Debrief

Salvage is a themed map where a floating salvage operation is taking apart a spaceship for scrap. The spaceship is therefore the map's aesthetic and strategic centerpiece; the broken ring that surrounds it is the salvage station. And if that's not complicated enough, there's a lower level of mostly natural geometry that can be used to escape the upper-level heat for a bit and move from place to place without all those pesky bullets flying at you. The design leans on Halo classics like Avalanche (the basic horseshoe layout, with the ship replacing Avalanche's hotly-contested keyhole) and Zealot (the lower level here functions in much the same way as outer space did for Zealot - but better). It also incorporates the max number of mancannons and a few teleporters as well for unexpectedly fast travel around the large map, and a gloss of old-school arena-shooter feel on top of the basic Halo template.

Floorplan

This picture illustrates how the map is put together on the top level, which is where the majority of the action occurs in most gametypes. Blue dots represent a drop shaft to the bottom level; you can walk or run into them and safely land on the ground far below due to the slope of the rock beneath you. Gold dots represent 2-way teleporters; each of these has a corresponding node in the basement level for easy transport to and from the bottom. The purple dot is The Big Lift, or rather, the point in the ship that The Big Lift delivers you to, from the bottom; this lift is one of the map's most fun aspects too as it sends you shooting up through a whole lot of open space, so fast that it's difficult for enemies to even shoot you. (The mechanics of building that thing and making it work reliably, nearly 100% of the time, were so complicated that I won't bore you with them.) Purple arrows are mancannons that move you between the four outer platforms.

This concept sketch is what I used to build the map originally. It's not perfectly to scale, but very little of this changed from my original design to the finished map. One thing that did change: the lower level (represented in lightish red) got bigger; it was originally going to be enclosed and somewhat smaller than the top, with every fall from the outer ring above usually resulting in a quick death. This also gives a clearer view of how the map was built from the ground up for CTF in particular - the flag locations (empty red circles here) are placed in such a way that the seemingly most direct route - through the spaceship - is actually almost as long as going around the outer circle, or dropping down to the middle and using The Big Lift or a teleporter to get back up.

Ordnance

- 2 Beam Rifles
- 1 SAW
- 1 rocket launcher
- 1 ghost
- 2 pulse grenades (x2)

Recon photos

Credits

Thanks to xAudienceofone, again, for helping with my lift problem; unrivaled20 for a suggestion about the bottom level that I think improved it greatly; UNSC Fenix Hulk for capturing gameplay for me that helped me see how people were playing the map; and all the other TCOJ guys for helping test this and giving great feedback week in and week out.

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