You leave port in something held together with optimism. Everything better than that has to be taken off somebody else. Salvage Run is a roguelite where combat is only half of an encounter — the other half is standing over the wreck with a cutting torch and a countdown, deciding what you have time to take.
Ships are a frame plus modules with real shapes, wired to a reactor by a chain that runs through the hull. That chain is the tactical layer: wreckage conducts nothing, so a hit that kills a module in the middle of a ship cuts power to everything behind it. Aiming for the guns is rarely the best idea.
Death costs you the ship and the cargo, keeps your meta unlocks, and sends you out again. PvP is real-time and authoritative, and the stake is cargo only — enforced in the rules engine rather than hidden behind a UI that declines to show you the button.