In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you must depressurize the interior of the vessels you’re salvaging. If you don’t take care to vent all the air out of ships, they’ll suffer explosive decompression as soon as you cut the hull. Unfortunately, LYNX Corporation doesn’t give you a manual detailing ship operations, and you’re forced to learn how to depressurize ships in Hardspace on your own.
How to depressurize ship interiors in Hardspace: Shipbreaker
The first time you hit Tier 2 ships, you’ll probably end up confused about how pressure works in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. You can use the airlock to get into a vessel, but it’s not readily apparent how you vent the atmosphere from the inside.
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Your key obstacle, as well as the tool you’ll need to depressurize ships, is the Atmospheric Regulator. This device is found in the interior of vessels and will automatically attempt to keep the atmosphere pressurized. You can manually activate it to depressurize a section of the ship. However, it only works on a per compartment basis unless you put some work in.
Tier 2 and 3 ships consist of two compartments: a cargo/passenger area and the cockpit. Each of these areas has an Atmospheric Regulator. If you use the one in the cargo area, the cockpit will remain pressurized and vice-versa. Even if you open the cockpit door and attempt to use a regulator to depressurize the ship, the regulator in the other section will simultaneously try to repressurize the ship, leading to an explosive decompression event.
The trick to safely depressurizing ships in Hardspace: Shipbreaker is to turn the entire ship into one compartment by removing barriers in a particular order. On tier 2 and 3 ships, you can do this by following these steps:
- Enter the ship through the airlock and reseal the airlock door.
- Open the cockpit door.
- Use your grappler to disconnect the Atmospheric Regulator in the cockpit.
- Close the cockpit door, and use your cutter to slice the doors off.
- Use the Atmospheric Regular above the airlock to depressurize the ship.
- Open the airlock.
By completing these steps, the ship should now be depressurized and open to the vacuum of space.
The same principle used to depressurize tier 2 and 3 ships remains true for tier 4 vessels and up. However, these craft are much larger and contain multiple compartments. For big ships, this is sort of a puzzle as you have to figure out how to get the entire vessel pressurized so you can safely depressurize it.
