There are several hazards that you will overcome in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. From hazard level five and up, ships can be found partially or entirely pressurized. While keeping certain areas pressurized can be useful for replenishing your oxygen, your ultimate goal is to depressurize the entire ship, if you want to safely move all of its components into the necessary salvage areas.
Depressurizing a ship incorrectly can have dangerous consequences, so it's important to always find the safest way to depressurize areas of a ship. Let's take a look at how to safely depressurize ships and a few tips for doing so.
How Pressure Works In Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Before you begin to open airlocks or cut through doors, open your scanner and inspect the ship. The default scanner setting will indicate which areas of the ship are pressurized or depressurized, indicated by a green or red light, respectively. While the pressure level by itself is not dangerous, changing from one to the other without traveling through an airlock or using an atmosphere regulator can be dangerous.
When using an airlock or atmosphere regulator, the ship's system will automatically and safely pressurize or depressurize the area. However, if you cut into a pressurized area from a depressurized area, the oxygen in the pressurized area will rapidly escape, creating a strong blast of air that can knock you flying.
Similarly, cutting into a depressurized area from a pressurized area will cause the air to escape, pulling anything in the room along with it. This can cause loose objects like cargo or chairs to crash into you, damaging your work suit or helmet. Ideally, it's best to avoid these situations to avoid damaging salvage or yourself.
However, there are cases where you are unable to safely decompress an area with an atmosphere regulator. In these cases, you'll need to do controlled rapid decompressions by opening airlock doors or cutting into the area. Most of the time, opening airlock doors is much safer, as the resulting velocity of the escaping air will be higher through a smaller opening, and lower through a larger opening.
This means that cutting a small hole into a pressurized area will cause the air to escape more quickly and violently, whereas opening an airlock door will create a larger gap for the air to move through.
How To Safely Depressurize Ships
To safely depressurize an area, first head through the airlock into that area from outside the ship. Then, when the airlock has closed, find the atmosphere regulator and activate it, safely depressurizing the room. Next, you will want to depressurize the inner walls of the ship to safely remove its panels.
Because there is no atmosphere regulator in the inner segments of a ship, you'll need to depressurize this area manually. If there is an airlock into the inner segment, use that to get inside, then open the doors to rapidly decompress this area. You can press the Z or X key to hold on to the wall to avoid flying through the open door.
Now that both the room and inner segment of the ship are decompressed, you are safe to cut and move pieces of salvage.