The game does actually TELL you where to get stuff. If you pin a blueprint, pull it up (right hand menu) and float your mouse pointer over the resources, it pops up a little description telling you nuggets such whether it's a ship component, or a mission reward or a commodity. Even down to suggesting what kinds of ship usually drop it (Freighters, Fighters, Authority ships etc).
Therefore, if you can't find the 1tonne of unobtainium or left-handed widgets... Try this for steer in the right direction.
THIS, by the way, is why this game really needs a manual...
Whilst the descriptions help, the problem is the number of things that share a common source and the various influential factors that the game DOESN'T tell you about.
For example the description might tell you that some common as muck manufactured material comes from military ships. What it doesn't tell you is that common variants of a material won't
ever drop on ships above a specific type or rating and instead they will only drop higher grade variants of that material... the only very common/common components they will drop are those that have no higher tier variants.
Or it might tell you "Commonly found hacking into planetary base databases". What it doesn't tell you is that the type of base (prison colony, mining outpost, comms outpost etc), security rating and size of outpost plus the number of datanodes you have to hack to access the network feed into the types of data you'll receive with some types being found in some combinations, but impossible to come across in others.
And the list goes on. Even applying to things as fundamental as elements like Arsenic.
So you end up with a environment where the randomness isn't randomness at all but tightly controlled and restricted by unstated rules of what is allowed to drop what and what grade it's permitted to make available to the player, which completely undermines the very purpose of having a rarity or grading system in the first place.
If you're higher rated and/or doing a lot of high rated combat mission than the 'very rare' variants of components will be frequent as hell for you, but the 'very common' and 'common' variants of the same components will be the things you're barely finding a couple of units of for hours of play and where you are finding them is in the purely random USS areas like signal sources or wreck sites.
And the same with planetary bases. Do a lot of high risk, large datanode networks and you'll be much fuller on lots of rare and very rare data, but have very few of the vital commons (Grade 2) or grade 3s needed by many Engineers even at high recipe ratings.
Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself providing either it's made clear what you need to target for a specific grade tier. Or better yet give the player the ability to do the associated activity at any level they wish and then have the ability to trade up or trade down what materials they do have into other grades, so you don't end up punishing players for taking on higher risks for better reward, by locking them out of ever seeing the other types of reward they still need.
But at present, Elite Dangerous does neither.
We'd probably all be better off if it really was purely random with the options available to us at present, but hopefully Frontier are aware of the flaws of the foundation they've established and have plans to quickly flesh it out in the coming weeks.
