Scavenging happens after you close the shop, when you choose the dumping grounds instead of going to sleep, and your scavenger background is what makes those trips possible. Each trip costs wound risk and the next morning's opening traffic, so it is worth taking only when the haul beats both.
On this page
Probably Stolen night scavenging: what a trip looks like
Close the shop and pick the grounds.
Choose the grounds rather than sleeping.
Equip a pack, a bandage and a tool.
Add — if you own one — a plasma cutter or a scanner.
Make your limited number of digs.
Cancel out of a tile you cannot read.
Rather than spending an attempt blindly.
Decide what fits in the pack.
A pack with limited slots forces real choices between tools and modules.
Get back before the morning opening.
You get only a handful of attempts per trip, around five in early playtests. A scanner upgrade changes how often good tiles appear rather than giving you extra attempts.
The wound odds
The in-game SCAVENGE panel shows a Minor Wound Chance of 10.00% and a Major Wound Chance of 2.25% per attempt, and scavenging is unavailable entirely while you are wounded — the panel reads "Can't scavenge while wounded!".
Bandages exist specifically to treat these wounds, so treat bandages as an operating cost of the trip and think twice when the trip would consume your last one.
What you can bring back
| Haul | Use |
|---|---|
Junk and good sets | Sort and sell |
Ruined modules | Still worth credits; an early example sold for 30 credits |
Tools such as wire cutters, plasma cutters and scanners | Equipment |
Scratch tickets | The junk drawer |
Scrap metal from broken machines | Furnace input |
Leave the labelers and the Hemingway handbook at the shop; they are no use on the grounds.
Scrap feeds the furnace
Scrap goes in the furnace bay to be smelted into ingots, modules and tools go into storage or the display case to attract buyers, and tickets go in a junk drawer. The production chains page covers what the furnace does with two pieces of scrap or ore.
The trip costs you the morning
Scavenging trades the next day's opening traffic for materials, so a late opening can trigger a missed-customer penalty and repeated misses weaken the shop's attractiveness.
Only go when you urgently need furnace inputs or sellable stock, when you are ahead on rent, when you are not injured, and when you can still open on time. Do not leave loot outside overnight, since theft is still possible afterwards.
If the reason for the trip is not digging at all, the radioactive waste page covers the hand-off route for an item you are carrying out. The vacuum robot is a shop night worker: it neither scavenges nor buys back a late opening.