What determines whether commodity canisters are legal salvage or not?

[IstvaanDCIV]

So as a change of pace from Thargoid stuff I've been going around uninhabited systems at the edge of the bubble picking up materials/commodities/escape pods. But when I moved from one system where all the canisters I found were described as being "legal salvage", I'm now finding that in the next system over they are seemingly all "illegal salvage". This is annoying since I don't want to have to deal with the extra hassle of handling illegal goods.

So what are the factors which determine whether commodities are legal to pick up or not?

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Basically down to government type and security level.

Illegal Goods

Illegal Goods are items that are prohibited in a location by the ruling Minor Faction. Which items are prohibited can be checked on the System Map, by selecting a Starport and reading the Prohibited list in the sidebar. If you are carrying illegal goods, the Illicit Cargo indicator on the...

elite-dangerous.fandom.com

It might also be that some are tagged as stolen, which will be illegal anywhere there's laws regardless of the above.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

Basically down to government type and security level.

Illegal Goods

Illegal Goods are items that are prohibited in a location by the ruling Minor Faction. Which items are prohibited can be checked on the System Map, by selecting a Starport and reading the Prohibited list in the sidebar. If you are carrying illegal goods, the Illicit Cargo indicator on the...

elite-dangerous.fandom.com

It might also be that some are tagged as stolen, which will be illegal anywhere there's laws regardless of the above.

Not quite what I meant. The goods I'm picking up are completely legal in all territories, normally. Stuff like narcotics, weapons, nerve gas, I just leave those. Minerals, precious metals, consumer goods, those are the kind of things I pick up. But sometimes they are legal salvage and other times they are illegal salvage. I even picked up a couple of "stolen" escape pods that I had to jettison.

I'm wondering if there is any rhyme or reason to this, or if it's just the luck of the draw.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Basically it comes down the backstory of the cargo container of whether it was jettisoned (illegal) or jettisoned and abandoned (legal). From the point of view of finding this stuff in signal sources or on planetary surfaces, yeah, it's pot luck since from a realism point of view you'd have no control over how these were dumped or whether they were already stolen in the first place .