Just when you thought grinding couldn't get any lower...

[Staarlord]

Gotta agree with OP. I started the grind for Selene Jean last week. Did all the hoop-jumping and now locked on grade 3 Armour despite having all the materials up to Grade 5. I can't seem to get ahead now as I think I now have to keep grinding this grade 3 on all manner of ships until I get to grade 4 etc. I mean really? I "liked" the old system better. I guess my old brain isn’t grasping this new fangled way of doing stuff lol. Any tips on how to accomplish grade 5 would be most welcome!

Well you've got a couple choices as to how you can show yourself a good time.
You can:

A.) Screwing yourself out of material - Choose any upgrade on her list and take it up to grade 3, then choose another upgrade on her list and take it up to about grade 3. Finally, choose the upgrade you want and it should be enough to unlock the next grade. I do this whenever the engineer I was made to unlock has nothing I ever use, nor care about...like missile rack upgrades, sensors and the like.

B.) Deal with their commodity market. This is tricky, as you only gain rep with them as long as you are profiting from what you are selling them. This makes absolutely no sense because the buyer doesn't want you to profit, so I have no idea why they get their jollies off on you making money off of them, instead of the other way around. That'd be like me saying, "customer you're paying too much, under pay me for that TV and I will be your friend till the end." Basically look at their commodities list, choose a thing, look at what their buying price is and see if you can buy it somewhere for cheaper. You may have to use INARA.

Sometimes engineers will also have other ways to earn rep, like sell exploration data, or earn combat vouchers by bounty hunting in their system. I think Selene accepts cartographic data.

 

[drama]

I love grinding...

Spoiler

[video=youtube;18W9zQgGi5I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18W9zQgGi5I[/video]

 

[Vasious]

What is the Rare supply in Kamitra when it is in Boom?

 

[Eidolon]

You must be thinking about Broo Tarquin's flippin teas. I just pulled into port and discovered that they are only sold in lots of 5. So let's pickup 5, deliver them 10 times, shall we? Hmmm...let's see how many jumps that is.

Broo's were spawning in 4's for me one Sunday evening. I did a couple of trips then logged off.
That evening I couldn't sleep and fired up the game in the early hours.
Imagine my complete surprise on my next trip, when the star port had a ready supply of 35 tonnes!

It was at that point I realised that the rares must be limited by total player activity. So after that I always unlocked the appropriate engineers close to midnight

 

[House0fDerp]

Unlocking engineers isn't always sparkling gameplay but it's hardly the end of the world.

Don't think it takes more than an hour to unlock any of them... aside from Palin, depending on whether you've done any travelling already.

Depends where you start from. I probably can't get trade in 50 markets done under an hour even though I've likely hit that many stations (most of my stops have been exclusively for fitting ships). Mining for Selene? not even sure where I am on that but from scratch that would be some time. Took more than an hour for Qwent but that was admittedly 100% my choice.

Many of the others I care to eventually unlock I have the first requirement, it's just a mater of getting down the line to them.

 

[Iron Duke]

Buy some hull reinforcement, put it on your ship and keep engineering it. Remove the mod when you hit the barrier and start over engineering. Repeat until you unlock grade five.

Well you've got a couple choices as to how you can show yourself a good time.
You can:

A.) Screwing yourself out of material - Choose any upgrade on her list and take it up to grade 3, then choose another upgrade on her list and take it up to about grade 3. Finally, choose the upgrade you want and it should be enough to unlock the next grade. I do this whenever the engineer I was made to unlock has nothing I ever use, nor care about...like missile rack upgrades, sensors and the like.

B.) Deal with their commodity market. This is tricky, as you only gain rep with them as long as you are profiting from what you are selling them. This makes absolutely no sense because the buyer doesn't want you to profit, so I have no idea why they get their jollies off on you making money off of them, instead of the other way around. That'd be like me saying, "customer you're paying too much, under pay me for that TV and I will be your friend till the end." Basically look at their commodities list, choose a thing, look at what their buying price is and see if you can buy it somewhere for cheaper. You may have to use INARA.

Sometimes engineers will also have other ways to earn rep, like sell exploration data, or earn combat vouchers by bounty hunting in their system. I think Selene accepts cartographic data.

Thanks so much for the sage advice - I'll give both methods a whirl and see which one works for me. Rep to you both (virtual to Graelock as I think I've already repped you previously).

 

[MickyG1982]

Broo's were spawning in 4's for me one Sunday evening. I did a couple of trips then logged off.
That evening I couldn't sleep and fired up the game in the early hours.
Imagine my complete surprise on my next trip, when the star port had a ready supply of 35 tonnes!

It was at that point I realised that the rares must be limited by total player activity. So after that I always unlocked the appropriate engineers close to midnight

It also has quite a lot to do with the controlling factions current state - they can also not spawn at all if the faction that makes them gets knocked off...

 

[zinzaemon]

if it's worth anything, it's not only 4 or 5 cigars you can haul at a time, but 4 or 5 tons of cigars...

Sorry, I am not good at making people feel better

Which, if you think about it, is absolutely absurd.

Assuming a cigar weighs an average of 10 grams, that would be 100,000 cigars per ton.
Even if you assume that half the weight is freight, 50k cigars/ton is a ridiculous amount.

If he smoked like J Jonah Jameson@10/day, that's over 13 years of stoogies.
For each ton.
And he must have thousands of tons of those frickin' cigars by now...

Not such a rare commodity then...

 

[Brrokk]

Those cigars are rare, that's why she's always asking people to get a few more.

I RP'd that a "ton" of Kamitra cigars is actually a box of a dozen cigars plus a ton of cryogenic gear necessary to keep them in tip-top condition.

Anyway, the whole operation only took about an hour.

 

[zinzaemon]

Those cigars are rare, that's why she's always asking people to get a few more.

I RP'd that a "ton" of Kamitra cigars is actually a box of a dozen cigars plus a ton of cryogenic gear necessary to keep them in tip-top condition.

I'll go with that

 

[Stigbob]

Why not use a ship with a smaller cargo hold and longer jump range for the unlock.

 

[crushdepth]

What would be better, would be a requirement for *one* box of cigars and a mission to get them that is challenging and *fun*.

 

[Factabulous]

It's almost like FD want you to think about how to achieve different tasks efficiently, rather than just mashing A -> B grinds

I would understand CMDRs who grind if they at least enjoyed it - I predict another ragequit thread in a few months.

It's much more fun to play the game like you're in a large open universe - influence a system, investigate aliens, fight wars - and maybe unlock some engineers when they're nearby, rank up with factions / empires as a side effect, not an end goal. Takes longer, but much more fun.

 

[Ian Skippy]

..., you go and do a thing, like meet someone called Hera Tani. This, boys and girls, is the classic example of desperation at its finest. In this case desperation to create grind where none is warranted. We got people out there with cargo space that can fit a village in it, yet, the commodity market here is rigged so that as long as it so much as detects the 23 Kamitra cigars it has just sold you, in your inventory, it absolutely WILL NOT restock anymore....ever...not until you fly back to Hera Tani and offload what you have...only then will you be "allowed" to stock more in your hold. So this means your third trip back is to buy 4 cigars? FOUR??? What the???

I'm sorry, but I procrastinated for almost 4 years in unlocking these engineers for precisely this reason. I did not believe in engineering because I thought the whole "make this person happy, to get a referral to that person, to make them happy, to get a referral to another person, to make them happy...." thing, in addition to the "oh each one of us want some stupid commodity thing, too" was so poor. Iit appears I was not wrong. Oh and while we are on the topic... Marco Qwent was the most useless thing I've ever unlocked in a game, but we NEED him, for Palin...and what does Palin want? Nothing more, or less, ridiculous than what Selene wants. Let's see...jump 20 thousand times? or mine 500 tons of ore? I just can't decide which is more fun?

But even after all that...do I still love Elite? A mind blowing "YES." It just bewilders me how low people can go to figure "how can we create unnecessary grind?" And, you know you struck the gold mine of "grind ideas" when you think, "how about only fitting 23 tons of the required 50tons in a cargo hold of 160 tons?"

I still havent unlocked some of these rares engineers. No g5 boosters for me, no matter how important they are. Really very poor design.

 

[Faybs]

Actually, the cigars was one of the easiest unlocks. Just a handful of trips in a Cobra. Protip: when you get to the real grind, ie Marco "modular terminals" Gwent, head over to Sothis to do the criminal sightseeing missions. After one or two evenings you'll have more mats than you can store, a generous amount of cash and those bleepin' modular terminals.

 

[Ian Skippy]

It's almost like FD want you to think about how to achieve different tasks efficiently, rather than just mashing A -> B grinds

I would understand CMDRs who grind if they at least enjoyed it - I predict another ragequit thread in a few months.

It's much more fun to play the game like you're in a large open universe - influence a system, investigate aliens, fight wars - and maybe unlock some engineers when they're nearby, rank up with factions / empires as a side effect, not an end goal. Takes longer, but much more fun.

Noone just casually happens to be in the rares systems, then just happens to go to the engineers, dozens of times. You either do it intentionally or you wont unlock them. The latter for me. Other engineers are unlocked by 'just playing', but these aint. It should be changed.

 

[Jack Schitt]

Be grateful none of the Engineers require iPhone 5s to unlock. Or indeed paracetamol.

Spoiler

Not saying it isn't frustrating, or lazy game design. Just pointing out that there are real-world analogues to how ED places per-transaction limits on the sale of some goods.

And now I'm half expecting someone to start nitpicking the definition of "customer", or "retail", and applying it to ED because internet.

 

[askavir]

Wait until you meet that one who wants 50 Fujin Tea... Fujin Tea is a rare good sold in 5 units at a time... if the system is in boom.

 

[Factabulous]

Noone just casually happens to be in the rares systems, then just happens to go to the engineers, dozens of times. You either do it intentionally or you wont unlock them. The latter for me. Other engineers are unlocked by 'just playing', but these aint. It should be changed.

You say you haven't unlocked them, then say it should change - try it - an hour of back & forth and you're done.

Don't fear the content

 

[Faybs]

Noone just casually happens to be in the rares systems, then just happens to go to the engineers, dozens of times. You either do it intentionally or you wont unlock them. The latter for me. Other engineers are unlocked by 'just playing', but these aint. It should be changed.

Each of the engineers has a theme: Palin is exploration, Qwent is missions, the dweller is smuggling and so on. It's a neat idea, but it's only used to unlock them. It would be great if they'd taken it further, like themed missions to unlock unique modules (eg "I heard the imperial navy is working on new super low power beam lasers, and they have the prototypes at this military base. If you can smuggle them out and bring them to me, I should be able to reverse engineer them. By the way, security is going to be tight.").