do not flush even when you disconnect a reactor. Find a bend with clear line of sight out of the engine and cut it if you are unable to flush the lines otherwise.
- After fuel lines are disconnected / flushed, use the switch on the fuel line next to the thruster to unlock it. Using the switch without flushing the fuel line often results in an immediate explosion.
Mackerel Class 1 Reactor:
- Proceed with thruster disassembly to remove fuel hazards.
- Clear a path out of the ship by popping the floor panel off.
- If attached to a fuel line, make sure the line has no lights on it (and is thus empty) before cutting the line free.
- Carefully grapple out the reactor.
- Warning: The Class 1 reactor arcs. Don’t be too close.
- Barge the reactor.
ECU (Environment Control Unit):
- Pop off the front cover with grapple sign on it
- Remove all coolant units inside the ECU – this will stop the floating frost around the compartment. You can pocket these.
- After removing coolant units, cut the coolant pipe on the backside of the ECU to free it.
- Barge the ECU with a path of least resistance. I prefer to cut the aluminum side panel off and extracting the ECU through the side of the ship, but with the ECU disconnected you can return to it later, too. It has no integrity timer, unlike the reactors.
Gecko Class 2 Reactor:
- Proceed first with ECU disassembly.
- Proceed with thruster disassembly if you want to use the utility key, otherwise you can go ahead.
- Clear a path out of the ship – usually by disassembling the cutpoints and popping the cover off above the engine in the passenger model where the reactor is vertical, or by doing full thruster disassembly and popping the back-bottom floor off in the cargo model with horizontal reactor.
- Begin by grappling off all 8 covers on the sides of the engine. This will pop the top cover off, which you can barge out of the way.
- Carefully grapple out the reactor. You should have 15 pips of integrity if you’ve disassembled ECU and Thrusters, which is plenty of time to escort it out of the ship.
- Warning: The Class 2 reactor arcs A LOT. Clear all flammables from the path of reactor extraction before proceeding.
- Barge the reactor.
Fuses & Gecko Power Generator:
- Gecko has an alternative triangular generator on the outside of the piloting compartments.
- For maximum integrity and safest retrieval, remove all fuses before proceeding with removal of the power generator.
- Fuses can be removed by pulling the switch when all red lights are off – the fuse panel will blink three times red, once white, and repeat that pattern. As of writing this guide (21st of June 2020), fuses have glitchy physics and it may be better to just throw them away rather than collect them. They serve no gameplay purpose (yet).
- After removing fuses, pull out the generator.
- Generator behaves like a stable class 1 reactor – arcs somewhat, but has nothing special with it otherwise. It seems to arc less with higher integrity, which it has if you remove all fuses beforehand.