How to play Deep Salvage

Deep Salvage is a push-your-luck deduction game. You strip a dead freighter one deck at a time, and the whole game is knowing when to stop.

The core loop

Breach a tile next to you and it gives up salvage credits and a number. That number is exactly how many rogue drones are touching that tile.

From those numbers you deduce where the drones are and flag them. This is minesweeper logic with a walking character, and the numbers never lie.

The three guarantees

Every deck ships with three properties baked in, which is what makes it deduction rather than gambling.

The airlock's entire neighbourhood is drone-free, so you always have a safe opening. There is always a clear route through. And the deck is solvable — you are never required to guess your way past a genuinely ambiguous position.

Knowing the guarantees exist changes how you should play: if a position looks like it needs a coin flip, you have missed a deduction somewhere rather than been handed one.

Going deeper, dive by dive

Somewhere on each deck is a hatch down. The next deck pays a bigger multiplier, but carries more drones and a longer walk.

This is the push-your-luck decision and it is the whole game. Deeper decks are worth much more per tile and are much more likely to kill you.

Banking

Credits are unbanked until you return to the airlock and extract. A third drone hit vaporises everything you are carrying.

So the number on your credit counter is not money, it is exposure. A run that ends on the fourth deck with a huge unbanked total scores nothing at all, and the correct play is very often to walk back up and extract a merely good haul rather than push for a great one.

The two hits you can absorb are not lives in the usual sense — they are a budget. Spending one early on a careless reveal costs you the ability to take a calculated risk later, which is usually worth much more.

Your kit, item by item

You get one probe per deck. It resolves a genuine fifty-fifty, so it should be saved for exactly that: a position where you have exhausted the deduction and two possibilities remain. Spending it on a tile you could have reasoned out is the most common waste in the game.

Shield cells repair a hit. The vault is optional and pays well if you fancy the risk.

Playing it well

Deduce before you walk. Movement is not free — a longer route past unflagged tiles is more exposure — so work the numbers where you stand before committing to a path.

Flag as you go. An unflagged drone you have already deduced is a drone you will forget about three tiles later.

And decide your extraction depth before you start descending, then stick to it. The decision to go one deck deeper is always tempting in the moment, which is precisely why it should not be made in the moment.