Okay, I admit it. I don't know how to find Raw Mat's.

[Stealthie]

You're not though. My point is that you can use expertise to pick favorable geology from the air (from within the scanner blue area), then fly over there for a closer look. It's quicker than SRV scanners and less brainless

What would you say constitutes "favorable geology"?

At Wardhr A8a, for example, scanning the surface just makes almost the entire surface a uniform blue colour.
Are we saying that I just need to look for ground that's easy for the SRV to traverse, or am I looking for something more than that?

 

[Stealthie]

Okay, for the sake of civility, it may be the location I mine doesn't produce much.

My problem is you make it sound like it's all there for the taking, but it's not, and nowhere near the quantities you claim.

There are not "tons" of it. There is not "...Always plenty for any engineering project...". If that were true, I would already have all the Grade 4/5 mats to trade down that I need for engineering my ships. I'm currently trying to learn how to locate materials and it's been a mess of information so far.

And more than one method from "years" past simply don't work these days. It's a wild goose chase with newer players getting mad they can't seem to do it right when the reality is that the location no longer produces what it MAY have in the past.

So, in other words, people don't need exaggerations, they need facts.

The problem we are discussing is about locating such systems in the first place. Blindly going from system to system is technically possible, but the point is, surely there is a better way to use what info the game provides, a method beyond random searches.

Uhuh.

Mining is one of my main "things" in ED.
I know it's not for everybody (which means getting raw mat's as a byproduct of mining is a non-starter for those people) but I do enjoy building ships that are good at mining and refining my own techniques to optimise the process.

Even so, I'd say the raw mat's I collect could best be described as a "nice little bonus" rather than being a primary source of those mat's.

And, besides, the quantity, and grade, of the mat's you can gather means that (once again) it'd be just as easy to hit up the crashed Annie in Koli Discii for half an hour instead.
The mat's you get from mining are a "nice little bonus" but you wouldn't want to rely on them as a primary source of mat's... especially when you're looking for specific mat's.

 

[Archvillain]

What would you say constitutes "favorable geology"?

The kind of geology that produces the features you are looking for. Maybe it's tectonic rifts, maybe it's altitude, etc

I've mostly been paying attention to exo-biology so I learned that instead, but the volcanism I've found along the way seems similar to exo-bio, eg. There are clusters of vents in the right geology and they are absent elsewhere, so you learn what to look for. At least that's how it is with exo-bio and it looks to me to be true of other features too

 

[Ozric]

Geo' POI's weren't a "loot crate" in the same way that, say, a crashed Annie is.
To find them you had to scan planets to discover if they were rich in what you were looking for and look for planets with Volcanism.
You were doing the work to find a suitable location for the stuff you're looking for.
The actual Geo' POIs were simply the payoff for your success in locating a suitable location.

Equally, brain-tree sites have similar prerequisites so they're not a "loot crate" either.
The issue I have with them is simply the fact that they're usually not a source of what you're actually looking for,
Instead, they're somewhere you can go to find something and then trade it for the thing you actually need.

You would still have to locate the Annie through in game methods. Unless you're googling quickest way to get raw materials, like people used to do with Crystal Shard sites. I sort of get where you're coming from, though I don't think it's that different as the geological features still hold those materials they're just not automatically shown on the nav panel when you DSS a planet.

It's annoying in some ways certainly, but it's been almost 4 years I don't think they're updating it.

Regardless of the patch note, it was never even slightly accurate like that. "Hot" and "Cold" meant exactly the same in practice, because you got an overlay which was either "hot" or "nothing" with a very thin band around the border fading through "cold".

That was not my experience with the original, as it was how I learnt that different types of Fungoida grow in different terrains for example. How if you saw the Yellow areas over hilly terrain you knew it would be Setisis, or if it was on the flat it would be Gelata. Learning the boundaries that existed in game as you describe. Where as now it's a sea of Blue, there is not "hot" or "nothing", it's all a "maybe".

Now I look at the map to see where is Blue, and then turn it it off to manually look for the type of terrain I have learnt the geology/biology occurs on.

The border generation is the similar to the clustering with NSPs we got in Beyond. The Codex descriptions aren't entirely accurate, but you can get a guide from them

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

Uhuh.

Mining is one of my main "things" in ED.
I know it's not for everybody (which means getting raw mat's as a byproduct of mining is a non-starter for those people) but I do enjoy building ships that are good at mining and refining my own techniques to optimise the process.

Even so, I'd say the raw mat's I collect could best be described as a "nice little bonus" rather than being a primary source of those mat's.

And, besides, the quantity, and grade, of the mat's you can gather means that (once again) it'd be just as easy to hit up the crashed Annie in Koli Discii for half an hour instead.
The mat's you get from mining are a "nice little bonus" but you wouldn't want to rely on them as a primary source of mat's... especially when you're looking for specific mat's.

Exactly. Well said.

As a "nice little bonus", I have indeed collected a few materials while laser mining. I'm new to mining which is why I'm currently in learning mode, trying to find valid information on how best to locate materials specifically.

I was just watching that video yesterday which mentions KOLI DISCII, and also Ross 444. I made a folder of info with screenshots, etc. But I have not been there as yet simply because I want to make sure that info is true, as best I can.

The video (READ DESCRIPTION! How to Engineer your first FSD Elite Dangerous Guide 2025) by Dituri's Elite was posted 7 months ago, so I assume that's rather current. I haven't located anything with a more recent date. And that video is about specific materials for a specific module so it's about collecting certain materials.

There's a ton of open pastures around, but only certain ones have cows!

 

[Stealthie]

The kind of geology that produces the features you are looking for. Maybe it's tectonic rifts, maybe it's altitude, etc

I've mostly been paying attention to exo-biology so I learned that instead, but the volcanism I've found along the way seems similar to exo-bio, eg. There are clusters of vents in the right geology and they are absent elsewhere, so you learn what to look for. I'm not certain it's similar to exo-bio but it appears to be

Okay, that's good to hear.

Given that this all arrived with Odyssey (at roughly the same time I left), though, it's a bit strange (and frustrating) that nobody seems to actually have a handle on this stuff yet.

Go to youtube and search for " Elite Dangerous How do I find [insert material here]" and almost all the resulting video's will be ones showing you how to either do laps of the Koli Discii Annie or nuke brain-trees from orbit (after monkeying with your gfx settings in a suitably exploity manner) and hoovering up mat's to trade.

I, literally, can't even find a single video (not even from respected sources such as DTEA or The Buur Pit etc) that goes through the procedure of locating a planet suitably rich in a mineral, and with suitable geology, and then physically locating it on the surface.

If nobody's making those video's, in favour of "crashed Annie" or "exploding brain-tree" video's instead, it kind of suggests that nobody thinks obtaining mat's from their primary source is a good idea... which is kind of worrying.

 

[Ozric]

Okay, that's good to hear.

Given that this all arrived with Odyssey (at roughly the same time I left), though, it's a bit strange (and frustrating) that nobody seems to actually have a handle on this stuff yet.

Go to youtube and search for " Elite Dangerous How do I find [insert material here]" and almost all the resulting video's will be ones showing you how to either do laps of the Koli Discii Annie or nuke brain-trees from orbit (after monkeying with your gfx settings in a suitably exploity manner) and hoovering up mat's to trade.

I, literally, can't even find a single video (not even from respected sources such as DTEA or The Buur Pit etc) that goes through the procedure of locating a planet suitably rich in a mineral, and with suitable geology, and then physically locating it on the surface.

If nobody's making those video's, in favour of "crashed Annie" or "exploding brain-tree" video's instead, it kind of suggests that nobody thinks obtaining mat's from their primary source is a good idea... which is kind of worrying.

It's the path of least resistance. It's what the community, especially those who make videos, have always done. As I mentioned before, prior to Odyssey it was all videos about how you should go to the Crystal Shard forests. The quickest way to find the type of Encoded Material you're looking for by searching for systems in a very specific combination of states.

Very few people make proper guides explaining the ins and outs of how things work, because the vast majority of people don't want that. They want where can I point my ship to get things quickly.
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That said, there are highly detailed threads on NSP generation and exo biology in the Exploration sub forum, that go into all the details about what conditions affect what things , where the Codex is correct/incorrect, the best type of main star to look for if you're looking for certain things, etc.

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

it's a bit strange (and frustrating) that nobody seems to actually have a handle on this stuff yet.

Totally agree. Maybe we set our bar of expectations too high?

It does seem as though nobody is making updated videos on the topic. Most of the "brain trees" videos are a bit dated it seems, as there are several but from years ago.

 

[K Olley]

A Quick GUIDE for engineering mats, not mine and to be honest I do not know who made or maintains it.

With the rings material it can be a bit hit and miss, some rings will not have all the materials listed and sometimes they will have materials that are not listed although if a material is listed as surface only then you will not find it in a ring.

If you mine a lot then it is worth visiting a mats trader on a regular basis and trading up your commonly found mats, I do this and normally have complete stocks of raw mats.

 

[Stealthie]

You would still have to locate the Annie through in game methods. Unless you're googling quickest way to get raw materials, like people used to do with Crystal Shard sites. I sort of get where you're coming from, though I don't think it's that different as the geological features still hold those materials they're just not automatically shown on the nav panel when you DSS a planet.

It's annoying in some ways certainly, but it's been almost 4 years I don't think they're updating it.

Fair enough.

Honestly don't mean this in an antagonistic way but, just so I can understand how people are thinking these days....how do you go about obtaining Selenium currently?

Is it a waste of time to even bother with surface prospecting, in favour of just nuking brain-trees or raiding a crashed Annie, or would you go looking for Selenium in an SRV?

It seems kind of nuts, to me, that FDev went to all the trouble of giving planets mineral compositions, and geological features, if none of that stuff provides a good (and I mean "good" rather than just "viable") way to obtain those minerals.... especially since they used to do that, but the usefulness seems to have been removed.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

If nobody's making those video's, in favour of "crashed Annie" or "exploding brain-tree" video's instead, it kind of suggests that nobody thinks obtaining mat's from their primary source is a good idea... which is kind of worrying.

"Here's a more fun but less efficient way to fill your material reserves" isn't the sort of thing which makes for a popular video, apparently.
(See also: everyone complaining that Inara isn't telling them where to find CMM Composites, when if they knew even what can be read on the in-game market screen about CMM Composites Inara would be really quite helpful to them)

One other Odyssey change you might have missed is that the generation of your basic "metallic meteorites" anywhere on any planet has gone way up, so you don't even really need a volcanism area, though they're nice for the view if nothing else. Just drop in, grab the meteorites and outcrops, if it's not enough go back to the ship and hop another 20km along.

how do you go about obtaining Selenium currently?

If for some reason I needed a lot of it, find a landable planet with Selenium, land somewhere, shoot the meteorites/outcrops, repeat.
(If I was trying to be efficient, I might use Spansh to see if there was a nearby one with Selenium, Zinc and Tin all at once, so I could fill up on the whole trade chain with the same planet, and also pick up one of the other G4 mats at the same time)

Since there aren't that many uses for Selenium, my "in practice" way of obtaining it is "I picked up a load in passing on an exploration trip five years ago and that will last me the rest of the game anyway". But I'd use the same technique for any raw material I needed.

Powerplay care packages are also good for topping up general material reserves. You can get a couple of those a week with pretty minimal effort just by doing the easy weekly tasks, or rather more if you put some effort in. You don't get to choose what specific material you get, but for something like Selenium where you maybe don't need all that much to start with I find that's plenty to keep it topped-up.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Okay, for the sake of civility, it may be the location I mine doesn't produce much.

My problem is you make it sound like it's all there for the taking, but it's not, and nowhere near the quantities you claim.

There are not "tons" of it. There is not "...Always plenty for any engineering project...". If that were true, I would already have all the Grade 4/5 mats to trade down that I need for engineering my ships. I'm currently trying to learn how to locate materials and it's been a mess of information so far.

And more than one method from "years" past simply don't work these days. It's a wild goose chase with newer players getting mad they can't seem to do it right when the reality is that the location no longer produces what it MAY have in the past.

So, in other words, people don't need exaggerations, they need facts.

The problem we are discussing is about locating such systems in the first place. Blindly going from system to system is technically possible, but the point is, surely there is a better way to use what info the game provides, a method beyond random searches.

What can i say? I mean, i could make a video, although not today, and not until the current CGs are over.

Maybe some older methods don't work, but i've used this method myself in the last couple of months and after a few hours mining i had more than resupplied myself fully with tier 1 mats and stocked up on loads of higher tier mats, both gathered and by trading tier 1/2 stuff as they filled up.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Fair enough.

Honestly don't mean this in an antagonistic way but, just so I can understand how people are thinking these days....how do you go about obtaining Selenium currently?

Is it a waste of time to even bother with surface prospecting, in favour of just nuking brain-trees or raiding a crashed Annie, or would you go looking for Selenium in an SRV?

It seems kind of nuts, to me, that FDev went to all the trouble of giving planets mineral compositions, and geological features, if none of that stuff provides a good (and I mean "good" rather than just "viable") way to obtain those minerals.... especially since they used to do that, but the usefulness seems to have been removed.

I have done the geo sites since Odyssey dropped. Never had trouble finding them. Just fly along at a low altitude and they pop up if you're in a suitable area. I generally don't do it because its a bit boring for me. If i was going to do it the SRV way, then i'd do the old scouting for rocks method, which, while less efficient, is fun, as you can bomb around a planet checking the scanner while testing your driving skills.

 

[metatheurgist]

Aren't they also available as mission rewards now?

 

[nemolomen]

Aren't they also available as mission rewards now?

Some are, yes.

 

[IstvaanDCIV]

Has anyone mentioned Brain Trees yet? I thought that was the "gold standard" for the acquisition of raw materials, at least until the recent engineering update. I can fill up on most of the raw materials available there in about an afternoon.

 

[Ozric]

Fair enough.

Honestly don't mean this in an antagonistic way but, just so I can understand how people are thinking these days....how do you go about obtaining Selenium currently?

Is it a waste of time to even bother with surface prospecting, in favour of just nuking brain-trees or raiding a crashed Annie, or would you go looking for Selenium in an SRV?

It seems kind of nuts, to me, that FDev went to all the trouble of giving planets mineral compositions, and geological features, if none of that stuff provides a good (and I mean "good" rather than just "viable") way to obtain those minerals.... especially since they used to do that, but the usefulness seems to have been removed.

I don't take it as antagonistic. I would do things the way I first mentioned though I'm afraid. Look for a planet that has a high Selenium content, and then drive the surface. I find it quite relaxing and very much enjoy the planetside music. If the planet has Geological (or pre-Odyssey Biologicals), then I would probably aim for somewhere that's in the Blue and look for some by low flying for a bit. If found then land there and drive around, then continue off in a direction. If not, then just drive until I come across some.

I still do it for Arsenic cause that will always be a pain to find As others have said you might find some as mission rewards so you could always check a station first before heading down to a planet. And as Ian said Spansh can be used to find planets with the highest quantity of your desired material if you need, and assuming someone's been there with EDMC active.

 

[Stealthie]

Very few people make proper guides explaining the ins and outs of how things work, because the vast majority of people don't want that. They want where can I point my ship to get things quickly.
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Yep.

It is, basically, the whole "Teach a man to fish..." thing.

Strange thing is, the Jameson Crash site has become a permanent fixture for obtaining Encoded mat's and HGE's have become easier and easier to farm with successive updates - to the point where collecting manufactured mat's is now as trivial as collecting encoded - but, at the same time, it seems like collecting raw mat's has deliberately been made harder less reliable.

We used to have the shard sites for mass stockpiling, Geo/Bio POIs for reliable sourcing and SRV prospecting and mining for casual collecting.
Now we've lost the two best ways to reliably gather raw mat's and they've been replaced by better-in-some-ways-but worse-in-other-ways SRV prospecting?

 

[aRJay]

Not sure about that.

Previously (to me, at least), it seemed like the "expertise" was in finding suitable planets and the payoff was an immediate, guaranteed, supply of a modest amount of whatever mat' you needed.

The POI with tens of geysers, fumaroles or vents all within a small area might have been the payoff but it was jarring especially when identical terrain produced nothing.

Now, if we're back to just driving about in the SRV, I'd say that requires less expertise, especially given that we know the various outcrops/meteorites/geodes we find aren't actually persistent and the game just spawns one somewhere in front of us when it thinks we're statistically likely to stumble on one.

You only go driving around in the SRV after you have found the vents, geysers or fumaroles from your spaceship, on some planets you can even spot meteors or other mat sources from your ship which is mildly frustrating if you haven’t got an SRV and are just looking for exobiology.

 

[Stealthie]

You only go driving around in the SRV after you have found the vents, geysers or fumaroles from your spaceship, on some planets you can even spot meteors or other mat sources from your ship which is mildly frustrating if you haven’t got an SRV and are just looking for exobiology.

Fair enough.

If found by ship or SRV, are the current geological features persistent or not?