During your time in a raid or while browsing your vault in Marathon, you’ll come across dozens of different loot items. Trying to sort out what certain loot does can be a nightmare on Tau Ceti, especially when you’re in the heat of the moment with enemies breathing down your neck. However, one of the loot items that is tripping more players up than anything is called “Enhanced Salvage.”
Enhanced Salvage is a classifier that is applied to numerous different pieces of loot in Marathon. You can see whether an item is Enhanced Salvage while looting it or in your vault between raids. Marathon doesn’t do a great job of explaining what to do with this type of loot, though, so allow us to walk you through it.
What is Enhanced Salvage in Marathon?
Enhanced Salvage is usually a piece of green or blue rarity loot, and the loot that it can be ranges from a wide variety of technological items. For example, we have a Fractical Circuit in our inventory in Marathon, and you can see the “Enhanced Salvage” tag at the top of the loot box in the vault.
All pieces of Enhanced Salvage also have a unique description that reads: “Salvage: Exchange for faction upgrades or Armory items.” Naturally, this is somewhat confusing, as Marathon features no salvaging system, like in Arc Raiders. The only visible options you have with loot when viewing it in the vault are to sell, inspect, or move it.
While that’s still technically true, you’ll have to visit the Armory if you want to get the most out of your Enhanced Salvage.
How to barter with Enhanced Salvage in Marathon
When you head over to the Armory tab in Marathon, you can browse through every faction’s shop and purchase a variety of weapons, equipment, and general loot with Credits, the in-game currency.
However, if you look at the top of the loot screen in the Armory, you’ll see a tab called “Barter Wares.” Here, you can trade in your Enhanced Salvage as well as most “Unstable” items for general loot, such as healing items, consumables, ammo, and more. Unstable items consist of loot like Unstable Diodes, Unstable Lead, etc.
While you can still purchase these items with Credits, it’s much more efficient to trade in your Enhanced Salvage and Unstable loot, as they have no additional purpose in Marathon. This saves you a ton of Credits and allows you to re-gear between raids if you’re low on a certain item.
Make sure to browse through every faction’s Armory page in Marathon to see all of the different loot you can barter for. Some of the more advanced factions have fairly rare loot that is easily obtainable if you’re bartering with Enhanced Salvage.
How to get more Enhanced Salvage
Finally, if you want to take advantage of this looting system in Marathon, you’ll want to stock up on Enhanced Salvage. Unfortunately, there’s not a dedicated farming spot on any map in the game that rewards you with loot of this kind.
Your best bet is to kill other players for their loot and search the bigger buildings on the map. You should have no trouble finding Unstable items, as those are considered common loot compared to Enhanced Salvage. However, as long as you’re looting consistently, you should have no issues finding a few pieces of Enhanced Salvage per raid in Marathon.