EVE Salvage Methods

So someone asked whether it was possible to assign individual salvage drones to individual wrecks rather than letting them do their own thing. The answer is apparently yes, you can manually assign individual salvage drones to individual wrecks, which is a lot of extra clicking (to the tune of N drones and M wrecks where N is usually five and M a "small" positive integer). Automation? Nope, not here.

A next question might be, which method takes less time, letting the drones blob up or manually assigning them to wrecks? We're ignoring the player effort part, and assume that the player is perfectly efficient in assigning drones to wrecks. Me, I just let the drones do their thing, and on rare occasions will put them all on a particular wreck, as extra clicks is not what my fingers need.

To answer this question we need a salvage drone simulator, and to make some guesses about the actual game logic.

There are some interesting results with five salvage drones going after 10 wrecks (five being the usual complement of drones, and 10 picked randomly),

    $ perl access.pl 2>/dev/null
    # Gang
    min       = 152
    max       = 1105
    range     = 953
    sum       = 4974050
    count     = 10000
    mean      = 497.405
    median    = 483
    mode      = 453
    variance  = 18480.3762126214
    stddev    = 135.942547469957
    variancep = 18478.5281750002
    stddevp   = 135.935750172647
    # Solo
    min       = 133
    max       = 1561
    range     = 1428
    sum       = 4583617
    count     = 10000
    mean      = 458.3617
    median    = 443
    mode      = 433
    variance  = 19465.967669877
    stddev    = 139.520491935332
    variancep = 19464.0210731101
    stddevp   = 139.513515736326

assigning drones individually to individual wrecks (solo) appears to take less time than gang work, on average and for the minimum, but solo has a higher maximum, which means sometimes, rarely, the RNG will screw you over and it would have saved time to let the drones gang up. Lower numbers are better, and the values are in server ticks, which last for one second each (roughly).

            Gang     Solo
    min      152      133
    mean     498      459
    max     1105     1561

    $ sumtime 152
    2m 32s
    $ sumtime 133
    2m 13s
    $ sumtime 1105
    18m 25s
    $ sumtime 1561
    26m 1s

So you can, in theory, save about 39 seconds when salvaging 10 wrecks, or probably some number of seconds less than that if you're not perfect about doing the drone to wreck assignments within a single server tick, and for a whole lot of extra clicks (target all the wrecks, launch drones, click on each of the drones, each of the wrecks, etc etc etc) versus target nothing (zero clicks), launch drones (one click), apply drones (one click).

Sometimes optimal play leads to degenerate play…