New player and new forum member here, and I'm looking for some advice. My first character is a mechanic character who I intend to craft things a lot, primarily acquiring the materials by either salvaging them or breaking down other objects including equipment the party acquires that's generally useless to the party, rather than just purchasing the materials outright. It helps that my character has so far been flat broke most of the time.

Thus, I'm curious how GMs have handled salvaging and scrapping before, how they quantify exactly how much material is needed for an object to be built, and how they handle encumbrance when it comes to materials.

9 hours ago, immortalfrieza said:

New player and new forum member here, and I'm looking for some advice. My first character is a mechanic character who I intend to craft things a lot, primarily acquiring the materials by either salvaging them or breaking down other objects including equipment the party acquires that's generally useless to the party, rather than just purchasing the materials outright. It helps that my character has so far been flat broke most of the time.

Thus, I'm curious how GMs have handled salvaging and scrapping before, how they quantify exactly how much material is needed for an object to be built, and how they handle encumbrance when it comes to materials.

The only question that is answerable here is "how much material is needed for an object to be built". The answer is, each piece of scrap just has a $ amount; so whatever total credit $ amount the book says to build "x" item.

The other questions, Encumbrance and price of the scrap is entirely dependent upon your GM. So that is something you have to work out with them.

I simply just put items in my mechanics path that I knew they would likely ask to scrap. A broken fusion lantern here a repulsor sled there. I decide a flat amount it is worth, I sometimes look at the original item price, but really I base it upon what I feel is a decent number. Extra success beyond first adds extra credits to that amount, usually 10-25%. Ex broken repulsor sled, 100 credits, 3 successes =150 credits. Its subjective though. Encumbrance, I don't sweat the small stuff, but if they are scrapping something large maybe i'll slap a 1-2 encumbrance on them.

I like to actually say that things have "units" of measure. So a blaster might take a recipe that requires 3 units of steel to make the frame and non-electronic parts, and other amounts to make the other parts. If it's a blaster from scratch it's going to have subcomponents and components though. Each of those will require x units of different materials. For scrap I always make it a pretty small amount of recoverable material due to impurities, missing chemical or rare material components, etc. I normally just say 10-20% is recovered of what it would take to build a new one, but you could make a mechanics check and use the results for selling to get those fractions. I also figure units of durasteel are going to be heavier than units of polymer, but gas is still pretty heavy because of the container.