HGE Farming Alternatives: Bigger "Salvage" Sites, Small Slots, Small Ships

[Osiricc]

We all know the most efficient way of getting high grade manufactured mats. Anyone who's fully engineered a ship or two knows the grind, and frankly any game loop that involves quitting the game out to the desktop and restarting is, well... broken.

I propose they do something like the HGE, but when you get to the signal source, it's a bigger wreck, one you have to fly into. You've seen these scientific research stations, they have these slots that limit what size ship can actually fly through parts of them. It's a fun place to go play around with a ship as you learn to fly with no FA.

What if there was something like these HGE sites, but you get there and it's a bigger ship/station, and you have to fly in and collect the high grade materials hidden inside. It would be balanced to give you the same amount of materials per hour as the current HGE method of restarting the game over and over.

It would be a great alternative to the current HGE method. Farming these mat's could actually be fun, you know, like a game instead of a chore.
Additionally it would give us an excuse to use the smaller ships more, which are underutilized in general, as it usually makes more sense to use a bigger ship with more utilities and optional internals for the current gameplay.

What do you think, how would you improve on the idea?

 

[Factabulous]

You could just - y'know - play the game? Most people who've engineered a few dozen ships just do that. The grind is only for n00bs.

 

[Osiricc]

You could just - y'know - play the game? Most people who've engineered a few dozen ships just do that. The grind is only for n00bs.

I " just played the game" for years and hardly had enough mat's for a heatsink synthesis or two.
One hour of HGE farming will net you orders of magnitude more mat's than years of other types of gameplay. If you can't admit there's an issue there, I don't know what to tell you.

 

[Jack Winter]

It might take a bit longer, but IMO playing the game is infinitely more rewarding than relogging to desktop..

 

[Factabulous]

I " just played the game" for years and hardly had enough mat's for a heatsink synthesis or two.
One hour of HGE farming will net you orders of magnitude more mat's than years of other types of gameplay. If you can't admit there's an issue there, I don't know what to tell you.

... and yet you are the one with only a couple of ships and no mats, where I have mostly full storage and lots of fully engineered ships over multiple commandos. Seriously - just learn how to play - it's actually pretty fun

 

[Osiricc]

... and yet you are the one with only a couple of ships and no mats, where I have mostly full storage and lots of fully engineered ships over multiple commandos. Seriously - just learn how to play - it's actually pretty fun

Only a couple ships and no mat's? Where'd you get that idea? I've got a good handful of fully engineered ships and loads of mats.

My point is "just playing the game" got me next to no mat's, over years. I couldn't have hoped to engineer one module, let alone whole ships, before using the same methods most folks do (brain trees for raw mats, jameson's or dav's for encoded mats, HGE for manufactured mats).

Maybe there's the occasional oddball with 10k hrs logged who never used these methods, but anyone I've ever talked to in game, or seen/read online, has used these same methods for gaining materials.

Why a simple suggestion to improve these loops seems to offend some people, I'll never know.

 

[midnight void]

Anyone who's fully engineered a ship or two knows the grind

fully engineered a dozen or two ships, but no, don't know any grind.
just saying

 

[Jack Winter]

We all know the most efficient way of getting high grade manufactured mats. Anyone who's fully engineered a ship or two knows the grind, and frankly any game loop that involves quitting the game out to the desktop and restarting is, well... broken.

I'm not sure that anyone would be offended by suggestions, or even Frontier themselves improving the mat gathering gameplay.

It's possibly the above assertion that somewhat offends. I somehow don't think that this was an intended gameloop.

I was in your situation a few years ago, also after having little success from just playing the game and deciding to unlock the engineers and fill the bins. Watched youtube, relogged, etc. A few years later with an alt I'm wiser, and know how to go about getting credits, mats, unlocking engineers, etc. I wish I'd found other youtube videos that actually showed how to play the game, and not how to minmax your result vs time spent by relogging...

 

[Osiricc]

At the end of the day, there are certain loops that will give you these mat's, and others that won't.
For example, if you're like me, and spent years casually exploring and mining for a few hundred hours, you will have virtually no manufactured mat's.

If you look up how to get these mat's, you'll find a couple of loops that may not seem remotely appealing as gameplay.
It would be neat if they added some fun loops for those of us who are interested in engineering, not just the HGE relog thing or certain types of missions.

Sub surface mining, core mining, mapping new planets, these are just innately fun to me. Unfortunately years of that didn't get me any manufactured mat's, like.. at all, practically none.

So yeah there are efficient ways of grinding out these mat's, all I'm saying is this "small ship - salvaging" option would be a neat addition. Sounds fun to me.

 

[aRJay]

At the end of the day, there are certain loops that will give you these mat's, and others that won't.
For example, if you're like me, and spent years casually exploring and mining for a few hundred hours, you will have virtually no manufactured mat's.

If you look up how to get these mat's, you'll find a couple of loops that may not seem remotely appealing as gameplay.
It would be neat if they added some fun loops for those of us who are interested in engineering, not just the HGE relog thing or certain types of missions.

The HGE re log thing was only put in by FDev to the extent that they put in HGEs some players found that if you switched modes or otherwise changed the instance while staying in place the loot would reset, FDev fixed this so that if you want to not have fun but get loot quickly you had to relog.
I have much more fun using a fast ship and just moving onto the next HGE or when they are gone the other emission sources in the system, missing loot is just swapped for at the Material Traders.

Sub surface mining, core mining, mapping new planets, these are just innately fun to me. Unfortunately years of that didn't get me any manufactured mat's, like.. at all, practically none.

So yeah there are efficient ways of grinding out these mat's, all I'm saying is this "small ship - salvaging" option would be a neat addition. Sounds fun to me.

Might well be but the people who love to relog or find other ways to grind and complain about the game will find some way to do it there as well.

 

[metatheurgist]

I find the game more fun flying from one signal to another, even switching systems every so often. Just don't do the relog? Personally I wish Frontier would just kaibosh that trick.

 

[Kira Goto]

Personally I wish Frontier would just kaibosh that trick.

I thought they tried. Only people figured out logging to desktop still allowed it to be done anyway.

... I haven't done the relog thing in ages. Got to the point where I rather get the stuff through missions and trade, or as I travel around(which I did for my alt when I was still getting it set up).

I also thought this was going to be a suggestion from Jmanis inspired by the Taranis debris field, until opened the thread.

 

[metatheurgist]

I thought they tried. Only people figured out logging to desktop still allowed it to be done anyway.

... I haven't done the relog thing in ages. Got to the point where I rather get the stuff through missions and trade, or as I travel around(which I did for my alt when I was still getting it set up).

Yes, the trick only works by relogging to desktop now, it's a lot more effort to fix than relogging to menu. If that's what you want to do to get your mats, well, that's your choice. I still wish Frontier would nix it.

A better fix for me would be a broader choice of mission rewards. CR they've made a joke, not everyone is interested in playing the BGS (especially since they decided to disenfranchise anyone not in a PMF).

 

[SteveWW57]

"(especially since they decided to disenfranchise anyone not in a PMF)."

I have a different take on this. CMDRs can adopt an existing faction and serve notice that they have done so (to prevent established pmfs saying that it is not an official pmf and can be treated with disdain. Which still might happen). Or, they can support anarchies which can be more subtle and interesting. If it gets too hot, they can move on. With no fixed base, if a PMF decides to attack, they can work from the shadows to destabilise the offender.

Steve

 

[Shurimal]

Anyone who's fully engineered a ship or two knows the grind, and frankly any game loop that involves quitting the game out to the desktop and restarting is, well... broken.

You're not supposed to do this. Getting grade 5 mats does not require that quit-to-desktop exploit—you can (and are supposed to) fly from HGE to HGE, takes only a minute or two if you're away from gravity wells and fly manually. It's a pretty chill thing to do, akin to mining. As for other ways of getting materials, go bounty hunting—it's just as chill as mining (in fact, I think it's exactly like mining, but the rocks shoot back) and you'll fill your mfg, bank account and also data bins fast.

Other than that, large debris fields with large amounts of materials in systems during and after wars should be a thing. They do (did?) exist in HIP 22460 after the Damnation fiasco and could easily be adapted to the rest of the game. Put some random-spawn cargo, escape pods, explosive stuff that goes boom if you get too close as an environmental hazard and pirates in them to spice things up and you'll have an excellent gameplay loop similar to Titan debris I have no idea why the devs hasn't gone for this low hanging fruit yet...

 

[Northpin]

We all know the most efficient way of getting high grade manufactured mats.

I doubt that.

 

[Oh Seven Commander]

Idk why the relog gets any flak. Filling up on 100 grade 5s in record time means I'm able to get back to the parts of the game I enjoy faster. If people want to grind to get mats, they are free to do that. But farming HGEs is speed running material gathering, not grinding imo.

 

[Osiricc]

Idk why the relog gets any flak. Filling up on 100 grade 5s in record time means I'm able to get back to the parts of the game I enjoy faster. If people want to grind to get mats, they are free to do that. But farming HGEs is speed running material gathering, not grinding imo.

Right! I mean I played for years, just exploring and mining, and had absolutely 0 manufactured mat's. I would rather just explore, but there are some pretty cool engineering things that help exploring that I wanted. The only way to get those is to do very non-explorey loops though, that's why I resorted to this HGE relog thing.

In a perfect world, getting these mat's would be fun. Which is why I think this "small ships through slots, into salvage sites with tons of manufactured mat's" would be a cool loop to add to the game.

 

[Jmanis]

Idk why the relog gets any flak. Filling up on 100 grade 5s in record time means I'm able to get back to the parts of the game I enjoy faster. If people want to grind to get mats, they are free to do that. But farming HGEs is speed running material gathering, not grinding imo.

This makes no sense. You are literally stopping "what you enjoy" by going out and grinding HGE relogs... instead of just doing what you enjoy and getting mats along the way.

A hundred hours spent "doing what you enjoy" which will get you mats along the way is better time spent than an hour of relog grind and 99 hours of doing what you enjoy (where, you'll continue to get more mats along the way)

 

[DemiserofD]

This makes no sense. You are literally stopping "what you enjoy" by going out and grinding HGE relogs... instead of just doing what you enjoy and getting mats along the way.

A hundred hours spent "doing what you enjoy" which will get you mats along the way is better time spent than an hour of relog grind and 99 hours of doing what you enjoy (where, you'll continue to get more mats along the way)

The problem is, doing that ends up wasting more time doing things that are unenjoyable.

Let me explain. Let's imagine I blow up a ship in a hazrez. I have two choices: I can stop to deploy limpets and allow them to collect the dropped materials, or I can move on to the next pirate.

Now, collecting the materials takes about the same amount of time whether it be at a hazrez or at an HGE. They both require deploying limpets and sitting still while the collection process occurs. Collecting the wreck may be a bit slower, because the materials generally fly off and scatter a bit. Additionally, an average wreck will have something like 2 chunks of G1 mats, 2 chunks of G2 mats, and one chunk of G3 and G4 mats.

By contrast, an HGE has an average of 4 chunks of G5 mats.

So the average value of a wreck is 44 G1 mats. The average value of an HGE is 324 G1 mats.

In other words, stopping to collect combat wreckage is, on average, around 1/8th as fast as farming HGE sites. Even accounting for the time spent relogging, you're still going to be seeing on the order of 4x faster collection rates farming HGEs. And, of course, that discounts the fact that many HGE mats simply cannot be acquired in normal combat, as they only drop from certain ship classes such as passenger liners. So in many cases, you're instead looking at 1/12th the collection rates, after accounting for cross-trading penalties.

So, if we assume that collecting mats takes about 1 minute, and it takes place after every ~2 minutes of fighting, then after three hours of playing, you'll have lost an hour of gameplay. By contrast, if you ignored the floating materials, and instead used the saved time to farm HGEs, you would have had an extra ~45 minutes of fun, engaging gameplay - and still ended up with the same amount of materials. Not only that, but you won't have needed to sacrifice at least two optional slots to carry limpets and a collector limpet controller!

This is why I still hold that the biggest problem is the rate at which materials can be collected. The simple fact it takes a notable amount of time to collect dropped materials means it will always be more effective to farm HGEs than to collect battlefield debris. The game SHOULD work the way you envision, but due to slow collection rates, it simply can't.

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Regarding the OP suggestion, I WOULD enjoy the idea. Having a place where I can actually have engaging gameplay to collect materials at a similar rate to HGE relog farming would be an excellent change.