As has been said there is a lot of information on the forums, the web, the yootoob and elsewhere, but the game has been around for many years and changed substantially over those years so check the date anything you find was written or edited as the older it is the more likely it is to be wrong.
General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System
- Thread starter Daniel Dusk
- Start date
I just wanted to add to what my husband (OP) said. If you ever overhaul engineering, which as a Mom, is impossible for me to do as it is now, I would really appreciate it if you could add more in the way of cosmetics for the ships and characters. IMO, you can never go wrong with lots of outfit/hair/ship skin options!
You should hang around the newcomer forum and regale us of some family Dusk-Dawn CMDRs adventures and exploits (and perhaps disasters!) in the world famous "What are you up to?" thread!
Don't think too far ahead. Enjoy that Vulture.
Just imagine all coming down on some geologic signals, then go to the coordinates of the best find and see one another zooming around in your SRVs in a field of geysers or something. How fun!
You mustn't give up so soon and we shall hope to see you around!
I want to thank the community for its passion for this game. I received much pushback and some encouraging words, but what I took from my first post on this forum is that everyone here cares deeply about this game. My wife and I reinstalled the game and decided to synthesize and apply the advice we received. I have opinions, but I’m not so arrogant as to think I know better than those who have invested thousands of hours. As we learn this game, I will keep posting my suggestions and ask you to be charitable. Overall, this is a good community.
Update: I outfitted a python for mining, and I’m working on saving up for an FDL while my wife bought an ASP Explorer while working on her imperial rank because she loves the aesthetics of the cutter.
Thank you, everyone, for your feedback, and God bless.
Update: I outfitted a python for mining, and I’m working on saving up for an FDL while my wife bought an ASP Explorer while working on her imperial rank because she loves the aesthetics of the cutter.
Thank you, everyone, for your feedback, and God bless.
Happy to hear that you're not giving up, this game needs more players. Do use the newcomers forum and just ask if you are unsure about something. The game really is much better than some discussions would lead you to conclude, and there are normally multiple ways to achieve something.
forums.frontier.co.uk
Newcomers: Questions, Guides & Tutorials
An easy way to make credits mining, is to find a platinum hotspot and laser mine for platinum to sell as soon as you run out of limpets. Everyone can mine the same rock, which makes things go faster. As the collector limpets do not differentiate as to who produces the material chunk, have one primary collection ship.
Since you have a ready made group, a long term objective could be to buy a fleet carrier. Then everyone and their ships could travel together.
Steve
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Much about Elite Dangerous is far from obvious but there are a lot of online resources to help.
Inara, for example, is practically essential: link your account to it and you can track materials, crafting requirements and all sorts.
And, of course, you’ve already found these forums!
In terms of progression … I can only recommend what I’ve always done:
- Get into a DBX ASAP and engineer your FSD as much as you can
- Get out to a Guardian site and collect materials to unlock the FSD Booster module as first priority alongside whatever else you might like. There are some great excellent guides on this forum for both finding and deciphering the sites - depending on how much help you want vs the fun of figuring it out yourself!!
- Now you can get out to the Crystal sites to fill up on high grade raw materials before trading them down to lower levels, likely giving you circa 100 of all the raw materials in the game. Again, there are some excellent guides on here for where to go and what you need to look for.
Just don’t forget a fuel scoop! And you’ll need a Detailed Surface Scanner for finding the crystal sites nowadays, IIRC.
That alone sets you up in a good starting place for engineering since it’s then only Manufacturer and Data that you need to worry about. Plus you’ll have done a bunch of jumps and gained route plotting and flying experience.
For Manufactured materials, it depends what you like doing … with a wing of 4 you should be capable of dropping into a RES site with little engineering and picking off ships to then scoop up materials.
Data will come from scanning ships in those self-same RES sites or from mission rewards.
There’s also a bunch of on-foot stuff if you have Odyssey …
Inara, for example, is practically essential: link your account to it and you can track materials, crafting requirements and all sorts.
And, of course, you’ve already found these forums!
In terms of progression … I can only recommend what I’ve always done:
- Get into a DBX ASAP and engineer your FSD as much as you can
- Get out to a Guardian site and collect materials to unlock the FSD Booster module as first priority alongside whatever else you might like. There are some great excellent guides on this forum for both finding and deciphering the sites - depending on how much help you want vs the fun of figuring it out yourself!!
- Now you can get out to the Crystal sites to fill up on high grade raw materials before trading them down to lower levels, likely giving you circa 100 of all the raw materials in the game. Again, there are some excellent guides on here for where to go and what you need to look for.
Just don’t forget a fuel scoop! And you’ll need a Detailed Surface Scanner for finding the crystal sites nowadays, IIRC.
That alone sets you up in a good starting place for engineering since it’s then only Manufacturer and Data that you need to worry about. Plus you’ll have done a bunch of jumps and gained route plotting and flying experience.
For Manufactured materials, it depends what you like doing … with a wing of 4 you should be capable of dropping into a RES site with little engineering and picking off ships to then scoop up materials.
Data will come from scanning ships in those self-same RES sites or from mission rewards.
There’s also a bunch of on-foot stuff if you have Odyssey …
Or let's stop making excuses for the lack of effort from Fdev to give that info readily in game ?
Third party apps show that the information is in game and also there is a need for that info ?
As new players come in maybe a bit of encouragement wouldn't go amiss?
Just saying .
Yes.
They are in game.
Little offtop, but actually, in some places new players ask questions, which in 90% can be covered by...
screen from handbook (even "how to gather materials" could be at basics covered by it. Just don't expect level of drop tables for each target, list of all sources for all possible material, and recommended places for gathering them (in elite- usually place where you can just relog farm).
Just saying.
Also, fact that some sites and tools provide tools more accurate than game (because they are feeded by data submited by THOUSANDS PLAYERS FROM WHOLE GALAXY) doesnt mean, that game have to be such accurate.
First thing which come to my mind is trade.
Using inara for whole time is like using translator.
Learning economy-commodity links (in terms of profitable trade and access of commodity) and in game tools is like learning language.
Without using additional sites for whole time unironically even trade is more interesting.
But if it's in game why not readily available to the players in game ? I am an Xbox player and did it the hard way before they fixed the API and we could get the bigger picture and the info was a game changer, such as my travel and my systems, but that's not in game I had to use journal planner and then transfer to edsm . And I could search planets and how many of what I have found , can't do that with the in-game stuff ??
Once you have figured out what drops where and when and what to look for then it becomes "easier" but that info was never given in game that was collated by people who loved the game not Fdev. Many great ideas but mostly mediocre implementation.
Yes, they gave API/log access. If you need anything extra, you're welcome to do. That's how whole Open Source works. And Elite is pretty progressive in that. Other games does not have API or have "icons changer" only. For example, TESO, WoW aren't playable without plugins too.
Trust me Cmdr - assuming you like the game and stick at it, all the systems will be second nature to you soon.
Imho, the complication & your will to succeed, will keep you coming back again and again (hopefully!)
Elite rewards time investment.
Sorry if we can be a little 'spiky' with some ideas (Suffice to say some subjects get mentioned more often than others!)
But truly - we're always happy to welcome a new Cmdr!
Welcome & I hope to see you in the black Cmdr o7
We all were newbies at some point in time.
But information can be found either in game or from other players, here on forums or on other media
For my part yes I went through the engineering route for my main account. However I decided against doing that for my alt accounts, sticking to vanilla and Tech Broker kit.
This is fine for the exploration alt, the Bubble alt does want to do a couple of unlocks though.
Most of the stuff I spent hours 'grinding' for however now tends to rest in storage.
It's a steep learning curve certainly but I'd say be prepared for your perception of the game to change quite profoundly.
This is fine for the exploration alt, the Bubble alt does want to do a couple of unlocks though.
Most of the stuff I spent hours 'grinding' for however now tends to rest in storage.
It's a steep learning curve certainly but I'd say be prepared for your perception of the game to change quite profoundly.
I did same thing for my alt, and honestly, I never had more fun from combat, than on unengi alt.
I think, that it tell something about engineering, and gameplay
Only exception which I did was AX. But for bounty, massacres and CZsI always use nonengi ships.
It's just more funny, when you arent superhero which can tank 10 enemies at once.
The engineers are fine. Except the Ody the ones where personal equipment upgrades are pretty grindy (he said having done loads already ).
The exception here is Domino Green who I personally dislike with extreme prejudice. Her voice and 'tood are just too much for me. I'd like to stuff her in my extra backpack cap and lob the whole thing into the nearest bark mound.
).The exception here is Domino Green who I personally dislike with extreme prejudice. Her voice and 'tood are just too much for me. I'd like to stuff her in my extra backpack cap and lob the whole thing into the nearest bark mound.
Hey there @Daniel Dusk and @Momba Dawn, as a player who has only started playing this 11-year-old game just over a year ago, so perceiving myself as being somewhere in between a newbie and a veteran, I would like to offer my perspective and some general advice and encouragement. Because I would really hate to see you and your family choose to miss out on this game because of a handful of prickly responses from a minority of forum dwellers. I think Elite Dangerous has some really great gameplay to offer, despite the lack of official and easy to navigate documentation that really drills down into the depths of this game's mechanics.
Yes it is true, Elite Dangerous is very much a game that does not hold your hand. But if you persevere and make use of the community-generated tools and documentation like I did, you can find your niche within it. There's also an Elite Dangerous subreddit that in my experience has a community willing to help out with any questions you might have. But before you make a post anywhere, do try and use a search engine to determine if someone else has asked a question or explored a topic before, keeping in mind that some things may have changed with later game versions and expansions. For example, planetary coordinates in the Horizons version of the game are not the same as in the Odyssey version of the game, since the Odyssey DLC changed up a lot of things to do with planetary surfaces.
If using Google is not too effective at first, then keep at it and eventually the algorithm will learn what you're trying to look for. Nowadays when I search for something related to Elite Dangerous, I get plenty of results at the top of the search page from both this forum and the subreddit.
My personal opinion is that ship-based engineering is good enough to be worth bothering with. You might have to find and spend a lot of materials in order to get a module or weapon all the way to the top-tier G5 level, but I think the performance improvements are mostly commensurate with the required effort to get them.
On-foot engineering just looks like a tedious mess to me and I haven't bothered with it. I would recommend taking a look at the "Sharing is caring" thread instead and grabbing some ready-made G3 suits and weapons to save yourself the hassle.
Yes it is true, Elite Dangerous is very much a game that does not hold your hand. But if you persevere and make use of the community-generated tools and documentation like I did, you can find your niche within it. There's also an Elite Dangerous subreddit that in my experience has a community willing to help out with any questions you might have. But before you make a post anywhere, do try and use a search engine to determine if someone else has asked a question or explored a topic before, keeping in mind that some things may have changed with later game versions and expansions. For example, planetary coordinates in the Horizons version of the game are not the same as in the Odyssey version of the game, since the Odyssey DLC changed up a lot of things to do with planetary surfaces.
If using Google is not too effective at first, then keep at it and eventually the algorithm will learn what you're trying to look for. Nowadays when I search for something related to Elite Dangerous, I get plenty of results at the top of the search page from both this forum and the subreddit.
My personal opinion is that ship-based engineering is good enough to be worth bothering with. You might have to find and spend a lot of materials in order to get a module or weapon all the way to the top-tier G5 level, but I think the performance improvements are mostly commensurate with the required effort to get them.
On-foot engineering just looks like a tedious mess to me and I haven't bothered with it. I would recommend taking a look at the "Sharing is caring" thread instead and grabbing some ready-made G3 suits and weapons to save yourself the hassle.
As a newcomer not that long ago myself, going on about 350hrs in the game, I think that my own newbie exp is still fresh (and ongoing) so I could share some thoughts I had with you:
-As a beginner, Do NEVER watch videos the like ''How to win 3000 whatever mat/Cr per hours'', you'd end up depressed, and thinking it's all about ''grinding stuff'', but on the contrary, go for lore videos and historical events, so you get hooked even more by this universe: this game is old and had many steps, so it has built its own History based on what early players and the others after that acomplished, some events are actually so famous that even people or journalists not playing the game reports them, here are some examples:
-I've watched in my native language a video about one of the longest rescue made by Fuel Rats,
-The various far distance explorations is fascinating,
-Crazy things good or bad, but still, happened like actual history events, as for example when some people lured newbies to ''enslave'' them...
Those things really put you into some long time, vast universe, in which old pilots put their marks, and that you are pleased to jump in and discover yourself, that's the idea I started to make of ED.
Also, I joined a squadron, so it is always nice to meet both more experienced cmdrs and fellow noobs, and they can help you with engineer stuff a lot.
But this, you actually don't need to rush at all, or to learn evertthing from others and spoil the game's hidden mechanics: I've found myself wandering in the game with space rock/stoner music compilations, with whatever random unexpensive ships I want to try, and see what happens with those relative weakness, give a try to types of missions I'm not used to, make mistakes, and so on, you'll soon find that you harvested a lot of craps by doing so, and then, what is useful for what...
Alternatively, if I don't have much time, I just pick one mission, sometimes evertyhing's fine so i can start another, sometimes it fails in every way possible so the challenge is to reach safety with a broken ship asap...
So yes, pick advises here in this forum and elsewhere whenever you need, but also, just fly your ships with your familly and see what happens, make mistakes, blow your own ships being stupid sometimes, or get notoriety because you misunderstood something, you'll still learn a lot by trying, plus being already a team, you will have multiple brains figuring things out, just like an escape game.
So my two cents ans a noob: listen to the vets, sometimes don't, but have fun first, ED is way more than a grindy mobile phone crappy game with no background, no matter those strange videos with ''tank'' anacondas making credits whilr the guy's AFK or whatever.
-As a beginner, Do NEVER watch videos the like ''How to win 3000 whatever mat/Cr per hours'', you'd end up depressed, and thinking it's all about ''grinding stuff'', but on the contrary, go for lore videos and historical events, so you get hooked even more by this universe: this game is old and had many steps, so it has built its own History based on what early players and the others after that acomplished, some events are actually so famous that even people or journalists not playing the game reports them, here are some examples:
-I've watched in my native language a video about one of the longest rescue made by Fuel Rats,
-The various far distance explorations is fascinating,
-Crazy things good or bad, but still, happened like actual history events, as for example when some people lured newbies to ''enslave'' them...
Those things really put you into some long time, vast universe, in which old pilots put their marks, and that you are pleased to jump in and discover yourself, that's the idea I started to make of ED.
Also, I joined a squadron, so it is always nice to meet both more experienced cmdrs and fellow noobs, and they can help you with engineer stuff a lot.
But this, you actually don't need to rush at all, or to learn evertthing from others and spoil the game's hidden mechanics: I've found myself wandering in the game with space rock/stoner music compilations, with whatever random unexpensive ships I want to try, and see what happens with those relative weakness, give a try to types of missions I'm not used to, make mistakes, and so on, you'll soon find that you harvested a lot of craps by doing so, and then, what is useful for what...
Alternatively, if I don't have much time, I just pick one mission, sometimes evertyhing's fine so i can start another, sometimes it fails in every way possible so the challenge is to reach safety with a broken ship asap...
So yes, pick advises here in this forum and elsewhere whenever you need, but also, just fly your ships with your familly and see what happens, make mistakes, blow your own ships being stupid sometimes, or get notoriety because you misunderstood something, you'll still learn a lot by trying, plus being already a team, you will have multiple brains figuring things out, just like an escape game.
So my two cents ans a noob: listen to the vets, sometimes don't, but have fun first, ED is way more than a grindy mobile phone crappy game with no background, no matter those strange videos with ''tank'' anacondas making credits whilr the guy's AFK or whatever.
I'm a player who didn't watch any exploit videos. Never went for the gold rushes. From my experience you don't get anywhere in ED if you just play along. No reputation, no credits (that might have changed by now, but I made less than a billion total back then), no materials, no powerplay thingums. What you get is random loot that doesn't bring you forward at all. And when you want to go forward you have to burn that preciuous stuff in unfavourable trades.
Nah. If you liked doing ED your way, you were screwed when the engineers came. It was yet another dreadful stretched progression bolted on the others of which they alleviated the credits so we can listen to "credits are meaningless today!" when in reality the problem is something else entirely.