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Salvaging is the indelicate art of harvesting usable parts from the wreckage of exploded ships. The wreckage may be left behind by the remains of dead players or NPCs, with larger ships yielding larger quantities of salvage and wrecks left behind by more advanced ships containing more valuable varieties of salvage.

These harvested parts are used to manufacture rigs, which are semipermanent modifications to ship hulls that yield an important bonus in exchange for a mild penalty. They basically allow particular ships to be somewhat customized, and are an essential tool for most players in EVE Online.

If you have some friends that run missions, salvaging can be the most profitable activity for newbies to pursue.

Salvaging is a sort of sub-profession in EVE Online. It can be viewed as "mining" PvP wrecks in order to make that more lucrative, but it also improves mission and NPC-killing revenue dramatically, though at the expense of requiring a bit more work.

The best thing about salvaging is that the skill requirements involved are very low, and the ISK value of the parts can be very high compared to other newbie-friendly professions.

What You Need To Salvage

In order to salvage, you need a few things:

• Train the following skills in order to use the main module involved: Electronics I, Survey III, Mechanic III, and Salvaging I.
  
• A ship with a spare high slot that can fit a 'Salvager I' module and safely zoom around a battlefield to grab wrecks.
  
• A ready source of wrecks.

A couple other things can really help salvagers rake in ISK:

• The ability to a 'Small Tractor Beam I' so that you can more rapidly pull in wrecks that belong to you or a corporation member.
• In order to do so, you only need train Science III.
  
• Having ready access to a large number of wrecks produced by other players. A sample set up might be if you have a couple friends running missions in the same solar system, you can flit back and forth between their mission rooms, salvaging wrecks without any downtime.

How Salvaging Works

Salvaging itself could not be easier. The short of it is that you activate the special module on a wreck, and wait until your salvaging attempts meet with success.

The long of it is that you equip your ship with one or more 'Salvager I' modules, fly to within 5k of a wreck, lock the wreck, and activate the salvager on it. Give it a few seconds. Each time your module cycles, you will receive a message that your salvaging attempt has been met with failure or success. If your attempt succeeds, the wreck will disappear and whatever salvage was to be had will appear in your cargo hold. It may take several attempts for you to successfully salvage the module, and sometimes you will receive a message that there was no salvage to be had. Once you are out of wrecks or space in your cargo hold, you can just dock up, empty your hold, and repeat the process.

There are a few more things to know about: First, different kinds of wrecks drop different kinds of salvage, and not all salvage is as valuable. Second, you will make more ISK by making rigs out of your salvage and selling them, than by just selling your salvage on the market. Third, if you really like salvaging, you can train the 'Salvaging' skill to level V, and gain access to the 'Salvager II' module, which has a higher chance of succeeding than the tech one version of the module, and is sometimes requisite for salvaging very rare wrecks, such as those left by some of the denizens of wormhole space, or tech III ships. Fourth, the more valuable the wreck, the higher your salvaging skill needs to be trained in order to salvage it, and the less attempts each wreck will require. For example, you could not salvage the wreck of a tech II ship with salvaging only trained to level I (it usually requires salvaging III). For anything shy of wormholes, having salvaging trained to IV should suffice.

The exact salvage in each wreck will vary. It is kind of a crap shoot. As a general rule, the larger the ship that the wreck is from, the more salvage there will be and the more advanced (i.e. tech II or faction) the wreck, the more valuable the salvage will be. The best salvage generally comes from the wrecks of faction battleships. Because these are fairly rare, most of the salvage in the game probably comes from the wrecks of dead NPC battleships.