Any tricks for finding high grade USS?

[Stealthie]

****ing bull is what this is, nothing works with any dependability. I just spent two hours in Arcturus, pop 400 mill, less than 20 USS's, not a single HGE.

I'm sure it's all a very complex calculation but I think that, basically, whenever you jump into a system the game sets a "base probability" for things happening, including USS spawns.

Once you're confident about where stuff should be appearing, you can use that knowledge to determine whether or not you're currently wasting your time or not.

If you jump into a system where you should be finding, say, improvised components and you don't find any after 10 minutes, just wrap it up and try elsewhere cos the game has obviously decided that you're going to be "unlucky" this time around.

Course, sometimes, even when you get lucky it can be annoying too.

Spoiler

 

[khaos526]

Best advice I have is to try and search for Encoded or Combat Aftermath or Degraded or any other USS. Make sure you really want to find those ones and then you'll be plagued with HGE's. ED knows what you want and will then give you everything you don't need.

I've found HGE's from 100ls from the main star out to 75,000+ with no rhyme or reason or difference in frequency.

Now I tend to look for the HGE's based on the material I want, rather than the signal type. So for Imperial Shielding, I'll look for them in Archenar, for Pharmaceutical Isolators, I'll go to Bunda for example, or any other system that meets the requirements for PI's, since we all know systems can change, states can change and so forth. What may be a Boom state, might be different tomorrow. Though systems like Sol, Beta Hydri, tend to be in BOOM more often than not, so they can be more reliable for those types of HGE materials.

For me, I tend to start looking right as I leave the main start and then usually go out to about 16,000-20,000 ls away. For some reason I always seem to have better luck in that distance and after 20,000 it seems to go down a bit in frequency. I seem to get the most between 7,000 and 16,000. But again, that's just plain luck without anything going on behind it.

This gives me a chance to go forward, watch TV, etc on the way out, then on the way back in, I can get a long time for ship scanning for those mats...

 

[Stealthie]

I've seen this clustering happen in multiple systems so I don't think it is a fluke.

One of the clearest demonstrations I had, of this, was in a system with binary stars around 250KLs apart.

I could start at the A star, target the B star, fly toward it and pick up plenty of HGEs until I got about 70KLs away from it.
By the time I got 100KLs away, I'd be getting no HGEs at all.
If I carried on heading toward the B star I'd start picking up HGEs when I got within around 100KLs of that star and they'd be coming in regularly when I got within around 70KLs of it.
Fly all the way to the B star, turn around and head back toward the A star and exactly the same thing would happen.

Clearly both stars had a "sweet spot" that reached out to around 70KLs so there was a "dead zone" between them.