Hardspace: Shipbreaker – How To Depressurize
Job simulations are a popular category in gaming. There’s satisfaction in taking on a role with a clearly defined goal and doing the job well. Whether you’re working as a chef, gladiator instructor, or powerwasher, there’s no shortage of virtual careers to partake in. Some of them even take place in worlds very different from our own.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a sci-fi sim about ship salvage, and while it might not seem exciting to smash an abandoned ship into scrap metal to throw in a furnace, getting the job done in space efficiently and while avoiding an explosive or otherwise messy death. One of the most fundamental but troubling issues with scrapping a ship is depressurization: releasing the air trapped in the ship without ripping the ship to pieces or causing a catastrophic meltdown in the process. Here’s everything the player needs to know about depressurizing.
Pressure Relief Basics
A reason for that Hardspace: Shipbreaker As cinematic as can be is the level of detail and realism it brings to the salvage. Improperly breaking the pressure seal on a spacecraft has some consequences, none of which are desirable. The sudden depressurization will rip the contents out of the newly depressurized area and throw them into space in an undifferentiated cloud of twisted scrap metal. This makes sorting, collecting, and recovering the dropped ship components far more time-consuming and frustrating than it otherwise would have been.
Improper pressure relief is also costly. The player won’t be able to get as good a return on their salvage if many of their most desirable components were simply ripped into the vacuum of space and smashed against each other. The depressurization can also throw the player off the ship, with potentially fatal consequences if near the rupture point, and unintentionally turn the game into a sci-fi comedy. Finally, if the ship’s core or volatile contents have been damaged by depressurization, death can result, so it pays to do the right depressurization.
How to relieve the pressure
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is not a sci-fi utopia and the player has to work hard and take risks to make money. The first step is to check if a certain section of the ship is under pressure at all. The player can do this by using his Scanner. The green squares that appear indicate pressure zones and give the player a good idea of where it is safe to cut and where not. Red zones, on the other hand, indicate areas that are not under pressure. When the ship is pressurized, the player should always enter the ship through their airlock. A glowing blue indicator shows the airlock is pressurized. The player can open and close the door with the interaction button.
Once you’re inside, it’s time to find those Atmospheric regulator and deactivate it via the interaction button. Unfortunately the controller will only depressurize one area. In some cases, the ship does not have one Atmospheric regulator or the controller damaged, making depressurization more complicated. Then all that remains is a controlled (unsafe) pressure release. Before performing a controlled depressurization, use either the character’s hand or the grabber to remove loose parts from the ship’s interior to prevent an incident when depressurization occurs.
The player can now perform controlled depressurization by drilling a hole in the cockpit or otherwise opening up the ship. The same realism that makes this sci-fi game great also makes it dangerous, so take it slow. It’s generally safer to perform controlled depressurization from the outside, and it’s important not to cut into the ship in locations with explosives, coolant, or radiation lest the player suffer their fallout. Either use the brakes or steady your hand against the ship to avoid being pushed away by the draft. The smaller the air bubble that is depressurized, the less violent the reaction can be, so it is usually a safer option to depressurize three rooms individually rather than a large room at once.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is now available for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.