Only 48 units of Lavian Brandy available. I need 50!

or … if you have a fleet carrier you can transfer it to there and then go pick up some more. When you have enough you can stock up from your carrier and then visit the engineer.
I did it this way on my last of 3 commanders to unlock engineers. It's sort of better, you can pre-stock all of the rares.

But it must be rare for someone to have an FC before doing this? Mining rush notwithstanding.
 
You only have to do it once, may as well just suck it up and take the extra trip.

And then you get to do the real engineering grind!
Do you mean the engineering mats? Luckily for me I decided to knock a good portion of that out in the beginning. I went to bug killer site and then crystalline shards. Then did bunch of HGE's, went to davs hope, Jameson crash. Ive got a good bit of mats now.
 
Do you mean the engineering mats? Luckily for me I decided to knock a good portion of that out in the beginning. I went to bug killer site and then crystalline shards. Then did bunch of HGE's, went to davs hope, Jameson crash. Ive got a good bit of mats now.

Great, you're set then.
 
Do you mean the engineering mats? Luckily for me I decided to knock a good portion of that out in the beginning. I went to bug killer site and then crystalline shards. Then did bunch of HGE's, went to davs hope, Jameson crash. Ive got a good bit of mats now.
Good one. IMHO, gathering all the mats required is the most tedious part.
 
@Rat Catcher good call old chap, the baggers are always happy to help out with these kinds of things.

OP, drop us a message somewhere, or PM Ratty or me and we can work something out if you still need :)
 
Geez unlocking engineers becomes a super tedious hoop jumping contest. I feel like a frickin dancing monkey who has a sadistic overlord playing mind games with me. Thats two engineers Ive been trying to get to today and I just cant.

Cant unlock Lee Cheung because I need to trade in 27 more markets. Yet when I sold the gold which I bought in another system. The number of markets it says Ive traded in stays the same!

Now this! Its utterly infuriating. Hear me space gods! I curse you!

Im just gonna go play some Cyberpunk now.
When I needed Lavian brandy Lave was in famine and I had to wait for it to exit that state to even be able to buy a single crate. You’ll get no sympathy from me. :p
 
As everyone has already said about the Rares for unlocking Engineers, buy what you can, drop it off, pop back and buy some more until you’re done.

As for Lei Chung, it was quite a while ago but I’m pretty sure I just bought 50 units of whatever and spent an afternoon hopping from system to system selling one unit at the closest station to the main star and used the “Visited Systems” filter in the GalMap to keep tabs and make sure I was in a fresh system each time.

The Engineer unlocking can get a bit tedious at times but some of them can teach you some very valuable lessons.

Again it was ages ago, but I think it’s The Dweller that needs 50 Black Market interactions.
That one taught me very quickly how to get into stations super quick and stealthy and now I pretty much always fly through mail slots at 200+ mps like it’s second nature.

Good luck o7
 
I did it this way on my last of 3 commanders to unlock engineers. It's sort of better, you can pre-stock all of the rares.

But it must be rare for someone to have an FC before doing this? Mining rush notwithstanding.
Perhaps. I only unlocked Didi the brandy lady recently when I had my FC. The only G5 mod she offers is for shield boosters so I mustn't have bothered with engineering them in the past.
 
@Rat Catcher good call old chap, the baggers are always happy to help out with these kinds of things.

OP, drop us a message somewhere, or PM Ratty or me and we can work something out if you still need :)
Thanks for the offer. I finally got it. Just made two trips. Guess I kinda over reacted. Just getting used to how things work in ED. Lotta tedium to be expected I suppose.
 
Just getting used to how things work in ED. Lotta tedium to be expected I suppose.

It's really only tedious in regards to Engineers. Unlocking them is the worst, but Engineering new ships is a bit tedious too as you will usually want to visit them. Sure, you can pin your fave blueprint for each module type, but you will usually want an experimental; so remote engineering is really only helpful when you want to put off fully engineering a module so you can just play now. You'll still end up making the trip.
 
Geez unlocking engineers becomes a super tedious hoop jumping contest. I feel like a frickin dancing monkey who has a sadistic overlord playing mind games with me. Thats two engineers Ive been trying to get to today and I just cant.

Cant unlock Lee Cheung because I need to trade in 27 more markets. Yet when I sold the gold which I bought in another system. The number of markets it says Ive traded in stays the same!

Now this! Its utterly infuriating. Hear me space gods! I curse you!

Im just gonna go play some Cyberpunk now.
Easy solution, make 2 trips no impotent rage quit necessary.
 
48 is unusual, it's normally about 14 :)

You could try jettisoning the 48 outside the station, going in to buy 2 more and then returning to scoop up the 48. I think you get a few minutes.
 
Again it was ages ago, but I think it’s The Dweller that needs 50 Black Market interactions.
That one taught me very quickly how to get into stations super quick and stealthy and now I pretty much always fly through mail slots at 200+ mps like it’s second nature.
Dweller is 5 black markets and is an example of a perfectly fine requirement. If fdev had kept it to 5-15 for all requirements of a similar nature, instead of 50 or whatever, it'd be spot on. Teaching basics, a reasonably time consuming task, but not repetitive to the extreme.
 
Doing less than 5 A to B runs is now "repetitive to the extreme"? :LOL:
No. One single unlock isn't. I meant adding all the repetitive tasks up together as the whole process of unlocking. 3x individual rare runs is repetitive when some require 3-4 runs but that's just 3 tasks out of several way more repetitive tasks and...

50 markets is extremely repetitive, though. All on its own. I thought it was pretty obvious that's the main one I was talking about considering the topic of the quote, my correction and the similarities between the two tasks.

5 black markets, maybe 10 or 15 normal markets, 3 single rare runs (no more than 15 for any), maybe 80-100t mining (roughly an hour), 15t bromelite, 25t gold, 500ly distance traveled...

That's all going to take time, each roughly 30 minutes to an hour or so to fulfil, each still flavoured to the engineer but it significantly reduces the repetition of each task. I'll say it again and again, repeating any of these game play loops more than a couple times doesn't enhance the fun of it.

I'd much rather the tasks be more interesting anyway. Like how they changed the sensor fragments requirement from how it used to be (farming HGEs) to how it is now (visit the alien crash site). That went from a repetitive, dull task to a single, interesting, fun trip.

More of that and less arbitrary targets plucked out of thin air would be great but given they won't have time to design more interesting tasks I'd settle for less arbitrary repetition.

This is my opinion too. If you don't like a few flights from Lave to engineer (about 3 jumps each way), there's no way to enjoy any of the activities ED offers.

It'd be my opinion too if that's all engineers took to do....

But even in isolation, needing to do that run four times instead of once (which is required for one, without boom) doesn't make it better, more fun, more challenging or more interesting.

It's arbitrarily set. It adds little. It's actually an incredibly lazy target anyway, given I thought the game industry evolved from "kill 10 rats" quests years ago. It'd be fantastic if Elite could do the same. It's understandable that the mission board has to follow some template design like this but hand crafted missions for a full expansion of material?

Given FDev's obvious keen interest in delivering great stories and intricate plots, you'd think the engineers story and missions might have had more nuance than this.

The guardian tech broker system is way better, for starters. Still repetitive if you do more than one blueprint - it'd be better if each blueprint had its own location and task rather than share the same resource, which is a crime fdev commit way too often with their content, which results in grinding the same loops to get stuff - but still such a fun experience in isolation. I loved it. Way, way better than any single part of the engineers process.

So yeh, 3 runs of rares when one would have been adequate does feel grindy when you slot it into the entire process of unlocking engineers.
 
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50 markets is extremely repetitive, though. All on its own.
If you've done no trading at all before suddenly deciding you need to unlock that particular engineer, the task sure seems grind(ish).
Extremely repetitive? Hardly. Pretty tedious if done the with the "instagib me all NAO" mindset? Sure.

Again we get to the point that all mission/combat/mining earnings are so ridiculously high from the get go, that the organic gameplay which was natural to any previous Elite incarnations players, doesn't happen. New players hardly pooter around the bubble trading small amounts of commodities everywhere, while figuring out what and how to do in the game and same time maybe getting their credit balance slowly up for more equipment and new ship(s). That way the 50 markets requirement would happen many times over without even trying.

I'd much rather the tasks be more interesting anyway
This is a petition I would sign. :)
 
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