Another whinge about mat gathering

[5AnaHalfHatsize]

Because it's really tedious.

No, like, really, really tedious.

The new(ish) exploration mechanic is much better than the old fly-round-in-circles-till-you-run-over-them one but the spawn-rates are tweaked waAAAay too low.

I mean I've been looking for Imp Components now for about 45 minutes going from one (of the very few) civil unrest system to another and I've hit only a single HGE spawn, and it was in the wrong state.

And that wouldn't be too bad if you could do something else while you're looking, if it was possible to just find them along the way - but no, if you're looking for level 5 mats like that you pretty much have to find the right HGE spawns (reports of getting them as mission rewards are just fake news as far as I can see).

So I'm writing this basically to pass the time and that's an hour now and still nada.

Frontier, this is NOT your customer base:

 

[Wolf Starslayer]

Yes agreed, I have stopped playing atm because the engineer/mat rng gathering and poor trade rates just makes me angry, so I spend my gaming time ( and money ) elsewhere for now.

 

[Florenus]

Weird, I find at least one HGE in almost every system now. Especially those in Boom state.
Personally I think it is a little bit too often, tbh. I'm of the opinion those should be very rare, as in description.
But, well, they're everywhere, because people complained.

also, try to look for them while doing something else. I scan systems when travelling through the bubble doing something different then hge hunting (if I'm not in a hurry). And after some time you have enough g5 mats to trade for anything you might need.
as for mission rewards - there are plenty of those. mostly paying with exquisite focus crystals and biotech conductors. It's good to get allied with a faction first to get better deals.

 

[Stealthie]

Because it's really tedious.

No, like, really, really tedious.

Hmmm, sounds familiar.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/lordy-hunting-for-hges-is-dull.509104/

For me, I'm fine with having the current way of collecting mat's being a way to obtain them but it shouldn't be the only way of doing it.

Take raw mat's, for example.
You can just plonk yourself down on almost any planet and shoot rocks in the hope of getting what you want.
As a step up from that, you can scan planets to establish their mineral content and then shoot rocks on a favorable planet to get what you want a bit more quickly.
Even better, you can locate planets with Geo' POI's, land there and harvest a modest guaranteed supply of what you want fairly quickly.
At best, you can pack your bags and head off to somewhere with a suitable Bio' POI and harvest gigantic heaps of what you need really fast.

There are, in short, different ways to achieve things, depending on a player's skill, knowledge and tenacity.

Similar thing should apply to ALL forms of mat' gathering.

Let's have pirate-bases which can be raided to obtain reasonable quantities of rare mat's.
Let's have naval yards which can also be raided to obtain reasonable quantities of specific rare mat's.
Let's have convoys of tough ships which can be attacked to obtain reasonable quantities of rare mat's.
Etc.

The current system is fine as a fall-back method of obtaining mat's, for those who can't manage to get them any other way.
There should also be other, faster, methods available for those willing and able to accept the required risk.

 

[Stabby_Dave]

1. Go to Dav's Hope. Collect everything. Mode switch. Rinse repeat.
2. Go to Jameson's crash site. Scan all beacons. Mode switch. Rinse. Repeat.
3. Trade up for whatever you want.

 

[Old Duck]

In contrast, I was thinking the other day that I could easily play PvE without engineering, but so much of the game is built around materials that it "hollows out" the game to just ignore them.. As an explorer, the only reason to land on a planet is to gather materials and on very rare occasion scan something for the codex. Sure, I can see a pretty view, but there is no other "purpose" to driving around in my SRV as an explorer than materials.

Signal sources are the same way. I love salvaging wrecks, but that salvage is almost always materials. Why can't a wreck have some LTDs floating around?

Even mission rewards are credits (I'm too rich already), rep / influence (only interesting if playing BGS), and materials.

So if anything, it's almost as if materials are TOO abundant and emphasized in this game IMO. It would be nice if there was some gameplay that revolved around something else. The Codex could have been so much more in this regard, but alas...

Disclaimer - I'm a minimalist who only modestly engineers my relatively small fleet, so I really don't have any problems with "too few materials" as some apparently do.

 

[Vardaugas]

Engineering is not an either or thing. You can easily get up to grade 4 and then add more grade 5s as the materials come in. Pinning blueprints made that convenient. And for the rare grade 5 materials you can use a material trader to get a few to to some rolls. Most manufactured materials you get from combat and encoded signal sources. High grade grind is a meme.

 

[Lightspeed]

I have the same experience (it seems, as many of us do, maybe even most of us ..... all of us ?).

I have four conductive ceramics, but wanted to top up my cache with these items. Could I find any, after hours of searching? None.

And it destroys the wish to play, it really does. You kind of close the game down and say to yourself "what am I doing wasting my time with this?" And it's reaching that point for me now, I'm afraid.

 

[Vardaugas]

All conductive materials seem to be found in conflict zones. That's where I got all my conductive polymers* from.

*Edit: Polymer capacitors. The conductive polymers are mission rewards.

 

[Old Duck]

Engineering is not an either or thing. You can easily get up to grade 4 and then add more grade 5s as the materials come in. Pinning blueprints made that convenient. And for the rare grade 5 materials you can use a material trader to get a few to to some rolls. Most manufactured materials you get from combat and encoded signal sources. High grade grind is a meme.

These days I engineer mostly to experiment with special effects. I already have very capable ships, so there is no need to keep on engineering for the rest of my days playing ED.

I have four conductive ceramics, but wanted to top up my cache with these items. Could I find any, after hours of searching? None.

And it destroys the wish to play, it really does. You kind of close the game down and say to yourself "what am I doing wasting my time with this?" And it's reaching that point for me now, I'm afraid.

But then what? I'm at the point where I can do anything I want in the game with the ships and engineering I have, but there's nothing else to do. Sure, I could buy some ship I don't own and engineer that, too, and eventually have a fleet of 1,000 ships G5 engineered for every possibility, but is that really the reason we play this game?

Like I said previously, I wish engineering wasn't THE focus of the game, yet threads like these seem to prove that it is.

 

[Kissamies]

I don't bother with signal sources. I just collect the materials in bulk and let the trader sort them out afterwards.

• Raw: On my exploration trips I always land to log out. I try to find a surface POI and go shoot some needle crystals when I do that.
• Manufactured: I have a dedicated PvE ship with collector limpets for that.
• Encoded: I end up scanning a lot of ships in PvE. Usually I also idly scan the ships that fly across my nose in stations too to see if they have punny names.

 

[Maymo]

I don’t think I’ve ever had a HGE drop of improvised components in all the time I’ve been playing, from what I’ve read they seem to be the holy grail of the g5’s.

Like Old Duck, I run a pretty small fleet so I don’t share the same frustration with mat gathering as others do. Some of my ships share modules to.

RES combat provides half of my mats, the other half come from being a fiend and blowing up ships at anarchy nav beacons. Material trader can then usually fill in the gaps...

FWIW it would perhaps be better if HGE’s were capable of dropping an assortment of g4/g5 materials rather than a specific state dependant type.

 

[Stealthie]

1. Go to Dav's Hope. Collect everything. Mode switch. Rinse repeat.
2. Go to Jameson's crash site. Scan all beacons. Mode switch. Rinse. Repeat.
3. Trade up for whatever you want.

I REALLY wish people would stop saying this about Dav's Hope.

You might, on average, collect 1 Chemical Manipulator drop per lap of Dav's Hope.
That's 3 CMs per minute.
That's over an hour, including relogging, to fill your supply of CMs.
You then take your 150 CMs to a mat' trader and swap them for G5 mat's at a rate of 6/1 if you want PI's or 36/1 if you want some other G5 mat'.

Let me just emphasise that so there's no confusion: Your 150 CM's will get you a grand total of either 25 PI's or FOUR of any other G5 mat'.

You've spent an hour (or more) don't mind-numbing, spirit-crushing, laps of DH to get FOUR PRA's, EFCs or whatever.
But let's carry on.
It usually takes around 10 rolls to complete a G5 mod'.
That means it's going to take 360 CMs to trade up to get 10 of most G5 mat's.
You can carry 150 G4 mat's at once which means it's going to take 3 trips to DH to collect enough CMs to trade for enough G5 mat's to complete one G5 upgrade.

In a nutshell, ~3 hours (minimum) to get enough G5 mat's for ONE mod'.

So, no.

Dav's Hope is NOT a good way to obtain G5 mat's.
It's fine for obtaining the stuff that is there, if you don't fancy exploding things to obtain the same stuff, but it's a really bad idea to rely on it, and trading, to obtain G5 mat's.

 

[5AnaHalfHatsize]

Personally I think you should be able to get any mat from a ship kill, and the quality of the mats that drop should be based on the difference in capability between your ship and the ship you destroy.

So if you manage to take down an elite Annie in your stock sidey you'd get dozens of G5 mats.

 

[Elfias]

I have to say that currently I like it much more, dont have shortage often. Sometimes I run short on something but with ability to trade mats I can do whatever even get different mats and than I just trade them.

For Manufactured I have collector limpet in ship and collect whats left after killing NPCs.
For Raw I go to Vulcanism.
For Data I switch the game off and go to do something else lol.

Not perfect but much better than before. Guardians thats something completly different.

 

[Vardaugas]

Guardian materials are now easily available in the degraded signal sources where The Prospect was build. I'm basically filled to the brim with them. Now getting the pattern data, that's an entirely different thing.

 

[Reggit]

I have the same experience (it seems, as many of us do, maybe even most of us ..... all of us ?).

I have four conductive ceramics, but wanted to top up my cache with these items. Could I find any, after hours of searching? None.

And it destroys the wish to play, it really does. You kind of close the game down and say to yourself "what am I doing wasting my time with this?" And it's reaching that point for me now, I'm afraid.

Okay - so, i admit, i'm a bit of a weirdo - but my experience is the exact opposite of this.

When i'm sat there in a fully-Engineered 'whatever' ready to go, i struggle to figure out exactly where and what to do. (I usually end up annoying Squad mates!)
But when i'm running around picking up some materials and theorycrafting what the hell to do with em - i find i'm really engaged, dare i even say excited, over the prospect of how God-like my next ship will be and how ill NEVER need another ship again.........heh - never seems to work out that way

That being said - by picking up all the G5 materials i come across (and most of the G4 mats too!) I find i usually don't need huge amounts of materials when i do decide to build a new ship....I just need to make sure i take a break from Engineering from time to time so my mats have a chance to recover (and trade for the rest)

The System could do with some tweaks....its not perfect....But i value my Engineered modules all the more, knowing i put 'some' amount of effort into making them

....yeah....weird, i know!

 

[Stealthie]

I have the same experience (it seems, as many of us do, maybe even most of us ..... all of us ?).

I have four conductive ceramics, but wanted to top up my cache with these items. Could I find any, after hours of searching? None.

And it destroys the wish to play, it really does. You kind of close the game down and say to yourself "what am I doing wasting my time with this?" And it's reaching that point for me now, I'm afraid.

Honestly, in my more paranoid moments I wonder if the game "rolls a dice" to decide some fundamental things about your CMDR when you first create them.

On my main account, Conductive Ceramics are the bane of my existence.
I can do laps of DH until I'm, literally, full of Chemical Manipulators, Configurable Components and Conductive Polymers but I'll still only have collected 20-odd Conductive Ceramics.
Conversely, on my alt-account, I visited DH and farmed it to set myself up with a pool of mat's to start engineering and I quickly maxed-out my supply of Conductive Ceramics.

It's like the game picks certain things which you're going to be "lucky" and certain things which you're going to be "unlucky" over.

I hope this isn't what happens but it sometimes feels like it is.

 

[ADAMtheWELSHMANz]

Guardian materials are now easily available in the degraded signal sources where The Prospect was build. I'm basically filled to the brim with them. Now getting the pattern data, that's an entirely different thing.

Aim for Guardian ruins, not structures. No enemies and there'll often be upto a dozen obelisks to scan in the area, or a few close together that you can scan/relog on to max out your pattern data pretty quickly

 

[Stealthie]

Okay - so, i admit, i'm a bit of a weirdo - but my experience is the exact opposite of this.

When i'm sat there in a fully-Engineered 'whatever' ready to go, i struggle to figure out exactly where and what to do. (I usually end up annoying Squad mates!)
But when i'm running around picking up some materials and theorycrafting what the hell to do with em - i find i'm really engaged, dare i even say excited, over the prospect of how God-like my next ship will be and how ill NEVER need another ship again.........heh - never seems to work out that way

That being said - by picking up all the G5 materials i come across (and most of the G4 mats too!) I find i usually don't need huge amounts of materials when i do decide to build a new ship....I just need to make sure i take a break from Engineering from time to time so my mats have a chance to recover (and trade for the rest)

The System could do with some tweaks....its not perfect....But i value my Engineered modules all the more, knowing i put 'some' amount of effort into making them

....yeah....weird, i know!

Same here.

Just spent a week re-working 3 AspXs, 3 DBXs, an iCourier, a Krait and a Hauler all at the same time and I really enjoyed trying to figure out what mat's I'd need for all the mod's I planned, figuring out how to get them all in the most efficient way and then figuring out how to move ships/modules around to get all the mod's done.

And then, after I finished, I just find myself thinking "'kay. Now what?"