It's a bit ridiculous.

[Jikahn]

Alternatively, you could just fly to the Pleiades and, rather than fly back, evacuate people from burning stations, fight aliens, patrol the rescue ships or whatever. Then, after having tons of fun, you can fly back and get an FSD upgrade.

Or you can grind&complain. Seems dull to me, but its quite popular for some reason.

That's literally what I just did. I took a full T9 worth of basic medicine planning on getting a meta-alloy and flying back. I got there and realized there was something interesting to do, so I spent a bit of time flying around to refit my T9 into an Evac/SAR ship. Then I would just fly into a burning station, spam collector limpets and heatsinks, dock, and fill up with refugees. Did that for a while and ended up at top 10% of the community goal having came in on the last couple days of it.

 

[UFO Reality]

I was fine taking my Python 18 jumps for ~200 LY to get to Deciat to do some engineering. But then to find out I need a Meta Alloy that I can only buy from ONE station that is another 400 LY away... I'm kinda . Now I have to sit through 35 long , super boring, tedious jumps to get there, and the same to get back all for one damn thing just to unlock access to the engineer. OR, I have to go spend yet even more of my hard earned money, to buy another ship that might cut the jumps in half... REALLY?! So sick of this game. After ~800 hours, I don't know if I can do it anymore, it's just not fun. jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump jump = boring.

I feel the same about jumps repeated over 5 times.
A brilliant dev team could implement a mini game where you have a module that can boost your jump-range by 300ly but you must be able to beat the mini game for it to allow the jump.
Having a quick mini-game during a frameshift jump that will give you a 65% chance that your jump range hack will work to break the repetition.
It could be as simple as a RNG game with a cooldown should devs feel a little lazy.
Or improve the synthesis jump part of the current game which is annoying.
The neutron star jumps is also another thing that could have been done better.

 

[Chris Simon]

And so the five pages long story of a guy who didn't read three lines in engineer's description continues...

Seriously guys, there's so much to do to keep yourselves entertained in this game. Yet so many people get hung by the neck on one thing they decided to do over and over until their last breath. It's like if you played an MMORPG and decided that you will only be running forward and collecting herbs and after a week started to complain that the game is totally boring. Well, duh.

 

[Alodia]

You didn't do your homework mate, that's not FD's fault

This is such a bizarre, victim blaming thread. Sure, the game says she wants a meta alloy. You know what it doesn't tell you? What it is or where to get one. For some baffling reason that's left out.

The only fault here is the game, sending you to go hunt around on the internet- again- instead of putting a single line of text under the meta alloy request. Or you could randomly fly into the one in a million station that is darnielles progress entirely by chance that happens to sell them, I guess?

If the game insists on relying on 3rd party websites to do its own job for it, it should mention you won't get anywhere without them in-game. Not everybody is aware those sites exist, much less registers on this forum or has put anywhere near 800 hours into it. It's a terrible design oversight.

Don't you start the guardians mission by randomly flying into felice dock, without which you'd never even know the mission was there?

In sensible paid content expansions, the game would suggest by line of text or unmissable map icon that you may wish to visit location x. Not here! And it's a problem threaded throughout. I shouldn't have to buy ovrdrop so I can find out where to buy something as basic as ship modules via the roguey website without having to remove a vr headset every ten minutes, but here we are.