Hi folks, I am yet new to Ody material farming. Maybe it is common knowledge, but I just cannot find said materials. Is there a trick to it ?
Microelectrodes & Optical Fibers
- Thread starter RaketeMike
- Start date
Does one have to accomplish some kind of mission there ? Or can you just land at a random settlement, enter it & grab everything you get ? If I try the latter, I think will get shot down ? Can you just start your arc cutter and open everything without s/o taking care ?
Not necessarily.
You can do the land&grab, sure.
Yes, you will most probably be shot down.
You can start your cutter, but settlement personnel will notice it and start shooting at you.
Mission-wise, it would make sense to start with restart or restore missions where you get handed the power regulator right from start. You will have time during the mission to loot all the stuff without getting interrupted by personnel. However, there might be scavengers present sometimes, but you could shoot them from the air with dumb-fire missiles without risking on-foot combat.
Mate I've got them coming out of my ears, send us a friend request in game and I'll sell you as many as you like!
Cmdr Felix Cestria
Cmdr Felix Cestria
Ok, will do that as soon as I am in game next time
All i was able to find up to now were plenty of circuit switches.Your best bet is to find a system with reactivation missions (the one that gives you a power core to power up the base).
Once you have powered up the base, turn off the alarm system and just go around looting the lockers and downloading data from the ports.
You can use the cutter anywhere on these bases as there are no guards.
O7
Steal every asset that is not nailed down and trade them at bartenders for what you need. Exchange rates are not great, but curcuit switches are so plentyful they make a good trading currency.
The best value items are Graphene, Micro electrodes and Weapon components.
O7
The thing with micro-electrodes is that they are the highest trade value items in the lowest rarity category (circuits). So most people do the usual compression by trading everything up to them, ending up with high quantities of electrodes in the locker over time. I have like 600.
Don't buy them, learn how to loot everything in the most efficient way, then trade for the things you need. Unlock Domino Green to get access to backpack capacity and install that mod on a G3 Mav to make looting easier.
Don't buy them, learn how to loot everything in the most efficient way, then trade for the things you need. Unlock Domino Green to get access to backpack capacity and install that mod on a G3 Mav to make looting easier.
But they are also the least common ones
The best value items are Graphene, Micro electrodes and Weapon components.
O7
.Phew, thanks for all the informative and helpful replies! In any case, on foot material farming for me at the moment feels by far more unintuitive and a more uncontrollable black box RNG thing than regular farming. I have G5‘d multiple ships and weapons / modules in the past and G3ing standard ED stuff is extremly quick in comparison. 
Its also not so nice that you get shot at just because you take ciruit switches and the likes
. Dying multiple times for getting common materials is nothing that you will experience often with standard ED farming. There it is just mildly grindy, but not that you have to do illegal things all the time and get bunches of people drawing their weapons at you bc you are trying to gather materials. At the moment , I am just trying to G3 an Aphelion .
Its also not so nice that you get shot at just because you take ciruit switches and the likes
. Dying multiple times for getting common materials is nothing that you will experience often with standard ED farming. There it is just mildly grindy, but not that you have to do illegal things all the time and get bunches of people drawing their weapons at you bc you are trying to gather materials. At the moment , I am just trying to G3 an Aphelion .
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Circuits (which are the most common asset) are found on pretty much every planetary point of interest. Both of those are circuits, if you do a lot of planetary POIs you will soon have circuits coming out of your ears and you can trade them up for those 2 specific items. You can just go to any POI you see or do any mission that will take you to one, which also reward you something else you want.
Weirdly, graphene is super common and renders most chemical farming null by simply stacking them up (though needing these for suit upgrades will deplete the stock quickly). But chemicals don't tend to be the bottleneck, in my experience. I find the bottleneck is usually tech, then circuits. So weapon components are gold dust and I usually end up just needing to trade to fill the expensive orders required for these.But they are also the least common ones
Back in the day, microelectrodes and fibre were super common if you relogged at POIs. I don't know if you can still do that these days (I'm guessing not).
The advice here is generally good but it does expose the flaw in the game's upgrade system... EDO's material gathering meta is basically "grind lists of everything you need by gathering everything within the bracket you want then trade across" and it's not awe-inspiring game play, if I'm honest. The dopamine hit you get from trading 600 trash items to get the 30-40 rarer items you need is actually close to being inverse when compared to other games that reward you things you actually need by doing things you actually want to do.
In terms of game reward design, Elite does this a lot and seems to take the approach of declining hits (that is, you're investing time into getting things you've got no specific interest in and are then expected to "destroy" them in exchange for smaller quantities of things you do want in a system that barely registers on the "good feels" hit scale when you actually take part in it... i.e., manipulating a menu system and not actually playing the game).
Imagine a system that ordered things the other way around, giving you tasks to complete that resulted in a big hit of the items you actually want. The mission system almost does this, except it's limited to 5 (or more but only if you get very, very lucky with RNG) and doesn't include tech, chemicals or circuits. Even if it did, at a max of 5 per, you're still going to spend way, way more time grinding the lists out via missions than if you did it via bucket trading. It could be so much better. Like, you need 15 microelectrodes, right? Speak to an NPC at a suitable settlement (base "suitable" on the concept that it's the right type to have a supply of circuitry) and they provide you a list of items they can supply in return for a mission. You do the mission successfully and they'll then give you a way point elsewhere that you can go to, be it a settlement or POI, and there you'll find 15-20 microelectrodes spawned for you to collect. As you gain faction standing, the list of items they can offer increases and the end value of the reward increases. Microelectrodes may not even be on their list initially.
This adds a progression system that gives frequent dopamine hits whilst building reputation with various NPCs who offer you more options for performing missions to then unlock the locations for greater volumes of materials. All this takes time. It's all just "doing the game" but it ends with you being able to source items you need at an accelerated pace, albeit needing to still move about the galaxy quite a bit to achieve full lists (and, as Elite's factions are in a constant state of flux, you'll need to build up reputation with several different NPCs anyway).
It's just one idea. I could think of more. Elite just shows no interest in applying this sort of game play to its material gathering systems, which are all largely based on RNG and heavily reliant on the very dull trading system to work. If you want a thing, you generally cannot just go get a thing. You can go to a location with a chance of getting that thing but you need to do that same RNG dice roll 5-25 times depending on the thing. It'd be so much more fun if you could just "do things in a list required to eventually get a thing".
Edit: Just an aside, I saw a comment or two above (and these are typical in these threads) where someone is saying "just stack them up, I have 600 of them now because I just traded across" and so on. This is said from the position of someone who hasn't needed these items for a long period of play time. It's not very useful for the person who is asking the question (basically, you're saying "just play the game for months and don't upgrade for a while and you'll have everything you need to upgrade.") I see this in EDH discussions as well (just do missions for G5 mats and trade across; I have 100 of everything now!). Yup, we know you can max out storage of items "over a period of time" doing stuff and engaging in the dull trade system; saying this from the position of someone who has fully engineered ships already is misleading. This is not useful for a new player who is just starting out. The same is true for EDO. Using the trade system is essential, so it's good that the OP got told that information (as dull as a system as I think it is, it is essential) but letting them know that you've "easily" gathered 600 microelectrodes is misleading. It's not easy. It takes ages to do (not to mention requires a ton of inventory management to achieve, let's not forget that) and demonstrates only that you no longer require those items. The player who needs the items doesn't have that luxury by default and this advice is only useful if they're already done with the engineering loop and are just playing the game (useful because they may one day want to try another suit or weapon out).
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I get pretty little graphene. At least one order of magnitude less than common stuff like switches and stuff
I love it when I find 4-5 graphene next to each other in a locker, pity I've never found 5 weapon components at once..
I have just done a settlement restoration, power was on, and really every locker I opened was completely empty, I swear 
And every data panel had nothing to download. Was in a settlement in HIP 20056. Seemingly, it just shall not be. Before that, I tried to find POIs on landfall planets, nothing.
And every data panel had nothing to download. Was in a settlement in HIP 20056. Seemingly, it just shall not be. Before that, I tried to find POIs on landfall planets, nothing.
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