Engineers Exquisite Focus Crystals (still).

[Nero Tacitus]

I've spent the last month unlocking and levelling up engineers, and now I'm grinding out the materials to fully engineer my FDL.

I'm onto the last material, Exquisite Focus Crystals (EFC), and have exhausted Google for information on how best to gather them. Spotty information has indicated that being Allied, Boom State and either Extraction or High Tech systems have the highest spawn rate. So I created a trade loop between Tun (War, already friendly with factions, good source of Assasination/Massacre missions) Taranis (Boom-Extraction) & Apala (Boom-High Tech).

Over the last few nights I've raised most minor faction to Allied, and have been docking -> board flipping Missions & Passenger Boards checking each mission for EFC. From roughly 15 hours of gameplay, and not going out of my way to accept other grade 5 materials I have no use for, I've still gathered about 10 Modified Embedded Firmware, 18 Cracked Industrial Firmware, god knows how many Biotech Conductors and all sorts of additional materials, yet I have seen 0 EFC.

I'm combat oriented (hence Tun, and the FDL) and have access to Elite level combat missions. These regularly award other Grade 5 materials, but never EFC.

Either the recent patch hasn't restored EFC as a mission reward, or the spawn rate is inexplicably and unacceptably low. 100+ board flips is straying out of the territory of RNG, and into poor game design, or bug. Allied + Elite tier missions, in favourable systems, should have yielded several, let alone any, EFC by this point, and the fact it hasn't needs to be addressed.

 

[Nero Tacitus]

I should probably update.

I got my first EFC recently, and have since managed to find 5 in total. All of them came from various stations and economies, however ALL of them had the System in Boom State.

I flipped god knows how many boards in Tun while it was in War state (despite several of the minor factions being in Boom) and never saw any EFC. I have since seen 1 offered for a Massacre Mission at Tun, so it seems the info about Boom State increasing spawn rate is true, but poorly worded.
System Boom State = Chance for EFC to spawn. No System Boom State = 0.00000001% chance for EFC to spawn.

Still, EFC remains an absolute b*tch to farm. Simply adding an additional way to get it would really alleviate a problem a lot of people seem to be upset about. The current system also forces combat oriented players into playing space trucker since that's all Boom States offer, and without that state, you're not getting EFC.

Maybe allow EFC to drop from Elite Condas/Cutters/Corvettes in CZs only? It'd be nice to have a combat way to farm them. Hell, increasing their spawn chance in Boom and Civil War, would pretty much fix the issue.

 

[Jenner]

Closed at request of OP.