Deep Salvage

About this game

Deep Salvage is a roguelike push-your-luck deduction game about knowing when to stop. You are a salvage operator stripping a dead star-freighter, one face-down deck at a time. Breach a tile beside you and it gives up salvage credits and a number: exactly how many rogue security drones are touching it. That number is the whole game. Most reveals are not a gamble but a deduction, and the board never lies, because every deck ships with three guarantees baked in — the airlock's whole neighbourhood is drone-free, a clean route to the hatch is proven by search before you ever see it, and the hatch sits further away the deeper you go. What turns the logic into agony is the walk home. Credits only bank when you stand on the airlock and extract. Drop through the hatch and salvage pays more — one-and-a-half, double, triple, quadruple — but drone density climbs, the grid grows, and every deck stretches your escape line back past every drone you flagged on the way in. Hit one and a shield goes; hit a third and the entire haul is vapour. Shield cells patch you up, scanner nodes sweep a three-by-three free, a sealed vault in the worst corner pays a jackpot it has thoroughly priced in drones, and one probe per deck safely tests a single tile — the escape valve for a real coin-flip. Sweep a deck clean for a quarter bonus if you are greedy and good. Click to breach, right-click or long-press to flag, Z to probe, E to extract; on a phone one button auto-paths you home along everything you have already seen. Best haul, deepest deck, and lifetime salvage all persist, so no run is wasted — but the number you will remember is the one you were carrying when it went dark.

Controls

Click or tap a tile next to your operator to breach it and step there. Right-click or long-press to flag a suspected drone.

Keyboard

• Arrow keys or WASD walk onto already-revealed tiles.
• Z arms the probe, E extracts at the airlock.

Getting about

• Tap any revealed tile to auto-path there, or use the Walk to airlock button.

How to play

Breach a tile beside you to claim its salvage and read its number — the count of drones touching it. Deduce the rest and flag them.

Going deeper

• Somewhere on the deck is a hatch down: the next deck pays a bigger multiplier, but has more drones and a longer walk.
• Credits are unbanked until you return to the airlock and extract, and a third drone hit vaporises the lot.

Your kit

• Spend your one probe per deck on a real fifty-fifty, splice shield cells to repair, and crack the vault only if you fancy the walk back.
• Extracting is not quitting — it is the decision the game is about.

Read the full Deep Salvage rules and strategy →