Deep Delves

Deep delves are the work nobody sane volunteers for and everybody signs for anyway: sealed sites — derelict ships, dead stations, abandoned labs — that pay in salvage and pay big in the deep places. A delve contract is the Mercenary Guild's most dangerous paper, and its most profitable one below a Calamity-band capture.

Taking the contract

Delves post at the Central desk. Your license rank gates what you can sign — a Bronze dive needs a Bronze lead; below-rank crew ride along and share the pay (see The Mercenary Guild). Entry rules cover the rest: permits, airlock codes, salvage splits. The Guild's share is your fee for the writ — without it, you're not a delve crew, you're trespassers with a map.

How a delve runs

A delve is a stack of zones — depth bands from the entrance to the core. Depth one is the docking spine or the stairwell head. Each band deeper is worse: worse hazards, worse inhabitants, better salvage.

Two rules make delving what it is, and both are true the way weather is true:

• A zone is never the same twice. Encounter pools roll fresh every visit. The corridor you mapped last run may be sealed; the deck that flooded has drained — or flooded somewhere new. Maps are a best guess with an expiry date.
• Restock. Every zone re-rolls after its restock beats of in-world time. New inhabitants. New hazards. Shifted layout. Clear a site and walk away, and it grows back differently. Delve work never runs dry — the deep places make more of themselves no matter how long you play.

Minibosses and the deep boss

Named minibosses hold middle zones — roll their presence per arc, not per run. They carry their own special loot: hoards, dropped hardware, things they stole. The deep boss holds the deepest zone, and its special loot table is the reason delve crews exist: guaranteed signature salvage on a clean kill, less on a broken one.

Nobody tells you the counters. You earn them — in rumor, in prep, in crews that went before you and came back wrong.

Going deeper than the map

Here is the part the desk does not print: there is no bottom. Push past the last mapped zone and the next one generates — every two depths the threat band steps up the ladder (Street → Elite → Monstrous → Calamity → Cosmic), the hazards escalate one step, and the finds get rarer. Crews have turned back at depth nine of a five-zone site. The deepest depth your crew reaches becomes the new mapped edge — and it restocks like everything else.

Payout

Contract fee from the desk, salvage per the site's claim, and everything carried out. Special loot — boss coffer, miniboss hoards — is yours to sell, keep, or quarantine when the desk insists. Note what the desk quarantines: it is a list of things that worried someone enough to write down.

Surviving one

• Prep beats power. Sealed suits, surge charges, acid rounds, fire-suits — the sites punish the unprepared more than the weak.
• Every delve has at least one survivable exit. Finding it before you need it is the job.
• The environment fights for whoever feeds it. Cover, sealed doors, vented atmosphere — a smart crew makes the site spend its hazards on its own inhabitants.
• If the party is outclassed, the honest answer is: turn back, restock your own gear, and come back when the site has grown into something you can carve.