Great stuff - thanks for this!
All engineers leveled to grade 5 - a brag, a guide and a feedback
- Thread starter Teryd
- Start date
Very good guide!
I'd add my advice for those who, like me, are allergic to driving that bouncy nausea thingy called the SRV.
Get your Elements from Barnacles! Nowadays they change state weekly, look up the Canonn website for the latest status, which ones are intact.
I made one trip to the Pleiades, did some hours of farming to amass about 600 Elements. Now I am at 11 of 15 engineer unlocked to level 5, didn't have to hunt meteorites at all.
I'd add my advice for those who, like me, are allergic to driving that bouncy nausea thingy called the SRV.
Get your Elements from Barnacles! Nowadays they change state weekly, look up the Canonn website for the latest status, which ones are intact.
I made one trip to the Pleiades, did some hours of farming to amass about 600 Elements. Now I am at 11 of 15 engineer unlocked to level 5, didn't have to hunt meteorites at all.
Generally speaking I would say that farming barnacles is a much, much faster method than surface prospecting ftr, but ty for popularising the real best way to level up engineers, which is jumping from one mod tree to another finding the easy ones. That's a big thing for new players, plenty of people give up on engineers before realising that the best way to get mats is to craft a lightweight mod that requires heat dispersion plates or other easy to find loot.
Just look for it at imperial space.
Imperial shield is as same common as core dynamics composite in federal systems. Actually enough common depite being very rare more than certain common data. Not need more than 20 of it, as it can be replenished quite fast. Not mention in upcoming update, after we gonna will get more units per mat collected and every mat will be easier to find than now. It will be very easy to have stockpile of anything.
Otherwise that "guide" aint is half bad... Its not all about it, but close. Its perfect about gettin level up with enginers... for those who still stuggle with it.
Imperial shield is as same common as core dynamics composite in federal systems. Actually enough common depite being very rare more than certain common data. Not need more than 20 of it, as it can be replenished quite fast. Not mention in upcoming update, after we gonna will get more units per mat collected and every mat will be easier to find than now. It will be very easy to have stockpile of anything.
Otherwise that "guide" aint is half bad... Its not all about it, but close. Its perfect about gettin level up with enginers... for those who still stuggle with it.
Last edited:
nice one nost
Why don't you tell us what you don't understand? You have to do 3 level 4 mods to get to level 5.
I still dont get how Engineers works.... I leveled my rank to 4 and try to get to 5 now (currently 14%) only with rank 1 upgrades with Felicity Farseer, the Meta Alloy i have bought from Maia but i still struggle to understand how all this works together.
I read and re-read this article and it doesnt help me much, except for the Inara.cz link and i also did try to get the grasp of it with a video called "Elite Dangerous Tutorials - How to Level Up With Engineers Quickly?" from MassiveD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cze6d-pfNig and some other videos i dont remember now... I guess i have to experiment around, at one point in time i will have my "AHHA" effect i guess.
But nonetheless i reached a point where i can increase my rank and i bet i will get my rank 5 FSD at some point in time.
Instead of trying to get between levels 4 and 5 with dozens of only level 1 mods, you could just do three level 4 mods. Much quicker.
Yes: You only lose rank when you call in a favour to get a weapon special effect. Making 'normal' level 5 weapons and not 'paying' to have a special effect does not decrease rank.
Yes.
Level 1 modifications only increase your rank from level 4 a very small amount. It's a fine way of doing it if you are patient. However, it is quicker to gain rank by doing the highest level modification you can currently do, but uses more rare materials. If you do that, you only need to do three upgrades to get to the next level.
It's a matter of preference. either way is fine.
Full list of blueprints and engineers here: http://inara.cz/galaxy-blueprints. It's not official, but it is generally very up to date and accurate. It's very useful for planning and seeing what you need.
The most appropriate modification to get rank is generally the one for which you have a good supply of materials.
For example, I do a lot of combat, so I have lots of the materials found in combat wreckage. I focus on upgrades which use those rather than - say- arsenic or polonium which are found in the SRV, which is something I don't really do often.
I'm not too sure what you mean. What data specifically?
No problem.
![BigBANGtheory [VR]](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/71/71385.jpg?1644873788){kind=avatar}
why get them all to Lvl5 when some do not even offer Lvl5 modifications?
Nah, the favor only applies to picking a special seconday effect of your choice on weapons.
All Engineers have 5 'ranks' of your reputation with that engineer, gained by the methods described above. As BigBANGtheory pointed out, however, not all Engineers have blueprints that are rank 3, 4, or 5, so it's not always necessary to unlock those ranks. There's a few engineers that I have only gotten to about 50% in rank 3 in order to unlock another engineer.
You get those things from scanning ships, wake echoes, or as mission rewards.
The gain required for each rank increases exponentially with each rank.
Rank 1: 3 grade 1 mods gets you to rank 2.
Rank 2: 3 grade 2 mods gets you to rank 3. It takes 9 grade 1 mods to reach rank 3.
Rank 3: 3 grade 3 mods gets you to rank 4. It takes 9 grade 2 mods to reach rank 4. It takes 27 grade 1 mods to reach rank 4.
and so on and so forth; I'm not certain I'm correct on the exact numbers, but it basically works like that.
Any missions, as far as I know...though some regions of space are more likely to reward certain items than others. Nobody really knows for certain, I'm afraid, and I think inara has the best known descriptions and hints to the locations of various materials.
Yes. Scanning ships =/= the materials and/or data you can collect in a signal source.
Mount a wake scanner on one of your utility mounts, head to a busy station (or if you want to get fancy, find a "Distribution" POI in a system that's in a famine state), wait for NPC ships to leave, then target and scan the wake echoes they leave behind. (It tells you what system they jumped to and if you really want to, you can use it to make a hyperspace jump and follow them. Totally unecessary to follow them for collecting data, though.)
The number are more like:
Using grade 1 only
1->2 - 3 rolls
2->3 - 11 rolls
3->4 - 50 rolls
4->5 - 200 rolls
I use grade 1 mods to reach level 4 typically and then use some mod with easy to find mats to do 3 level 4 rolls to reach level 5 e.g. lightweight weapon mod level 3 and 4 is easy to get mats for and uses a buyable commodity.
Edit: I am using "grade" and "level" interchangeably...
Last edited:
In my experience, as long as you sit down and plan, it's very easy to just bring enough materials (and formerly commodities) to do the requisite 3 mods of the 'proper' grade to get to the desired rank, and then get whatever modification I'm truely after. Many of the recipes tend to 'share' materials and commodities, so that I can collect everything I need in 1 round trip instead of a more haywire trip.
Definitely preferable, to me, than collecting potentially hundreds of, say, Iron, to waste on mods.
But, also bearing in mind, there's many cases where I intentionally choose lower-grade mods because I don't need the benefits of higher-grade ones and it's so much 'cheaper', so to speak, to use grade 1 mods. (Powerplants, for instance, I actually just roll grade 1 armored mod [I think?] for a special effect to increase the power capacity (usually it seems to give ~7%), instead of actually going for the increased capacity mod.)
I am glad I got all my engineers to level 5 except for 2 I don't have any interest in other than I unlocked them because I would struggle now interdicting does not work for me anymore.
Interdicting haulers in anarchy space was a major source for me for some of the materials required.
I don't get why people think of it as a grind either I thought of it as a 3 month campaign that for the most part I enjoyed.
Interdicting haulers in anarchy space was a major source for me for some of the materials required.
I don't get why people think of it as a grind either I thought of it as a 3 month campaign that for the most part I enjoyed.
