I'm probably lucky, because I enjoy playing the mission board and also do some mining every now and then, so I'm able to randomly pick up most stuff while I just play my game. I do use the nifty "EDEngineer" tool, though, which lets me set up a shopping list and then shows me at a glance all the materials I need to get my current ship to full G5 (except thrusters, see below) and also which upgrades I can already afford. Without this tool I would likely be back to force-grinding one specific type of material for that one blueprint I currently focus on ...
What I cannot be bothered right now is to unlock Palin, because this is so not possible at all to do while playing the way I want to play. I haven't been futher out than ~700 ly yet and even this bit had been mostly forced during a CG which required as many system scans/honks (back then when we were searching for Emperor's Dawn cells, if anyone remembers). Also "Unknown Fragments"? What exactly is that? Some Thargoid stuff? "Unknown probes"? Never seen one of those and probably won't, as long I play the game the way I do ... But who cares, even on G3 dirty thrusters my FdL feels like a nimble little fighter
I decided I'll take a passenger mission 10k ly when I need to unlock Palin, they pay about 40m credits at the top end, so at least it'll be worth it. You just know though, don't you, that as we're approaching the destination, they're gonna ask for 2 units of condoms and 2 units of KY jelly 'to make the trip more interesting'. "Hey, what's going on back there!" lol.
