✨ Loot them or Loose them
🧹 Time to tidy up the battlefield, Captains. Since Madame Hollow arrived, we have been keeping a close eye on combat around the galaxy, and some of you have been very busy indeed. In a few systems we found captains carving through pirates by the hundred, which is wonderful to see, and leaving every last hulk exactly where it fell. One field we looked at had so many wrecks piled up that it looked less like a battlefield and more like a scrapyard.
All those wrecks are not just untidy. Every one of them has to be tracked and drawn on every screen in that field, and with hundreds of them hanging about, that is a real risk of lag for everyone fighting there, not just the captain who left them.
So from today’s patch, wrecks clean themselves up.
Any wreck that has not been salvaged will break apart 10 minutes after the ship was destroyed. Pirates brought down by a field station’s guns go a little sooner, after 6 minutes. You will see each one go with the same collapse you get when a wreck is stripped clean. Ten minutes we feel is plenty of time to finish the fight, send your salvage drones in, or nip back to dock, empty your hold and come back for the rest.
This patch will go live this evening.
The clock keeps running while you are away, though, so a wreck you leave behind will not wait for you forever. Salvaging works exactly as before, and hideout bases are not affected, they stay put as always. So the rule of the field is simple from now on:
Loot ’em or Lose ’em.
Happy hunting, Captains. 😉