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In part one of this blog series, I made the following rather bold claim:

If you can salvage that Rusty Longsword you found sticking out of a skeleton beside the door under the Well of Souls in Allestar Tower, then you can salvage anything at all. There is no scaling to the ability to salvage...

2bcontSalvaging weapon and armor components (blog post)

At the time I made that assertion, I was a long way into my first playthrough, and had spent well over 300 hours playing the game, including time spent on the "great cycle" of saving, salvaging, reloading, salvaging, reloading, salvaging, and saving again. Allestar Tower and Gorhart were a distant memory.

With this, the second part of my blog series on salvaging weapon and armor components, I am now right back there at the beginning again in Gorhart, with my new Fateless One, on my second playthrough of the game. I still have that Rusty Longsword in my inventory as I'm writing this!

I've learned a lot about the game since I was last here in Gorhart as a new player. When I began my first playthrough, my salvaging was mostly of the single-click variety, mashing the Ⓐ button on my Xbox controller repeatedly, to quickly salvage everything in my Junk pile, never giving a thought to what I was getting, as long as I got something. On this playthrough, I do the whole "great cycle" as I described in the previous blog post, ensuring I get the best possible components when salvaging.

From this, I can can tell you that my previous assertion that "there is no scaling to the ability to salvage" is complete and utter bollocks! I have just spent the last 45 minutes unsuccessfully trying to salvage a Cotton Heel from a pair of Old Shoes that I picked up somewhere between the Well of Souls and Gorhart. I must have been through my "great cycle" at least 50 times – slightly more than once per minute, with the time it takes to reload each time – before I finally gave up in disgust.

On the article page for Old Shoes, the editor The Supreme Deity made the observation that:

The wording used here is important. The word "include" here implies that other components may also be salvageable from this item. What else could there be but the core component, the Cotton Heel. Is it possible to salvage that as well?

My new player character currently has no skill points whatsoever in blacksmithing. I am left wondering if the blacksmithing skill does somehow affect the outcome of salvaging. Time for some primary research! Those Old Shoes seem like a good place to start. I plan to attempt to salvage them 100 times for each level of blacksmithing skill, and record the results in a spreadsheet. Once I have completed 100 salvaging attempts, I'll sell them to Rikka Egest in The Corner Shop in Gorhart. When I have added a point to my blacksmithing skill, I'll come back and buy them off her and have another go, and so on, until I've salvaged the same Old Shoes 100 times for each level of blacksmithing skill. Hopefully that will give a guide as to how the skill affects the "chance to recover better quality components", as I called it in the previous blog post.

If anyone here has already done such an experiment, please share your results in the comments of this blog post. If you can fault my scientific method, or propose a more robust and less time-consuming test, please let me know also.


EDIT: I came up with a better idea myself, just a few minutes after posting the above blog. Why not bring my player character from my first playthrough, Thoreandan, out of retirement to help settle this matter? He is a level 10 mastercrafting blacksmith, after all. If anyone can extract the core component from those Old Shoes, he should be able to.

So fresh from his new digs in the Orbocant, Thoreandan fast-traveled back to Gorhart. There are three merchants in that village, and guess which one still had the Old Shoes I'd sold to them at the start of my first playthrough? That's right, the last one I went to! They cost me a princely 2 gold to purchase back, out of Thoreandans purse of over 4 million gold. I took the shoes to the Corner Shop and attempted to salvage them 50 times, each time unsuccessful for the core component. I think we can safely say that no amount of skill increase can recover the Cotton Heel from those Old Shoes. Maybe The Supreme Deity's "include" was an "exclusive include", as in, "Components salvageable from disassembling Old Shoes only includes..."

This seems to bring us back full circle, such that I seem to have disproved my new assertion, that my previous assertion was a load of bollocks. There really is no scaling to the ability to salvage. Or is there? Does this little experiment on a single item really prove anything? Now that I have two player characters doing the testing, one a complete novice, and the other a master blacksmith, I may well have some interesting results for you in the next episode of this blog series.

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