Star Citizen Salvage Material Finder

Construction salvage is the raw material you get from breaking a ship’s frame apart, as opposed to scraping its outer skin. This material is referred to in game as Unrefined Construction Material, or UCM. It comes in three grades, and the grade depends entirely on which ship you brought, not on the wreck you found.

Construction Rubble is the light grade, produced by the RSI Salvation, the Drake Vulture and the MISC Fortune. Construction Pieces is the medium grade and currently comes only from the Argo MOTH. Construction Salvage is the heavy grade and comes only from the Aegis Reclaimer, which returns the most material per cubic metre of hull it eats.

None of the three can be sold as it comes. All three refine into Refined Construction Materials, which is the commodity kiosks actually buy, so a hold full of raw rubble is worth nothing outside of player trading until it has been through a refinery. That refining step is the single most common thing people miss.

Recycled Material Composite, usually shortened to RMC, comes off the outside of a hull rather than from breaking the ship’s hull up. Hit the mouse scroll wheel until you see the heads pop into view, then left click and hold the beam on the wreck, and the outer skin comes away as RMC, packing itself into SCU crates aboard your ship as it goes.

Any ship with a salvage head can do it, including the small ones, and unlike breaking a hull apart there is no size limit on scraping. You can strip a capital ship with a Vulture if you have the patience and somewhere to put the 1 SCU boxes you produce.

How much a wreck holds depends on how much outer surface there is to cover, so a big flat freighter gives far more than a compact fighter of similar length. RMC needs no refining at all, which is what makes it the beginner’s income: scrape, fly to a kiosk, sell.

Five ships can run structural salvage, and they differ as much in crew as in size. The RSI Salvation is the one built for working entirely alone starting out. The MISC Fortune and the Drake Vulture both suit solo work or a crew of two with extra storage space, which is where most people salvage day to day. The Argo MOTH wants a small to medium crew, usually three or more, and the Aegis Reclaimer is a large-scale operation that optimally expects at minimum three if you want it to be convenient.

Crew matters more than it looks, because somebody has to deal with the containers while the beam is running. On a solo run you stop scraping every time the hopper or buffer within the ship’s cargo area fills. With additional crew it is easier to ensure you can keep scraping and munching away on wrecks, rather than having to stop because the hopper filled up and needs unloading.

Size ceilings are fixed to the ship type you are piloting and no module or upgrade moves them, so the ship you are flying determines what you can and cannot break down.

Three ways, and they suit different moods. Wrecks turn up as you fly, particularly around known trouble spots, and you can simply take one you stumble across.

To look deliberately, use your ship’s scanner, by default V, and send a radar ping with Tab. Wrecks show up on the return like anything else with a signature, and sweeping a quiet area beats flying in hope.

The third way is to buy the location. The contracts app in your mobiGlas sells Salvage Rights, which hand you a wreck’s position for a fee. That is a real cost to weigh rather than a formality: nearly every salvage contract charges you to accept it, from around a thousand up to two hundred thousand, and what you strip off the wreck is your return. Some unlawful jobs hand over the location free and pay you on top, because of what they are asking you to do with it. The contract table further down lists the lot.

Fly within range of the wreck and switch the ship into salvage mode, by default M. Aim the beam at the hull and the interface will tell you what is there to take.

The outlines are the part worth learning. Blue means an excellent amount of material left in that section, yellow means mediocre, and red means useless or nearly stripped. Working blue sections first is the difference between filling a container and wasting a beam.

Pick which scraper module to use with the right mouse button, then hold the left mouse button to start scraping. The lasers sit on gimbal mounts, so G enables gimbal mode and lets the beam track without flying the whole ship around the wreck.

This is the part that catches people out on their first run. As material comes in, the ship holds a fixed number of SCU worth of material, shown on your HUD as a meter to the right, and once it is full you cannot keep scraping until it has been ejected by the onboard filling station.

Worse, if the filling station’s storage area is already full, you can keep working but you will not actually get the rest of the material, and it is not recoverable. It is simply lost as you carry on working with a full hopper.

To clear it, use a Pyro RYT Multi-Tool with a TruHold Tractor Beam Attachment, or a dedicated MaxLift tractor beam, and move the containers onto your ship’s cargo grid by hitting the material you want ejected on the small touch screen located on the salvage ship’s hopper. This is the job a second crew member earns their share doing, because while they are stacking, you are still cutting.

Yes, and it needs very little. Equip either a Pyro RYT Multi-Tool with a Cambio-Lite SRT Attachment and at least one canister, or the dedicated Cambio SRT with its own canisters.

Walk up to the wreck and aim at the hull. The tool uses the same blue, yellow and red colouring as the ship interface to show what is left in each section. Hold the left mouse button to run the beam, and swap canisters as they fill.

There is a second use for what you collect that most people never try. RMC in a canister will patch your own hull: switch the tool to patching mode, by default B, aim at a damaged section and hold the left mouse button. The tool pulls material out of the canister and repairs the plating, which is worth knowing a long way from a station.

RMC sells as it comes, at commodity kiosks, and the price moves a great deal between buyers. The spread across the buyers listed further down is wide enough that where you unload is worth more than how well you scraped, so it pays to know which kiosk you are heading for before you fill the hold.

Construction materials are different because they have to be refined first. Unload the raw rubble, pieces or salvage through a freight elevator into station inventory, start a refining job, and sell what comes back. Refined construction materials sell for roughly double what RMC does per unit, though the refining takes time and a cut.

The sell table further down lists every buyer for both, with the system filter, so you can see what is worth flying to from where you already are.

There are three things to take off a wreck and they suit different ships. RMC is the steady one: no refining, no size limit, sells anywhere, and it is what most people run. Construction materials pay roughly double per unit but only after refining, and only five ships in the game can produce the raw grades at all.

The third is the wreck’s components and cargo, which is per-wreck loot rather than a hull constant: guns, power plants, shields and whatever was still in the hold. Tractor those out before you fire the beam at all, because scraping and fracturing both destroy what they touch. Locked components have to be released from the derelict’s own cockpit first.

If you are choosing what to fly, the calculator below sorts every hull in the game by what it pays, and the pay rate column ranks wrecks by what they return for the time they take rather than by size alone.