Engineers About to start first time, expectec cost and time investment?
- Thread starter Dr Seuss
- Start date
Engineering is irreversible so make sure you have the ship and modules you want before you put the high grade blueprints on. You can casually collect enough materials to get up to grade 3 blueprints. Higher than that starts to require focus. How much you want to do is a personal thing. A lot of people can't even stand the unlocking stage of engineers, much less the material gathering part.
See also http://www.elite-dangerous-blog.co.uk/post/Engineering-30 - this is slightly outdated as to GUI changes in the right-side panel, but otherwise gives useful information about engineering.
First, you must be familiar with inara.cz and coriolis.io sites. The best start would be to unlock Felicity Farseer and mod a ship with everything she has (FSD, thrusters, power plant, etc.). Read the description for each mod at inara.cz and make a list of materials you need.
Basically you will have to dedicate yourself to 2 activities: materials collection and engineers unlock/raise them to grade 5. There are a lot of ways to collect materials: missions that offer them as reward, killing other ships and collect the debris, collecting meteorites fragments with the SRV and special places (from volcanic to barnacles to brain trees or places like Dav's Hope, The Bug Killer, or Koli Discii). You also have to collect data by scanning ships or wakes or planetary/megaships installations data points (also crashed ships in the special places like Jameson's Cobra). You will also collect materials from USSes (Degrated Emisions, Encoded Emissions, High Grade Emissions, etc) that you encounter in supercruise (or by scanning the NAV beacon in a system or by using the FSS with the scale at the most left area).
After you have a lot of materials and engineers unlocked, you need to think what do you want to mod and what mod to choose, depending of your playing style. There are obvious mods (like increase FSD range + mass manager special effect or dirty drive tuning with drag drives), but there are also more specialized ones, like for weapons.
You may want to use a tool (like EDEngineer) that will show you in real time what you have and what you need for a certain blueprint.
You may treat engineers casual (and stick to Felicity for example) or unlock and mod everything to grade 5 on a ship. Just try to avoid the burnout if there are activities that you need to do while collection mats but you don't enjoy them. Don't do repetitive jobs more than a couple of hours and don't do them for many days in a row - you may feel you don't want to play the game anymore...
Some will say "just play the usual game you like and collect mats while doing this". I don't agree with that, engineers need a certain level of commitment if you want to fully modify to grade 5 a ship for a certain role. Unless you are ok to modify a ship per year.
The good news is the result is wonderful: I basically don't want to fly an non-engineered ship anymore. When I buy a new ship, I immediately apply the usual pinned blueprints to it and go to some engineers for special effects only. But this means that every once in a while I dedicate like a week-end to just collecting materials.
Basically you will have to dedicate yourself to 2 activities: materials collection and engineers unlock/raise them to grade 5. There are a lot of ways to collect materials: missions that offer them as reward, killing other ships and collect the debris, collecting meteorites fragments with the SRV and special places (from volcanic to barnacles to brain trees or places like Dav's Hope, The Bug Killer, or Koli Discii). You also have to collect data by scanning ships or wakes or planetary/megaships installations data points (also crashed ships in the special places like Jameson's Cobra). You will also collect materials from USSes (Degrated Emisions, Encoded Emissions, High Grade Emissions, etc) that you encounter in supercruise (or by scanning the NAV beacon in a system or by using the FSS with the scale at the most left area).
After you have a lot of materials and engineers unlocked, you need to think what do you want to mod and what mod to choose, depending of your playing style. There are obvious mods (like increase FSD range + mass manager special effect or dirty drive tuning with drag drives), but there are also more specialized ones, like for weapons.
You may want to use a tool (like EDEngineer) that will show you in real time what you have and what you need for a certain blueprint.
You may treat engineers casual (and stick to Felicity for example) or unlock and mod everything to grade 5 on a ship. Just try to avoid the burnout if there are activities that you need to do while collection mats but you don't enjoy them. Don't do repetitive jobs more than a couple of hours and don't do them for many days in a row - you may feel you don't want to play the game anymore...
Some will say "just play the usual game you like and collect mats while doing this". I don't agree with that, engineers need a certain level of commitment if you want to fully modify to grade 5 a ship for a certain role. Unless you are ok to modify a ship per year.
The good news is the result is wonderful: I basically don't want to fly an non-engineered ship anymore. When I buy a new ship, I immediately apply the usual pinned blueprints to it and go to some engineers for special effects only. But this means that every once in a while I dedicate like a week-end to just collecting materials.
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Engineering is not irreversible per se, you can remove the modifications. But the materials paid for it are gone. (Just to nitpick)
Nits being picked. It is good advice for starting out and Mugur's advice is there for a bit of depth.
How many times have you removed Mods? I am too mean to waste the materials. I store then and hope they will be useful, sometime.
Nits being picked. It is good advice for starting out and Mugur's advice is there for a bit of depth.
How many times have you removed Mods? I am too mean to waste the materials. I store then and hope they will be useful, sometime.
I did a few times when I was too lazy to get a fresh module, but I only wanted to point it out theoretically
Generally - unless you have a deadline or a spec requirement - I would advise being fairly casual about the engineering, as it has diminishing returns.
If you max a module out to the top of grade 5, that will give you a certain performance boost, at the cost of around ten materials at grade 5, and a lot of lower grade ones.
If you just make a grade 3 module, that will give you 60-75% of the performance boost (depending on the module and blueprint), at the cost of about three grade 3 materials and a few lower grade ones. In practice this means that it takes under 5% of the time of the grade 5 upgrade, and gives you most of the performance.
(When you start out, most modules you'll only be able to engineer that high anyway, because you won't have access to the specialist engineers)
If you use pinned blueprints, you can then push the modules further - without needing to go back to the engineer - whenever you have the spare materials.
If you max a module out to the top of grade 5, that will give you a certain performance boost, at the cost of around ten materials at grade 5, and a lot of lower grade ones.
If you just make a grade 3 module, that will give you 60-75% of the performance boost (depending on the module and blueprint), at the cost of about three grade 3 materials and a few lower grade ones. In practice this means that it takes under 5% of the time of the grade 5 upgrade, and gives you most of the performance.
(When you start out, most modules you'll only be able to engineer that high anyway, because you won't have access to the specialist engineers)
If you use pinned blueprints, you can then push the modules further - without needing to go back to the engineer - whenever you have the spare materials.
^^^^^^ Good info above, plus...
My approach:
Because the engineers are dotted about the place it is my contention that the very first thing you should approach is unlocking either Felicity Farseer or Elvira Maartuk and upgrading your FSD jump-distance, which will make further engineers easier / quicker to access. Unlocking Flic requires getting to Scout (if you are not already) then a trip to Maia to buy 1 t of MetaAlloy (or go murder a barnacle "fruit"). Elvira needs you to have gone 300Ly from your start - if you have not done so yet then just fly past Ngurii until the 300 Ly has passed then back to Ngurii to buy the three Soontil Relics you need to bribe her with.
So if you took a DBx or AspX and upgraded the FSD then you would have less jumps to for example go out to a Guardian module location, farm the bits there for a guardian FSD booster and so have an even bigger jump-range (and so less jumps) to facilitate materials gathering or engineer-base activities.
BTW - This should be almost permanently open in a browser window : https://inara.cz/galaxy-engineers/
have fun but don't have a cow
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What should one expect when one goes engineering?
If I go full bore will time keep disappearing?
Credit-wise? Ship-wise? Not to mention mat's too,
What to start off with, for easy access to Broo?
That's how Dr Seuss asks questions.
One of the best sources that I know of to save you a lot of time is Cmdr Exigeous great videos. He has videos on how to unlock each engineer, as well as the excellent third party software EDengineer. He also has a video on building a dedicated material gathering ship in the AspX. And other video's on the best ways to gather materials for engineering. Though some of this did change with the lastest update. He also has some very good guides on ship building. All of his videos are small and take very little time to watch and learn and he is direct and to the point.
IMHO Enjoy the journey
If you want to unlock engineers it means doing lots of different tasks - trading, exploring, mining, combat, black markets.... You can get these activities out of the way quick but if you take your time a little and get used each activity it can be fun.
start collecting mats - stick a wake scanner on you main ship(s) and drop in on signal sources as you go.
If you want to unlock engineers it means doing lots of different tasks - trading, exploring, mining, combat, black markets.... You can get these activities out of the way quick but if you take your time a little and get used each activity it can be fun.
start collecting mats - stick a wake scanner on you main ship(s) and drop in on signal sources as you go.
You will learn to loath mat gathering. And once you have G5 on all your ships and extra modules you will feel naked without an engineered ship/module and you're hooked! Its like a drug addiction. It kills you (sucks time mat gathering) yet you MUST have it.