Salvage is the reason to leave a safe berth and the reason to plan the return before you leave. The official Ostranauts store page frames the game around salvaging derelicts in a boneyard, upgrading a ship while managing debt, fuel, air, and food. That premise supports a useful salvage discipline: every target has a value, a route, a working cost, and a way to fail. The correct question is not “what can I grab?” but “what can this ship and crew recover without turning the trip into a loss?”
Choose a target with a return plan
Before approaching a derelict, record what you want from it and why. A part may repair your own ship, support a future build, or sell for money, but its value is reduced by travel, fuel, access, and crew time. The game may present a promising object that is not practical for a new save. A small, well-understood recovery can be a better first lesson than a dangerous prize.
The page cannot publish a universal loot table from the store description. Exact objects, condition, and payout are current-game facts. Instead, use the target’s visible clues, the ship’s status, and your own notes. If a community guide gives a route, record whether it assumes a particular update, mod, or starting state.
Approach before entry
Treat the approach as a flight problem first. Reduce uncertainty while you still have room to abort. Watch relative motion, target orientation, available fuel, and the status of your own ship. Do not begin a delicate interaction while momentum is carrying you past the intended point. Exact controls belong to the current keybinding menu, so this site describes the sequence rather than guessing keys.
Keep a clean save before a new class of target or a new mod. This is not a promise that every failure can be undone; it is a way to separate an experiment from a normal route. Record the build label and branch so a later result can be compared with the original.
Entry and crew safety
The store description makes oxygen, water, food, intimacy, and security part of crew AI needs. A derelict job therefore asks more than whether a door opens. Check which crew member is working, what they need, where they can wait, and how the ship will respond if the task takes longer than expected. If the warning screen changes, stop and identify the cause before adding a second action.
Do not send every crew member into an unknown space simply because a target looks profitable. Leave a recovery path and keep the person who can solve the observed problem able to reach the right location. The exact behavior of a crew need or task interruption must be verified in the current build; a guide should label that observation instead of turning it into a permanent threshold.
Sort the result on the way home
Recovered items are not automatically profit. Separate what repairs the current ship from what belongs in storage or a future build. If moving a part blocks a route or overloads a plan, pause and inspect the ship again. A clean inventory note should include the target, item name, condition if shown, and what you did with it. This helps maintain a guide without claiming that one part is always valuable.
For a job or bounty, also record the contract wording, the date, and the branch. The official store description supports salvage and bounty-style work at a high level, but it does not guarantee the same terms after a patch. Treat the official update page as the place to look for a changed system and the game screen as the place to confirm the current offer.
Failure recovery
When a salvage trip goes wrong, name the first failure rather than the final screen. Was the approach uncontrolled, the route blocked, air or pressure unstable, the crew unable to complete a task, the cargo inaccessible, or the return underfunded? Restore the clean state if needed, change one decision, and run a shorter test. Changing the ship, branch, and mod at once makes the result impossible to explain.
A future detailed page can turn these observations into a target index, but the index needs verified data. Until then, this hub deliberately gives readers a method that survives changing item values: identify the risk, set a recovery point, observe the current state, and stop before a preventable loss compounds.
Keep salvage notes reusable
For each completed run, keep the target label, approach condition, first interaction, recovered item, return state, and final use. If a bounty or gig supplied the objective, preserve the dated wording rather than paraphrasing it into a permanent rule. This record supports a future index without claiming that two targets with similar names have the same condition or reward.
The strongest salvage article is one that tells a player when to leave. An exit condition protects the ship, crew, and debt plan even when the target is unfinished. It also gives the next update review a clear test: repeat the same approach on the same branch, compare the current warning or interaction, and revise only the part that the evidence changes.
Sources and boundaries
The official product page is https://store.steampowered.com/app/1022980/Ostranauts/ . It supports derelict salvage, boneyard play, ship upgrades, debt, fuel, air, and food as core themes. The site does not copy a loot table or promise exact payout, target location, boarding control, or collision result without dated current-game evidence. Checked 2026-08-11 UTC.
Recommended guides
Choose the guide that matches what you want to do next.
All Salvage guides
1 focused guides with steps, checks, and current caveats.