Lets talk OD engineering. I see a lot of guides and none covers this.
Most guides show you where to find certain materials, which sites to go to, what lockers to open etc. But they miss one of the biggest optimizations you can make.
Material storage was designed in a very clever way by Frontier. If we look at the bartender buy and sell prices for graphene for, it sells for 13, and you buy for 23. So you can sell for just a little bit more than half. This is quite important. We will get back to this point.
First lets talk about storage. The player can store 1000 assets, 1000 goods, and 1000 data, and also store 1000 of any combination of the previous three on their fleet carrier. This is great because you would never really need more than 1000 data or goods. For data the bottleneck is Manufacturing instructions and those can quite easily be farmed at crashed satellites/skimmers along with many other good datas like surveys etc. For goods the biggest bottlenecks depends on what you are engineering but it is suit schematics, power regulator and the 2 gas. Power regulators can easily be farmed from the landed ship site. Gas and suit schematics spawn in the same locker. in Power building, OPR, and the large locker in the center of sample rooms. In short these 3 are the biggest bottleneck for goods. I did not include weapon schematics here because they are super easy to farm from the 3 container site if you don't already get enough while doing the gas/suit schematics.
Now back to the point earlier. Looking at storage, the best thing to store is assets. There is really no point storing goods or data at the fleet carrier. This leaves you with 2000 asset storage space. If you loot at random until you get close to filling up this 2000 storage you will reach a point where you run around looking through tons of lockers, cherry picking the more rare material like graphene/weapon components/micro electrodes etc. This is where most players are losing an enormous amount of time gathering their materials.
The best thing you can do is to convert all chemical to graphene, all tech into weapon components, and all circuits into optical fiber and micro electrodes. These materials are not only the most widely used, they also have the highest buy/sell at the bartender. Storage space is the biggest bottleneck. You do not want to leave much behind, Its faster to loot 3 ion batteries on our way to a locker containing suit schematics/gas than to clear the EXT/STR etc to find 1. On average using this trading strategy you will increase your over all material yield by 10%, but more importantly you will spend more time finding the very rare materials, and you will more than double your total storage capacity. It is better to be storing 300 graphene and trading that down, than to be storing a bunch of rdx, epoxy, epynephrine, Oxiginated bacterial etc. Think of storage as, storing the bartender currency rather than storing a fixed amount of assets. The more valueble the assets you are storing, the more materials you have access to. And by using this method, you can spend more time target farming missions with the correct data, up to 10 at a time, more time targeting just the valueble lockers with gas/suite schematic, and less time looking for the few rarer materials in other buildings.
Most guides show you where to find certain materials, which sites to go to, what lockers to open etc. But they miss one of the biggest optimizations you can make.
Material storage was designed in a very clever way by Frontier. If we look at the bartender buy and sell prices for graphene for, it sells for 13, and you buy for 23. So you can sell for just a little bit more than half. This is quite important. We will get back to this point.
First lets talk about storage. The player can store 1000 assets, 1000 goods, and 1000 data, and also store 1000 of any combination of the previous three on their fleet carrier. This is great because you would never really need more than 1000 data or goods. For data the bottleneck is Manufacturing instructions and those can quite easily be farmed at crashed satellites/skimmers along with many other good datas like surveys etc. For goods the biggest bottlenecks depends on what you are engineering but it is suit schematics, power regulator and the 2 gas. Power regulators can easily be farmed from the landed ship site. Gas and suit schematics spawn in the same locker. in Power building, OPR, and the large locker in the center of sample rooms. In short these 3 are the biggest bottleneck for goods. I did not include weapon schematics here because they are super easy to farm from the 3 container site if you don't already get enough while doing the gas/suit schematics.
Now back to the point earlier. Looking at storage, the best thing to store is assets. There is really no point storing goods or data at the fleet carrier. This leaves you with 2000 asset storage space. If you loot at random until you get close to filling up this 2000 storage you will reach a point where you run around looking through tons of lockers, cherry picking the more rare material like graphene/weapon components/micro electrodes etc. This is where most players are losing an enormous amount of time gathering their materials.
The best thing you can do is to convert all chemical to graphene, all tech into weapon components, and all circuits into optical fiber and micro electrodes. These materials are not only the most widely used, they also have the highest buy/sell at the bartender. Storage space is the biggest bottleneck. You do not want to leave much behind, Its faster to loot 3 ion batteries on our way to a locker containing suit schematics/gas than to clear the EXT/STR etc to find 1. On average using this trading strategy you will increase your over all material yield by 10%, but more importantly you will spend more time finding the very rare materials, and you will more than double your total storage capacity. It is better to be storing 300 graphene and trading that down, than to be storing a bunch of rdx, epoxy, epynephrine, Oxiginated bacterial etc. Think of storage as, storing the bartender currency rather than storing a fixed amount of assets. The more valueble the assets you are storing, the more materials you have access to. And by using this method, you can spend more time target farming missions with the correct data, up to 10 at a time, more time targeting just the valueble lockers with gas/suite schematic, and less time looking for the few rarer materials in other buildings.
