Hardspace: Shipbreaker gets competitive with weekly scrapping challenges

Having already laid out a crushing capitalist future where debt is insurmountable and bodies are expendable, Hardspace: Shipbreaker now plans to pit its disposable workers against each other. Weekly challenges have arrived, delivering a new ship each week for gig-work scavengers to tear apart as efficiently as possible - proving once and for all who, exactly, is the best orbital vulture around.

Starting this week, each Thursday will see a new junker delivered to the collective scrapyards of Hardspace's scavengers. Everyone gets the same craft, the same objectives, and the upgrades regardless of their career progression, and are tasked with extracting as much value out of the ship in one shift. You can retry the shift as many times as you want over the week, mind, so expect to become intimately familiar with every last airlock and weld point to get high up on the boards.

The campaign has also been granted its own leaderboard, but today's update isn't just about ego-boosting. A cargo elevator has been added to the scrapyards, with a whopping great superfreighter docking periodically to collect your rubbish. Purely cosmetic, sure, but a welcome bit of world-building to the edges of your workspace. As a nice touch, you can now change your scrapper's screams.

There's also been a few spruced-up textures and models, changes to the behaviour of certain effects, and a whole lotta bug fixes - all of which are listed over on the official patch notes. If you prefer to take your time, mind, Blackbird have already released an update that lets you remove those pesky shift timers, letting you slice up starships at your leisure.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is still chugging along in Steam early access for £22/€25/$25.