The Relay Network has a new bay to build, and this one works for your adventurer directly. The Recovery Bay shortens the cooldowns on your loot actions (Fish, Hunt, Explore, and Mine) so you spend less time waiting and more time out gathering.
What it does
Every time you perform a loot action, the Recovery Bay gets a chance to trim a loot cooldown. When it lands, it knocks time off one of your loot actions and lets you go again sooner. It might shorten the action you just did, or a different one. The action you take is only the trigger; the bay decides where the saved time goes.
You will not see a cut every time. At first, most of the time nothing happens and you carry on as normal. The more you upgrade, the bigger the chance for a cut to land, for a cooldown to jump forward, and for you to get an extra turn earlier than you would have. To be a bit more explicit, the very fresh bay with one level 1 module gives you a 1% chance to cut the cooldown. On the high end, the biggest cut is 40% in Normal mode, with Overclock going above, into the 50% territory.
Feeding the bay
Like the Mint and the Refinery, the Recovery Bay runs hot and burns fuel.
- Fuel is Salvage. It draws from the same shared Salvage pool your other bays use, so a busy Recovery Bay is one more reason to keep the Refinery running.
- It warms up. A freshly fuelled bay starts weak and builds to full strength as it burns. Let it run dry and it does almost nothing; keep it topped up and it works at full power.
- It makes heat. The harder you run it, the hotter it gets, and an overheating bay quietly loses effectiveness until it cools.
You control how hard it pushes with its mode:
- Off: dormant. No cuts, no heat, no fuel burn.
- Under-clock: gentle. Smaller, rarer cuts, but it stays cool and sips fuel.
- Normal: the baseline.
- Over-clock: aggressive. Bigger, more frequent cuts, but it runs much hotter and burns much more Salvage.
Aiming the cuts
The action you just performed always evaluates for a cut. As you invest in the bay’s modules, it starts making extra attempts on top of that one, and those extras are the ones you can aim.
Out of the box, those extra attempts have nowhere else to go, so they simply pile back onto the action you just performed. To send them at other loot actions, you unlock targeting and raise the bay’s Focus Slots.
Focus builds up in stages as you raise the Focus Slots upgrade. At the lower tiers the bay fills your focus automatically, adding one action at a time in the order Fish, then Hunt, then Explore, then Mine. When you reach the top tier the training wheels come off and you choose exactly which loot actions the extra cuts chase. If you want every cut concentrated on your slowest, most valuable cooldown, that is where you set it.
As a (maybe?) clearer example, if you fish, initially the bay only targets fish action for the cooldown. If you level up the bay enough, it will start evaluating actions for a second time, up to 4 times on the highest-level bay. The bay can target any action from the current pool. The more you level up the bay, the more actions are in this pool, with the top tier allowing to select only the specific actions.
Banking loot toward your next quest
The Recovery Bay has a second job: it helps with quests.
Normally, when a loot find pushes a quest past what it needs, the extra is wasted. With Quest Storage, that overflow is banked instead. When you finish the quest and roll into the next one, the bank gives you a head-start on the new set for free.
A few things worth knowing:
- It scales with your quests. The bank holds a share of your current quest’s items, so the bigger your quests get, the more it can hold.
- The storage upgrade sets that share. Its tiers hold 5-80% of a quest’s worth of items as you climb them.
- Mode changes the room. Over-clock doubles how much the bank can hold and under-clock halves it. Anything you have already banked stays put even if you drop to a lower mode later, so a big over-clock haul is safe to keep.
- A warm bay banks more. The same warm-up that powers the cuts also drives how much overflow gets captured and how much of the head-start is handed over, so a fuelled bay makes the most of it.
Once you research the bank controls, you decide how it behaves at each rollover. Leave it on hoard to carry leftovers forward, or switch it to flush to wipe whatever is left after the head-start is applied and start each quest clean. There is also a manual flush button for when you want to clear the bank on the spot.
Getting started
- Build a Recovery Bay in the Relay Network and feed it Salvage.
- Set it to Normal and take a few loot actions to watch the cuts start landing. At first it may be rare, but…
- Invest in its modules to get bigger cut chance, higher cut ceiling, earn extra cut attempts, then research targeting and raise Focus Slots to aim them.
- When you are ready to lean on it for quests, research Quest Banking and buy the Quest Storage upgrade.
That is the Recovery Bay: less waiting between loot actions, and a steady head-start on your quests for the finds you used to throw away.