Material goldrushes - do they exist?

Chaparral · Apr 2, 2018

So we all know what credit gold rushes are and how popular player participation is when they are publicized.

Materials now represent a brutal gateway to engineering if you have a fleet, or plan to own a fleet.

Without giving away the candy store, has anyone ever found a material gold rush (raw/manufactured/data) other than Dav's or the anaconda?

Mars Starcruiser · Apr 4, 2018

Kinda wish this happened for data since even wake scanning has been pretty time consuming.

Darty · Apr 4, 2018

Yes. I am able to max out g1-g5 of a multitude of manufactured materials with just a few hours of gameplay. I also have a pretty nice strat for mef and a few other datas. Isnor is the best I know for Abnormal compact emissions. I have a nice strategy for all raw materials as well, I don't know how much faster it is than surface prospecting but it's fast enough that 1 or 2 play sessions of it can cover my material costs for a few months of casual engineering.

No I'm not going to post any of them on the forums. They are my exploits and frontier can't have them. Well, other than the raw material strat, I posted about it a few times but I don't want to advertise it.

Edit: Generally mat "exploits" aren't terribly broken because its so hard to get them in the first place. My exploits basically fall into that category, and a lot of times their true value is not in materials an hour but in consistency and minimization of rng. That is where they shine. You might be able to get a better material an hour from prospecting or HGE hunting, but you might also spend 2 hours and get only 3 drops. That is where my strats shine as they are much more consistent in terms of reward for time investment.

LP Garnell · Apr 4, 2018

Darty said:
No I'm not going to post any of them on the forums. They are my exploits and frontier can't have them. Well, other than the raw material strat, I posted about it a few times but I don't want to advertise it.

I have a couple of pretty reliable sources for some of the difficult to find data/mats that haven't seen posted, but will not post (nor pm) them either. They're not exploits, afaik. However, too many times the whiners have won the day and the nerf hammer has come down.

Darty · Apr 4, 2018

LP Garnell said:
I have a couple of pretty reliable sources for some of the difficult to find data/mats that haven't seen posted, but will not post (nor pm) them either. They're not exploits, afaik. However, too many times the whiners have won the day and the nerf hammer has come down.

The definition of an exploit is really subjective and basically comes down to if fdev says it is then it is. Most of the gold rush exploits were not exploits themselves but simply multiple poorly designed game mechanics coming together in a way that benefited the player. Most of my "exploits" fall into the same category, just me taking advantage of multiple existing mechanics in a way that gets me mats faster and more consistently than the vanilla way. But I can be pretty certain I am not using them as intended, or their effectiveness is not what the devs intended, so I class them as exploits and keep them to myself and non-public groups.

Chaparral · Apr 4, 2018

For a while I was grinding CIF and MEF from planetary bases that produced a commodity asked for as a mission request. Of course that got squashed pretty quick.

Mats are pretty much a gateway currency at this point, and given the material trader architecture, I would imagine t5 mat farming optimization will become a thing (if it isn't one already).

Fendalton · Apr 4, 2018

Yes, and there is no way in hell we'd announce them on the forums or post them on YouTube to draw attention to them, thus having them removed.

space voyager · Apr 4, 2018

Well, I'm gathering quite some mats when helping with station evacuation. First I go to the station with some limpets and A LOT of heatsinks, empty the station a few times - go in with weapons and shields disabled, deploy limpets, pick up everything from black boxes to mats, get out, relog, repeat until your holds are full or you're out of heatsinks, go to rescue ship to pick up missions for what you already have. Get credits and keep mats.

I'm not sure about goldmine, but you'll get a nice ammount.