How did you end up with 10 3rd party tools, several youtube videos for this? and we are only talking about a single engineer here...
This is the problem with following guides blindly... they all take you in different directions.
So, many tools out there are redundant i various ways. but a one tool that is a good place for most things, regardless of platform is
Inara
Inara can be a bit confusing to navigate, but find your favourite search engine, and search for like "Elite Inara Felicity", you will most often among the first results see somethign like
Engineer - Felicity Farseer [INARA]
That will take you directly to Inara and Felicity Farseer info. Now here you find some useful stuff like
How you discover the engineer. in this it is public.
What you need to unlock this engineer, Exploration rank of Scout or higher.
What you need to provide once you have fullfilled the requirements, 1 Meta alloy
And of course all the engineering blueprints she has to offer.
So what is the hard part here? Reach exploration rank scout? well exploration should be sort of self explanatory, go out in the void and discover stuff, get back and sell the discovery data, repeat until you reach Scout or higher. This should be a pretty self evident step that do not need you todo any 3rd party tools, or if you are way to lazy, you can off course look up best exploration builds and hear about rad to riches etc. etc. but there is no real need for most of this to reach Exploration rank Scout.
The are very a few things to figure out when it comes to exploration
1. How to keep going, ie refuel your ship, so a fuel scoop is often vital to achieve this.
2. How scan systems to gather data that you can sell, using the integrated FSS (Full Spectrum Scanner) and the optional module DSS (Detailed Surface Scanner).
Now once reached rank scout, you need to find meta alloys... here )Inara has a clickable link to its Meta Alloy page, yes it is confusing, but paying attention you will soon find there are plenty places to BUY metal alloys from, mostly Carriers. so just find one go there and buy your meta alloy and you are set to unlock,
So you have reached exploration rank scout and provided 1 meta alloy and you can now start to upgrade stuff, and you need to unlock atleast to rank 3, so that you get to learn about the next engineer from Felicity.
This upgrade is done either of these actions, also listed on Inara
- doing upgrades
- Selling exploration data
So doing upgrades is probably where you crashed and burned. but you could repeat the exploration stuff and go and do some more exploration and sell...but lets do the upgrade thing, and for the first engineer this now includes collecting various stuff. So at first you can only do grade 1 upgrades... these require the easisest stuff to collect.
so just try todo any grade 1 upgrade you can, and if you have not done material collection you will obviosuly have none of the required material, but Inara offers clickale links for all the blueprints, and what materials each grade requires, with clickable links for each material needed, that will tell you where you can collect these things. stuff like Iron, Sulphur, etc. it will tell you the locations of whre to find this stuffSurface prospecting, Mining. and it will in more details what this means:
Collected on planet surfaces and from asteroids
So either go and do some mining or land on a planet and drive around in your SRV...
We can read this on the "
MECHANICAL SCRAP" page,
Component found in ships: frequently used by haulage vessels. Destroyed haulage vessels can be scavenged from the aftermath of combat in shipping lanes. Known to be salvaged from signal sources.
so once again, you can find direction on where to find this stuff on Inara. Of course they do not hand holding with a quest marker to go here and find the stuff. you actually have to some of the leg works yourself.
but up to this point, we only needed to use ONE 3rd party tool and a browser. You might have looked up some stuff about exploration, and how to use FSS and DSS.
So how you got from this point to 10 tools and several youtube videos I am not sure how derailed that badly. Expecilly, since Inara is one of the most recommended sites to use.
So now we are at the how do we collect the needed stuff, without going crazy...
Material are divided in 3 categories, Raw, Manufactured and Data
Raw, is mostly gathered from Mining and surface prospecting, so if you have done mining, you will have got some of this stuff. the surface prospecting is you driving around in your SRV shooting at stuff, like rocks, or find some geological sites with stuff to shoot at. For this I want to introduce a second 3rd party tool that will help you along on where to land and shoot at stuff and it is
EDDB, Elite Dangerous DataBase, here you can use the "Bodies" search function to search for planets with for example Niobium on and select where you are, so that you get planets that nearby.
Of course you can rely on information ingame, but this means you have to use System map and look at the information on planets and what they contain to know what kind of stuff you will from shooting at stuff. no search function..Here our codex could have been a good source for this information.
Manufactured Material is mostly collected from ships in various ways, but it mostly involves finding destroyed ships and among their remains is manufactured materials, so either you can destroy the ship, or find ships already destroyed by NPC's, this normally referred to as signal sources. So you do not need anything special to collect this stuff, just open your cargo scoop, target the thing you want and scoop it up. tedious and slow, so do what we do in mining, add a collector limpet controller, and limpets, and send them out where there is stuff to collect and they will try collect anything within their range. So if you need stuff, and have blown up some ships, stay a while and collects the stuff left behind.
Data, this is gathered from scanning outpost and ships in various ways, this includes canning the wake of a ship that have jumped away, with a Wake scanner (utility module),
All of the above things can also be offered as mission rewards, for Manufactured and Data this is particularly uselful, as as you get allied with factions they will more often offer missions with high level material reward, often 3 or 5. but this is not the main point, instead you want to use this Grade 5 stuff to trade for the stuff you need, often Grade 4 or lower.
And here you get more material in the trade than doing the in the reverse
So if you have one grade 5 material and trade down these are your possible trades you can do.
- 3x Grade 4
- 9x Grade 3
- 27x Grade 2
- 81x Grade 1
So if you need
Atypical Disrupted Wake Echoes (grade 1), a single mission that gives you a single
Modified Embedded Firmware (grade5) as reward, will give you 81!
So what I want to say is that start to look at the mission board for any EASY missions that offers Grade 5 material, as these are an easy way to get high level material to trade for stuff you need. I have to constantly now trade away Grade 5 materials as I filled up with the Grade 5 material! and that is without actually grinding for this stuff, I do things I like and get this for free. I did lots of combat relations missions before, and these just gives me plenty of this stuff as a bonus! But there are delivery missions, passengers missions, surface scanning missions etc, that do the same, try these out, and figure out what kind of missions you like or what are really easy todo, and it is not ucommon that you can find missions that you can complete by doing what you normally do!
And if you only do G2-G3 and some G4 upgrades, this will be a plentiful way to gather the material needed for those upgrades, G5 upgrades often needs G5 material and here material traders can be costly, the trade is
not 1:1 for G5 material...
So now we really only used two 3rd party tools and ingame options to learn where to get materials we need to do engineering, and this is equal for all platforms.
When we get into the huge pit of I want to upgrade a whole ship in one go and what do I need, then there are plenty of options out there to produce lists of materials needed and to tell you want are missing... for most part here PC players have an edge over Console, as we have access to our Elite Dangerous logs and thus we can use any of the available tools that read our logs and upload these to sites like Inara and EDDB, or simply use the information directly. Inara can even allow you to upload your log directly. but all of this is optional and only really useful if you decide do alot of engineering in a short time. Instead of doing some here and some there and thus gradually upgrade stuff. as you get more material using regular gameplay.
So how you decide to how approach these sort of things will have an impact of enjoyment of the process. If you set out todo it all in a single go, then this will be a big and clunky grindy experience, and put a negative tone to quite a big part of the game. instead of experimenting with what would this do, or that do, and then make a small mini target to achieve this goal, that often can be done in a 1-4 hour game session
