High grade emissions spawn rate nerfed?

Youda

Youda
I'm trying to farm the manufactured engineering materials according to this table
Source: https://youtu.be/-4HClk1cRIo?t=194
, as i did in the past.
But now i've been flying accross the galaxy back and forth for 2 days already, and i barely see any High Grade Emissions at all, and most of them are just Boom or Expansion with Proto Heat Radiators inside. I had big troubles filling up even Proto Radiolic Alloys, which have been very common in the past, and I have not found a single one with either of Pharmaceutical Isolators, Improvised Components, Military Supercapacitors. I went to several systems that were in Outbreak or Civil Unrest with population in bilions and was waiting there for 30 minutes and the only High Grade Emissions that spawned was in War state.
Is anyone else observing the same?
 

Youda

Youda
Rat Catcher said:
No: but I don't 'farm' them, so pick up whatever is reachable without deviating too much from what I am doing. 'Farming' is, to me, the absolute opposite of entertainment.

Materials traders take care of things when I'm full of any particular mat.
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It isn't fun, but it is the only way to get up to the fun stuff without devoting your whole life to this game.

And material trading ratios are utterly ridiculous and non-sensical.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
Youda said:
It isn't fun, but it is the only way to get up to the fun stuff without devoting your whole life to this game.
Click to expand...
We each play how we wish, it is true. I prefer to just play and pick stuff up as I go along - and had a lot of 'full' mats even before starting to engineer. I'm fortunate that I am in no rush to do anything when playing games, and have 'free time' enough to play as I wish. Others may not be so fortunate.
Youda said:
And material trading ratios are utterly ridiculous and non-sensical.
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They are poor, but still better than not having them at all, maybe the eventual rebalance of engineering, should it ever happen, will change this, but until it happens, it is the best we have. 🤷‍♂️
 

Christopher Roberto

C
SlickPBW said:
In 2 days you could have collected bajillions of mats in a haz res, had more fun, increased your combat rating, made lots of space bucks, and been able to trade for whatever you wanted at a material trader.
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In 20 days of that he'd be nowhere near filling up all his engineered materials. HGEs for engineering, afk massacres for space bucks and combat rating. The game's grindy enough as-is, no need to make the grind take longer. You'll end up here forever.

As for the OP's question, they've probably not changed anything, ones like pharmaceutical isolators have always had a large element of RNG to them (or some hidden factor that's poorly understood) which has often led people to question if Frontier changed something when they have a streak of bad luck. I always had better luck with systems below 1M population for those by the way, not the behemoths, but it might not matter.

I'd keep trying and visiting more systems (and try to vary it, like try differently sized systems), but since they're somewhat rare, you want to also be ready to make the most of them when you find them. The bottleneck is how fast you can restart the client. Due to programming mistakes with how the language files are loaded, both the launcher and the client needlessly take a huge amount of time to start. You can solve one of these without doing anything sketchy by using the alternative launcher the people who play this on Linux use, min-ed-launcher. It's so frequently used for this it has options to help with HGE farming like automatically restarting the client. You can get it to the point where you only need a couple to max out your pharmaceutical isolators.
 

Noobqueen

Noobqueen
Why don't you just farm at a Haz RES? It's more fun and gets you more resources. I do salvage occasionally just to get materials when I engineer, but RES sites get me more materials, help with combat level, and you can check out combat bonds.

Salvage is okay when you have bad luck though, and HGEs are good but rare.
 

Fat_Dave

Fat_Dave
The "Why don't you just farm at a Haz RES" answers are off topic.
Still the question remains: what happened to high grade emissions?
Like @Youda points out: something has changed... Why Frontier? Because we should "farm and grind" instead?
 

YuGiOhJCJ

YuGiOhJCJ
Youda said:
I'm trying to farm the manufactured engineering materials according to this table
Source: https://youtu.be/-4HClk1cRIo?t=194
, as i did in the past.
But now i've been flying accross the galaxy back and forth for 2 days already, and i barely see any High Grade Emissions at all, and most of them are just Boom or Expansion with Proto Heat Radiators inside. I had big troubles filling up even Proto Radiolic Alloys, which have been very common in the past, and I have not found a single one with either of Pharmaceutical Isolators, Improvised Components, Military Supercapacitors. I went to several systems that were in Outbreak or Civil Unrest with population in bilions and was waiting there for 30 minutes and the only High Grade Emissions that spawned was in War state.
Is anyone else observing the same?
Click to expand...
Usually, I just jump to a system with "Allegiance: Empire" and "Population: > 1 Billion" and I can easily find some High Grade Emissions for Imperial Shielding (sometimes I also get Military Grade Alloys).
I tried this 3 weeks ago:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xXk1CY9xeg

I am happy with that because it's always faster than collecting materials at Dav's Hope.
I have not noticed any differences in HGE spawn rate since 2021 but your video has been released in 2019 so maybe there was a nerf between 2019 and 2021.
 

Fat_Dave

Fat_Dave
YuGiOhJCJ said:
Usually, I just jump to a system with "Allegiance: Empire" and "Population: > 1 Billion" and I can easily find some High Grade Emissions for Imperial Shielding (sometimes I also get Military Grade Alloys).
I tried this 3 weeks ago:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xXk1CY9xeg

I am happy with that because it's always faster than collecting materials at Dav's Hope.
I have not noticed any differences in HGE spawn rate since 2021 but your video has been released in 2019 so maybe there was a nerf between 2019 and 2021.
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I don't understand your answer.
I'm looking fo Pharmaceutical Isolators. Travel to a system in Outbreak (Alliance system) with >3billion population.
High Grade emissions? None
 

Brrokk

Brrokk
Youda said:
It isn't fun, but it is the only way to get up to the fun stuff without devoting your whole life to this game.

And material trading ratios are utterly ridiculous and non-sensical.
Click to expand...
This is not true. I think it's a couple of years since I dropped into an HGE, but I have almost-full materials across the board and use them regularly. Collector limpets, mission rewards and traders.
 

YuGiOhJCJ

YuGiOhJCJ
Fat_Dave said:
I don't understand your answer.
I'm looking fo Pharmaceutical Isolators. Travel to a system in Outbreak (Alliance system) with >3billion population.
High Grade emissions? None
Click to expand...
Yes, it only works for Imperial Shielding (and Military Grade Alloys).
If you want other materials like Pharmaceutical Isolators what I usually do is that I go to a Material Trader.
 

space voyager

space voyager
SlickPBW said:
In 2 days you could have collected bajillions of mats in a haz res, had more fun, increased your combat rating, made lots of space bucks, and been able to trade for whatever you wanted at a material trader.

This is how we learn.
Click to expand...
This is probably the only fast way to get materials fast and fun. A PvE oriented battleship with collector limpets in a haz res (or equivalent, say compromised nav beacon). You'll have to go to a trader very soon as your lower tier mats will get clogged.
 

Hellrider

H
I'm not sure, what happend with HGE spawn ratio, but from my few days experience they aren't rare.
This week I did some assasinations, so if you do 10 of them at once per 1 system you want to scan beacon.
In 90% of systems I seen at least one HGE, and I'm talking about systems with millions population. Not billions.
Even not saying, that high rank targets usually drop g4/5 mats (now add missions rewards, where sweet 5 units of biotech conductors are common reward). Even pharma isolators, in systems without outbreak. And you need dozens of them only if you are min maxer, which need last 3 rolls, which combined will give whole 2m/s.

It definetely isn't super fast, but if I jumped to war system, and I see 10 mission signals and 1 HGE...why not visit HGE :D
I'm checking signals even when I return to system where I took this mission stack. And in last days I havent any problems with finding signals. After it material traders are true blessing.

PS: for people which think, that game is super grindy, they need months in res, all materials, of course 150/150...no, you don't have to. Stop being completionists, and game will be much better. Idk, let's make some sheets about boosts from engineering after ANY, SINGLE roll, and check gains ;)
 
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Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
I have been farming these in the last few weeks, and can confirm, in my experience at least, that there are still quite a lot of them.

How are you set up to detect them in the first place? Asking this because those video tutorials basically suggest you just fly around until one pops up in your nav pannel. And I have found out that is not really the most optimal way. What has worked reasonably well for me is to scan the nav beacon of the given system every 5 minutes or so (in addition to flying around). Flying around only reveals a partial fraction of signals whereas nav beacons give you 100% of them in the system. Checking nav beacons tends to reveal new high grade emission ones every 10-15 minutes. Sometimes much faster. And if you find a system that resists yielding them after 2 or 3 nav beacon scans, just jump to a new one.

As an additional bit of anecdotal unconfirmed info I have also found that higher population systems give many more unidentified signals than low pop, including high grade emmisions ones.
 
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Brrokk

Brrokk
Viajero said:
I have been farming these in the last few weeks, and can confirm, in my experience at least, that there are still quite a lot of them.

How are you set up to detect them in the first place? Asking this because those video tutorials basically suggest you just fly around until one pops up in your nav pannel. And I have found out that is not really the most optimal way. What has worked reasonably well for me is to scan the nav beacon of the given system every 5 minutes or so (in addition to flying around). Flying around only reveals a partial fraction of signals whereas nav beacons give you 100% of them in the system. Checking nav beacons tends to reveal new high grade emission ones every 10-15 minutes. Sometimes much faster.

As an additional bit of anecdotal unconfirmed info I have also found that higher population systems give many more unidentified signals that low pop, including high grade emmisions ones.
Click to expand...
Interesting. Can you also use the FSS to reveal the signals, or does it have to be the nav beacon?
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Just remember you need to jump back to super cruise to see the new info updated by the beacon. Once you detect a high grade signal that you need check the timer. The more time the better so you can do as Yamiks suggests (fully exit game, not main menu, and relog).
 
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