Hardspace: Shipbreaker Cheats and Tips
Ships Are Full of Consumables
After you get the obvious, exterior goodies off a ship — like nacelles and antennae — it’s time to go inside. But you don’t need to start cutting right away! Take stock of the loose goods first. I mean that literally: ships are usually stocked full of consumable items you can collect and use on the fly. This includes fuel canisters, oxygen, and repair kits. The former two get consumed immediately, adding to your supplies, while the kits get added to your existing stock. There are also data logs with a bit of story for you to hear. Just get close and press the F key by default to collect any of these. Though it’s probably worth leaving O2 and fuel laying around until you need a refill. Just be careful not to light them on fire!
Insides Are Weak Points
The Splitsaw feature on your cutter exists for one reason: to slice open holes. This lets you reach otherwise inaccessible salvage and junction points that connect intact parts of a ship together. However, the plasma torch doesn’t work everywhere. The outside hull of very ship seems impervious to heat… The insides, however, bear no such defenses. If you want to get inside a ship’s guts, just go in through the airlock first (and go through the air pressure rigmarole) and start cutting from within.
Pressure Isn’t Equal
Depressurizing ships is essential. If you don’t, you’re going to get flung around, knocked unconscious, or downright exploded. That’s dangerous (and costly) in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. So the game teaches you to depressurize ships pretty early on. What it does not say is that cockpits have their own, self-contained air pressure. If you go into a ship and just depressurize the cockpit — without doing the main cabin first — is going to get you a face full of debris. Use the panel in the main cabin, first, unless you want to keep the cockpit separate for some reason.
Bulkheads Contain Delicious Treasure
So you’ve gotten inside the ship. You’ve taken all the consumables (or set them aside for later) and depressurized properly. Great! Now it’s time to cut your way into the bulkhead. These are almost always actually hollow. And they’re full of more structural weak points you need to hit, as well as valuable items. If you’re struggling to find a power cell to complete that pesky work order, for instance, this is where you find them: inside the bones of the ship itself.
Hit the Connectors First
Using your scanner will reveal all the important points on a ship. Later upgrades provide even more information to help you prioritize what you need. Right form the jump, however, you can see bright yellow junctions. These take top priority! These connection points aren’t worth a thing — unlike pieces of the hull and electronics. You’re totally free to just disintegrate them using the Stinger of your welding gun. Doing so will usually detach nice, clean chunks of the ship for you to immediately salvage. This has the doubly useful effect of often opening up “hidden” areas, too.
