Holding the ship together in one piece in the middle of pitched battle is a full-time job. In fact, it’s your job! Let the Captain and the Gunners worry about what’s going on outside the ship; your only concern is keeping each and every component on board fixed up and ship-shape.
Hull repair point.
Repair point for the balloon.
Once engines go out, your ship is a sitting duck. Or you'll be spinning...
You'll be repairing guns quite often.
As ship components come under fire, they take damage and their performance begins to suffer: engines lose speed and maneuverability, and weapons lose turning range and effectiveness. Eventually a component will become so damaged that it is unusable. If this happens to your balloon, you will rapidly lose altitude until you hit the ground, dealing constant damage to your hull until you are able to repair the balloon and lift off again.
If a section of your hull becomes badly enough damaged, you will no longer be able to repair it. Lose all sections of your ship’s hull, and your ship is no longer in business.
Basics
Repairing a Damaged Component
In order to start a health repair, choose what repair tool to use. The Shifting Spanner makes quick repairs and the Pipe Wrench makes longer but sturdier repairs (time and amount of health), and the Rubber Mallet is somewhere in the middle. Choose your tools wisely by pressing the number key corresponding to the desired tool.
Once you have a wrench out, walk up to a component until you see the Repair UI. You’ll be able to see the health and repair state the component is in. Left Click at the component to immediately apply the health and begin a cooldown.
The component indicator changes to show component status. This gun is damaged, with only one bar of health.
Now the component has had health applied and is in the middle of a repair cooldown, with the circular indicator filling to show progress.
Cooldown
Once a repair is started, the component is taken offline (for a gun, you can’t use it anymore) for a number of seconds. This is the repair cooldown. The the top gear in the Repair UI will empty and begin to fill up to let you know when the component is done cooling down. The component can’t be repaired again until the cooldown is complete.
Rebuilding a Destroyed Component
Destroyed components can be rebuilt using the same tools used to repair, but the action is a little different. Instead of hitting the component once and waiting for a cooldown, a destroyed component must be hit repeatedly to apply small amounts of health until it is back online.
Multiple crew members can pitch in to rebuild a destroyed component faster; the more, the merrier!
This gun has been completely destroyed and needs to be rebuilt. Note the red indicator.
The gun has been half rebuilt and still needs another whack.
