Is there any pattern to be found where materials are most probably found?

[vermu]

I started to collect today materials for my class 2 fsd range boost. I read the forums where I could mine the required commodity. I thought to it must be possible to do on my own with some research. I was at farseer system and filtered palladium trade routes so I could fine nearest pristine system. Nearest pristine system was just one jump away. There were 3 planets with rings, all pristine. Two of them were gas giants and one was high metal content planet. I first tried to mine from gas giant rings and launched 40 prospectors and no sight of the required commodity. Then I thought that high metal content planet with rings are not so common than gas giant with rings. Maybe asteroid impacts threw some stuff to the rings.

When I came to the rings wing of 4 pirates attacked me. There were no res sites in that ring so I thought now we are talking. When we have to do things in the hard way it's the right way. Luckily all the ships were harmless so it was piece of cake for my python. When I shot my second prospector I found what I was looking for. And I got 7 tons from one rock. Sorry I can't remember the commodity name So I got all the required mats and commodities at the farseer system or one jump from there. So I guess there is some kind of pattern to be found from the game. We'll see when I try to find some yttrium. Do I have to go where all the others are going or can I find another place from the millions of planets.

 

[Sylow]

Missions. They say what you get, so you can pick those which are actually useful for you.

Next to that, you can scan frameshift wakes and scan ships around a station for a while. While the rewards are still highly RNGed, you can get so many that you have acceptable chances to get something useful. For all the other methods to gather materials: forget about them. They are boring and tedious and not really worth it.