Hardspace: Shipbreaker

tl:dr Beat the game, then maybe play a little more.

When you start out, you've got a lot of debt, but once you beat the game most of it, if not all of it, is wiped away. So don't worry about this one until you've done the story. When I played on Steam I had to do a couple more ships to clear the last of it but on Xbox it was totally cleared upon completion.

In order to unlock this achievement you need to pay off the 1.25 billion debt you start with, whilst this may seem daunting, completing the campaign will knock 930 million off of the total.
This means you only need to earn 320 million, which isn't so bad.

Below I'm going to outline the fastest way to earn credits in-game. This does involve abusing the physics system in the game and may be fixed at some point, but at the time of writing (29/09/2022) this still works.

It's worth noting that you will need to fully complete three specific ships for some achievements:




You should complete the salvage goals for at least one of each of these ships as they become available as this will further reduce your debt, fully dismantling a Gecko Class Ship for instance will net your around 30 million credits.

So, without further ado, lets get into the quick method I mentioned above.

Once you progress far enough in the story you will start receiving orders to dismantle a specific model of the Mackerel Class Ship - The Exolab variant.

Once you start receiving these, it's time to begin:

1. Select the Exolab job
2. Begin making your way over to the cockpit
3. Destroy the cockpit window (if the cabin was pressurised the vessel will begin to pitch forwards. This is perfectly fine and will help you out immensely)
4. Wait for the vessel to come to a stop if it was pressurised
5. Position yourself in front of the now open cockpit and grapple the door from the other end of the cockpit
6. pull the door towards you using , The goal here is to trap it between either the consoles or the beams at the front of the vessel
7. Start pulling yourself and the door towards the barge below (The beams surrounding the cockpit will likely get in your way, but work around them. Do not remove them! This will cause the entire shell of the cockpit to come away and make this process near impossible)
8. You want to descend at a roughly 45 degree angle, if you descend too steeply the vessel won't get fully pulled into the barge and will stick out, this will prevent you getting the full income
9. Keep yourself a fair distance ahead of the vessel to prevent getting crushed when it hits the barge and is quickly pulled in

Once the vessel is pulled in you will instantly complete the first three salvage goals and net about 75% of the vessels total value. A typical Exolab vessel is worth about 15 million, and you will typically get around 11 million per vessel using this method.

Once you get used to the strategy you can pull the vessel into the barge in around 2:30 minutes. Meaning you can pay off your entire debt in around an hour and 15 minutes.

You will of course need to take time to complete other things such as scavenging resources for the ship doctor and completing training, so the above time is only realistic on paper, but is still significantly faster than playing the game as intended.