How to find "meta alloys" without guides and market-monitor?

[Imo]

I'm new to the game.
My principle is not to read any game guides outside of the game itself.
Research everything myself.
I also do not want to use the global market monitor.

In that case, how do I find the "meta-alloys" I need for an engineer? There is no clue where to look for them. There's not even information on what category this product is in.

How do the developers see my playthrough in this case?

you can only buy those in the system Maia at Danielle's Progress. Some fleet carrier commanders may have stored some too.

 

[Greasetrap42]

Often such information is abusive, cheating. Allows you to pass aspects of the game faster, which was not intended by the developers.

Did the developers at Frontier tell you this? Please either post or direct direct me to Frontier's statement regarding 3rd party tools. Where exactly do they state that 3rd party tools such as INARA, Coriolis, EDDB, Discord, Forums, etc. were not intended or anticipated.

Is INARA illegally hacking into Frontier's gaming servers to provide players with ingame info?

 

[Greasetrap42]

Often such information is abusive, cheating. Allows you to pass aspects of the game faster, which was not intended by the developers.

You think ED was not intended for collaborative efforts between players? Projects like EDSM and DSSA aren't supposed to exist?

Edit: It is cool if players like yourself don't want to use them. Just don't try convincing me these types of tools are against the wishes of the developers.

Trying to convince me that projects like this are against the wishes of Frontier and their game intentions?

 

[ste234]

I started out recently with the same idea as the OP but i have come to realise that this game isnt designed to be played as single person doing it by yourself, its very much an MMO. The problems presented were and are intended to be tackled by the whole community - you wont discover even 0.1% of the secrets by yourself - the idea is that someone out of thousands of players would discover something and they would spread the word to other commanders. Also, the game is 10 years old - a lots happened and a lot of discoveries have been made and shared already - thats why theres all the fan made collaboration sites. Theres a lot to catch up on to understand the current state of things. The game is deliberately vague as to whats going on and leaves the player to educate themselves - its a fascinating journey and the storytellers are the community. The lore isnt clearly laid out for you chronologically in the game, nor are the key discoveries - FDev didnt put tools in the game to track many things, perhaps because they knew it pushed people to interact and collaborate out of game, which is almost more remarkable

I would defo recommend new players watch Drew Wagar's (the ED author) Elite Dangerous Lore Introduction playlist on youtube to get a grounding in the universe as a start, and inara is fantastic for seeing / tracking your and other commanders activity around the universe and in the thargoid war, its a real hub of the community - you dont have to use it to find cheesy trade routes - its much more than that, its like a player made interactive encyclopedia. No one man can save the universe, we have to do it together

 

[Northpin]

However, this is obviously not how the developers intended the game to be played.

That's plain wrong.
the developers are deliberately offering information through Game Api for people to use that info.

ED is so big that there are dedicated player groups focused on researching in-game and publishing the results, Canonn Science being the most known, but they're not alone

Sure, you can try to shut off all external info while playing the game, but it would be pretty much the same thing as refusing to learn math in school and aiming to rediscover all by yourself (yea, i'm exaggerating for effect!)