The Salvage Arm
Your claw slot doubles as a grapple. Point it at a wreck heavy enough to need real pulling, cast the line, and reel it home against its own weight — nothing here is handed to your Hold by fiat. It sits in the water until the arm actually drags it free.
01 The claw slot is the arm
There is no separate arm slot to fit. The same claw that decides how well you gather crystals and creatures is read for three more numbers the moment something in the water needs hauling rather than scooping:
- Reach — how far out the grapple line can be cast at all. Past this, a haul is visible but the arm can’t touch it yet.
- Reel speed — how fast the line closes once it’s out, in weight units per second. A heavier haul on the same arm always reels slower.
- Capacity — the heaviest single haul this arm can lift at all. Over this and the line never goes out in the first place, no matter how close you fly.
Every claw’s arm numbers
| Claw | Tier | Reach | Reel speed | Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Utility ClawStock issue — the baseline every drone ships with. | Coastal | 150 px | 1.0/s | 2 |
| Heavy GrabberReels faster and lifts more; reach unchanged. | Twilight | 150 px | 1.2/s | 4 |
| Gaunt ClawSiege-forged — a little more lift, nothing else. | Twilight | 150 px | 1.0/s | 3 |
| Salvage ClawItself one of the two hauls below (§02). | Midnight | 220 px | 1.6/s | 4 |
| Shears RigTrades lift for reach — see the warning below. | Midnight | 240 px | 1.0/s | 1 |
| Filament HarpoonSiege-forged — strong across all three numbers. | Abyssal | 290 px | 1.9/s | 5 |
| Piston Crusher ClawBuilt to close hard, not reach far. | Abyssal | 210 px | 1.4/s | 8 |
| Warden HarpoonThe longest, fastest arm in the water. | Leviathan | 340 px | 2.4/s | 7 |
The stock Utility Claw is already enough to launch and land every haul in the water today (§02) — nothing about the arm is gated behind gear you don’t yet own. Only the claw fitted in your claw slot ever moves these three numbers; no Pearl and no Calibration node touches any of them.
Read the Shears Rig’s row carefully: +90 px of reach costs a full point of capacity, dropping the arm to a 1-weight ceiling. Fit it and a haul the stock claw could lift becomes too heavy again — reach and lift are a real trade here, not a straight upgrade.
02 Finding a haul
A salvage haul sits fixed in its own zone, exactly like a landmark or a crystal cluster — sail in and it’s there, glowing at the rarity of whatever it actually pays out, never richer-looking than the real reward. No separate discovery step: unlike a Ledger sighting, there’s nothing to fly close to first. Fly close enough for the fitted arm’s own reach and the rim brightens; press T to cast the line — the same key that opens a cover or a passage, resolved in the same priority order (§ux exit law) so it never fights another interact prompt in practice.
Only two wrecks exist to retrieve today — an early, small set the system is built to grow, not the whole of it:
Every haul in the water today
| Haul | Zone | Weight | Grants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Twilight lamp bar“A survey drone's lamp bar, sheared clean off and half-buried in silt. The glass never even cracked.” | Twilight Zone | 1 | MK-II Floodlamps |
| Lower Dark manipulator“A manipulator arm, sieve basket and all, wedged under a shelf of rock the way it might have fallen from something much bigger.” | The Lower Dark | 2 | Salvage Claw |
Worth noticing: the Lower Dark haul grants the Salvage Claw — the very claw that later reaches further and reels faster (Fig. 1). The stock arm is enough to pull its own upgrade out of the water.
The MK-II Floodlamps and the Salvage Claw can also still be earned the older way — a charted Twilight field, or a fully recorded Ledger — see Your Drone. The wreck is simply the faster, feels-like-the-real-thing route to the exact same part.
03 The retrieval run
The line fires the moment you press T in reach — a short, fixed beat (about a third of a second) just long enough to read as a real throw, never long enough to be the point of the interaction.
Progress fills at the fitted arm’s reel speed divided by the haul’s own weight. The stock arm (1.0/s) closes the 1-weight Twilight lamp bar in about a second flat; the same arm on the 2-weight Lower Dark haul takes about two. Fit the Salvage Claw (reel 1.6/s) and that same 2-weight haul closes in about 1.25 seconds.
While the line is out, the tether nudges your drone toward the haul — hardest on a slow reel (a heavy haul, or a weak arm), fading toward nothing as reel speed climbs. Bring more arm to the same haul and it drags you around less, not more; a weak arm on a heavy haul visibly fights your steering the whole way in.
The moment progress closes, the haul lands in your Hold and the line lets go on its own — see §05 for exactly what that pays.
04 What ends it early
A run can fail to start at all, or come apart mid-reel — either way, nothing but the time already spent is ever at stake.
No confiscation, no hull damage, no cooldown. A dropped haul is never lost — it’s simply still sitting on the seabed the next time you fly back with a line to spare.
05 What you get
A stowed haul pays the item it was always going to — the exact part named in Fig. 2, landed straight into your Hold, plus +25 Pilot XP, the same “salvage” award a cracked cover already pays (see Pilot & Classes).
Landed is not fitted. A retrieved part sits in your Hold exactly like anything crafted or bought outright — it changes nothing about your drone until you actually equip it. See The Part Catalogue & Workbench for what owning versus fitting really means.