I won’t waste your time like the game does. Don’t try to complete those compressed plasma missions, they are buggy for now and just waste your time and energy. I couldn’t complete those Salvage missions related to it, many other players couldn’t either. I expected more from the game I have many good old memories of.
Anyway, the best thing we can do is expect a fix soon. Leave those compressed plasma missions aside and do other missions. The game doesn’t count plasma packs it requires for some missions.
Read on:
What’s Going on With Compressed Plasma
Compressed Plasma is one of the specific physical salvage items that certain deep-space contracts ask you to recover from the big unstable space hulks (those giant floating wrecks that feel like Space Jenga).
You spacewalk out, use your Gravitino Coil to yank pieces free, fling them into your Corvette’s Tractor Beam, haul everything back to a Deep Space Outpost, process it and turn the contract in for standing.
The problem? A lot of people (including me) send the compressed plasmas to the cargo hold, but they don’t count!
As I heard, some players can’t even find the damn thing. It doesn’t always show clearly on scans, the hulk’s self-destruct timer is tight and even when you pull what looks like the right part (often the reactor), you sometimes just get a regular Reactor Core instead.
Some players have tried buying compressed plasma at the outpost processing stations using the new contaminated-scrap currency and it still doesn’t count toward the mission objective.
How Space Hulk Actually Works
These aren’t the old derelict freighters. Hulks are big, open, physics-based wrecks you spacewalk through. Everything is physical industrial salvage.
- Park your Corvette so the Tractor Beam faces the work area.
- Eject and spacewalk over.
- Open your Analysis Visor, higher-value bits are color-coded. Prioritize the good stuff first.
- Some pieces (especially reactors and shielded cores) need the Mining Laser to crack open the casing or remove at least two sides of the shielding first.
- Switch to the Gravitino Coil and yeet it toward your Tractor Beam. The beam has decent range and will suck it in, breaking down oversized chunks so they fit in the hold.
- Strip too much (especially the big unstable cylinders, spheres, or the main reactor) and a meltdown timer starts. When it hits zero, the whole hulk goes boom and anything left is gone. You can survive the explosion, but the remaining loot doesn’t.
That’s the core loop. Grab valuable first, leave before it cooks off.
What You Should Actually Do Right Now
Skip the Compressed Plasma contracts for the moment. Grab other salvage jobs instead (Industrial Salvage, Stasis Lockers, CPU cores, Stellar Geodes from ice fields, etc.). Stack similar contracts so one run finishes several at once. You still get standing and progress toward the five contracts needed for station ownership.
If a contract doesn’t complete after you’ve done everything right, leave the system, reload a restore point, or toggle multiplayer off before turning in.
Compressed Plasma is currently one of the more broken-feeling pieces of the shiny new Cosmos salvage system. The overall loop is actually fun once it clicks. Just treat the plasma contracts as skippable until a patch smooths them out.
