5. Engineering
NEWP Guide to EngineeringSo, “Engineering” - What is it?
Ever wished that your ship was tougher? Or that it could jump further? Or fly faster? Engineering is the answer to that wish.
Engineering allows you to change the characteristics of modules you own. The changes stay with the module no matter what ship you put it on. Letting you customise your ships to an enormous extent and make them better for whatever activity you want to perform.
Is it worth it?
Yes, unequivocally yes.
Getting ships engineered really doesn’t take that much time and effort if you know how to go about it, and the improvements you can get are enormous.
For example, imagine you are building a Diamondback Explorer for a long exploration trip. Without engineering, you’ll end up with a jump range of about 36LY. With just one bit of engineering – the Frame Shift Drive, you can get the range of that same build up to over 57LY. That's enough to almost cut the number of jumps in half, and it only gets better from there.
The effect is even greater for combat ships, an un-engineered Imperial Courier built for combat might have a top speed or around 400m/s with a total of about 1230 hit-points (hull and shields combined). Meanwhile a fully engineered one can easily exceed 800m/s with well over 2000 hit-points, while hitting harder at the same time.
Ok, you've convinced me. What do I need to know?
So, the basics.
Currently there are 25 Engineers in the game, each of these is able to perform engineering on certain different modules and weapons in your ship, and are able to perform these upgrades to different quality levels.
The types of upgrades that can be applied to a given module are referred to as "Blueprints" and the quality levels are referred to as "Grades".
The highest grade that is available is G5. Each engineer typically only has one or two modules on which they can perform G5 upgrades.
So, for example, you could get yourself a "Grade 3 (or G3) Overcharged Multi-cannon". This would mean you have applied the "Overcharged" blueprint to a Multi-cannon and reached the Grade 3 upgrade.
Most modules and weapons in the game can have multiple different engineering blueprints applied to them, but only ever one at a time. Each of these blueprints can be further modified by applying special effects to them (not all modules have special effects available).
In order to perform engineering, you are going to need to unlock access to an engineer by meeting certain conditions. Then use "Materials" as a sort of currency to implement the modifications.
Wait, "Materials"? What are they?
Engineering Materials are collectable items that you can use for engineering, synthesis and unlocking certain equipment. They are weightless, take up no cargo space (although you do have a limit to how many of each type you can carry at a time) and are not lost when your ship or SRV is destroyed. You cannot buy or sell materials, or give them to another Cmdr. However, you can trade them at a material trader - we'll get to that in a bit.
If you wish to think of this in the logic of inside the game, you can think of Materials as small samples of each of the different things they represent which are carried around with you in person. If you wish to think of them in more generic terms, think of them as gameplay tokens that you get from performing different activities around the game.
Materials come in 3 Types and 5 Grades. The types of materials are:
- Raw (such as iron, tin and polonium)
- Manufactured (such as biotech conductors, mechanical components and focus crystals)
- Data (such as cracked industrial firmware, and datamined wake exceptions).
The Grades, as you might expect range from 1 - 5, with G1 being common and the least valuable and G5 the rarest and most valuable.
You cannot buy or sell materials, but you can trade them at a Material Trader. There are 3 different types of traders, one for each type of material, each material type has multiple categories. Trading between categories comes at a cost of 6->1.
Otherwise, the exchange ratios are 1->3 going down and 6->1 going up. More detail is available here.
To do these trades, you first select the material that you want to gain, then select what you are willing to trade for it. The ratio will then show you how many you will get and what it will cost you.
Material Trade Tables
So, how do I get started?
Without a doubt, the best engineer to get started with is Felicity Farseer. She is one of the most useful engineers in the game, is quick and easy to unlock and we can get you started at gathering materials at the same time.
I'll warn you now that there is a wall of text to this, but having taken multiple people around this route, I can tell you that in practice, this only takes about 3 hours for most people to complete the whole thing, and most of this time is spent gathering materials that you will need in future. It's broken into convenient legs for players who can only do shorter gaming sessions.
First things first, get yourself a ship with a good jump range, and the following modules installed:
- Detailed surface scanner
- Cargo rack
- Planetary Vehicle Hangar (and an SRV in the bay)
- Shield
- Fuel Scoop
Something like this will work very well (note that you should be able to buy all this equipment at al-Haytham Enterprise in LHS 350, near to Meliae).
DBX Bubble Jumper
Note that as part of this trip you will be visiting the Pleiades nebula, you may (about 20% chance) get hyperdicted by a Thargoid. This is where they intercept you when you are jumping between star systems. They are not automatically hostile unless you are carrying something like thargoid or guardian commodities. But it's best to know how to escape them.
Go into the options menu, controls, and under the "Flight Miscellaneous" check that you have a key bound for "Toggle Flight Assist" and that the button mode is set to "Toggle".
If you get hyperdicted, immediately hit boost and the button you have set for "Toggle Flight Assist". This will send you rocketing off into the black, just before the thargoid emits an energy pulse and shuts down your ship. With FA-off you will drift away safely.
If you've done this right, when your power comes back online, you will still be alive. Then you can continue on your way.
First Leg
Check your ship has everything it needs (including an SRV in the SRV bay), and sufficient power. Check that you have the discovery scanner set to a fire group as you are going to need that exploration data later. So make sure you at least honk (use your discovery scanner) in every system you pass through.
From here on, you are best to operate in "Solo" or "Private" mode so that you aren't competing with other Commanders for materials (only one player can collect the materials in an instance, if someone else is there in Open, then the instance will not reset while either of you is present, so you won't be able to relog to respawn the materials).
Next, if you are a member of the NEWP squadron in game, you are going to want to go to the galaxy map, go to the bookmarks tab, and scroll down to the Squadron bookmarks (they have the squadron symbol beside them). The one you are looking for first is called.
"4.0: Materials - Dav's Hope"
In case you aren't a member of NEWP or can’t see this for some reason, the location is:
- System : Hyades Sector DR-V c2-23
- Planet: A 5
- Co-ordinates : 44.8180, -31.3893.
Plot yourself a route there, and remember to honk each system on route.
Once you arrive at the destination, you will see that it is a planet. So, it's time to put that Detailed Surface Scanner to work. Once you have scanned the planet to 100% you should see in your Navigation tab on the left panel, Dav's Hope. Head down there, land, and hop out in your SRV.
Dav's Hope is an abandoned mining colony. And it is a very useful location for gathering the "Manufactured" type of engineering materials. In order to do this, you drive around the site in your SRV, with your cargo scoop open, targeting, and driving over the materials which spawn. There is a easy track to follow around the outside of the site on which these materials appear.
As soon as you have completed a circuit, Menu Log, that is exit to the main menu, and log back into Solo or Private mode again. Hey Presto, the materials will have re-appeared. So drive around the circuit again.
I would recommend doing at least 5 circuits at this point as it will give you a very good starting point to get into early engineering activities with. Don't go nuts grinding it. This place isn't going anywhere.
Second Leg
Head to the Galaxy Map and again look at the bookmarks tab. You should find your next destination (remember to be ready for Thargoid hyperdictions from here on).
- 4.1: Materials - Bug Killer - HIP 16613
Which will direct you to:
- System : HIP 16613
- Planet: 1A
- Co-ordinates : -11.0093, -96.0339
Plot a course and start jumping, scanning as you go. Once you arrive in system, head to the target planet and perform a detailed surface scan on the planet using your probes. You should get a surface point of interest marker called "The Bug Killer".
WARNING - If you find yourself with a... visitor... at this location. Don't get too close, and don't take any aggressive actions. If you do, you will get dead very quickly. Otherwise, just enjoy the light show.
Follow the nav marker all the way down to the surface, you should find a crashed ship there. Find yourself somewhere to land. Now, deploy your SRV, scan the ships computer marker - located in the ship itself (you only have to do this once) then head around the back to where all the cargo and stuff is.
Around this area, you will find 3x "Cargo Rack" and 3x "Comms Beacon". You will need to shoot each of the cargo racks until it pops and a material comes flying out (drop you cargo scoop, target the material and drive over it) and scan the comms beacons (use your turret to target it, and hold down the datalink scanner fire button). Once you have done all 3 of each type, Menu Log again.
Each time you do one of these you will get 3x high value (G4 or G5) Materials. the cargo racks are dropping "Raw Materials" while the comms beacons are dropping "Data Materials". So, each time you relog, you'll be getting 9x Raw Materials, and 9x Data Materials.
I'd highly recommend you repeat this activity 5-10 times, as this is, by far, the most time efficient way to collect these materials in the game.
Third Leg
A short run now to go grab the meta-alloy that Farseer wants. There are two different ways to do this.
The first and easiest, is simply to go to the Maia system, visit the planetary base "Darnielle's Progress" and buy yourself a meta-alloy from the Commodities Market.
The second and more interesting (and free) method is to head to the nearby system "Delphi" and fly out to planet 5A. This is marked in the Squadron Bookmarks as
7.0: Thargoid - Unknown Structure
As before, perform a detailed surface scan. This will reveal an "Unknown Structure Scan" on your navigation panel. Head down and land yourself somewhere safe near the central structure. Go out in the SRV again and take a drive around this incredible structure (which is actually host to a secret underground room and a map, but you aren't quite ready for that yet).
For now, you are looking to find yourself some Organic Structures. You'll find these scattered around the central structure. Some of these will have something on them that looks a little like a round, green fruit. Shoot this off, and collect the thing that flies off, it will show up on your contacts panel as a "Mining Fragment". That is a Meta-Alloy scoop it up and return it to your ship.
Final Leg
Now, before we set off, there are a couple things to cover. Firstly, be aware that Deciat is a common hunting ground for gankers, if you don't believe that you will survive against a gank attempt, you may want to consider staying in solo, or get yourself an escort. Of course in the long run, I would recommend a gank survival course.
Secondly, we'd best check that you have enough Materials to do some engineering. So, go to your right panel, along to "Inventory" and down to the materials tabs. Check that you have got at least:
- 11x Atypical Disrupted Wake Echoes
- 8x Chemical Processors
And ideally also:
- 5x Phosphorus
- 5x Strange Wake Solutions
If not, we are going to need to get you to a Material Trader before you head to Farseer. The most convenient locations to get each of these are as follows:
- Atypical Disrupted Wake Echoes / Strange Wake Solutions - Tesla Dock in the GANDZA system
- Chemical Processors - Chandler Ring in KARKA
- Phosphorus- Zahn Enterprise in CENNICENINO
So if you are missing something set your course for one of the above systems, and remember to try to keep your trades within the same material groups (the horizontal sets) as you get the best exchange rates that way.
If you don't need anything, plot your route to Deciat.
WARNING You are now flying in the area where you may get hyperdicted. So, you'd best check you know how to escape them. Reminder: Immediately hit boost and the button you have set for "Toggle Flight Assist".
Time to hit the road, REMEMBER TO HONK.
Once you are safely on the ground at Farseer Inc, hand in the meta-alloy. BOOM. You have unlocked your first engineer. First order of business now is to improve your reputation with her. This is where all that exploration data comes in very handy. Click on "Universal Cartographics" and sell her all the exploration data you can.
Now, you should be able to upgrade that Frame Shift Drive to at least G2 Increased Range and potentially even further.
What's Next?
You don’t have to go all the way - if you’ve taken a G1 upgrade far enough to unlock the G2 upgrade, you might as well start on G2. There is no benefit in fully completing G1.
Reputation is valuable - improving your reputation with engineers no only unlocks higher levels, it also makes the lower levels easier. The first time you do a G1 upgrade it might take 4-5 upgrades to reach G2. By the time you’ve maxed out your reputation to G5. A single upgrade will complete G1.
Be careful with pinups - “pinning” a blueprint from an engineer is helpful as it allows you to apply the upgrade from any station. But your reputation with an engineer only improves from upgrades you do at their base. So get yourself to G5 access before doing remote engineering upgrades.[/size]
Beyond this, my advice for now at least would be to make good use of Farseer. With her help you'll have far less problems getting around the bubble, less issues powering your ships, you'll be faster... etc. However, once you think it's time to take engineering further.
Who's Next?
So, you've followed the guide above and got yourself access to Felicity Farseer, and hopefully been able to perform some basic engineering to get your jump range up and improve your ship. Now you've got the bug, and want to go further, a lot further, and really start optimising your ships for different roles.
Well, you've got a whole pile of engineers to unlock before you can do it. So here is a rundown of the engineers in general. I have deliberately selected only some of them here, as these are relatively straightforward to unlock and between them give you the ability to engineer most of the key modules you are likely to want to engineer early on.
I have also provided suggestions of what blueprints to pin at each and some notes on unlocking them where there is something relevant.
Felicity Farseer
Location: Deciat
Pin: Frame Shift Drive - Increased Range
Unlocking: Exploration rank of Scout or higher and 1x Meta Alloy (see walkthrough above).
Notes: Deciat is a common ganker hotspot. Murder hobo's from all over the galaxy come here to kill new players trying to unlock their first engineer. Either be well practiced at your evasive flying, or don't fly in Open.
Tod "The Blaster" McQuinn
Location: Wolf 397
Pin: Multi-Cannon - Overcharged (a matter of taste this one though)
Unlocking: Kill at least 15 Wanted ships, and bring him 100,000cr of Alliance Bounty Vouchers. Bring more if you can as selling these will improve your reputation with him.
Notes: N/A
The Dweller
Location: Wyrd
Pin: Power Distributor - Charge Enhanced
Unlocking: Sell goods at 5 different black markets. The easiest way to do this is by accepting a delivery mission, and abandoning it leaving you with stolen goods in your ship. Then find bounce around black markets selling one at each. Be warned, you will need to get good at entering stations without getting scanned. Any remaining stolen goods can then be sold at his station to improve your reputation.
Notes: G3 engineering for laser weapons is also available here. Combined with Tod, you now have most basic weapons covered to some extent.
Liz Ryder
Location: Eurybia
Pin: Seeker Missiles - High Capacity (again personal taste here though)
Unlocking: Get friendly with "Eurybia Blue Mafia" you'll find them in the system, do some missions for them and they will like you more. Then you'll need to buy 200 landmines, these can only be purchased at planetary bases. Use INARA to find where they are available when you need them.
Notes: This engineer isn't all that much use unless you are a heavy missile user, but she does give you access to Hera Tani (who is very useful) once you have got your reputation up to halfway through G3 (G3.5).
Lei Cheung
Location: Laksak
Pin: Shield Generator - Thermal Resistance (typically for early on in engineering, some change to Reinforced later)
Unlocking: G3.5 access to Dweller and Trade at 50 different commodity markets - the easiest way to get this guy unlocked is just to remember to buy a commodity from every station you dock at, and sell it at the next one. Then you'll need to give him 200t of gold, you can just buy this, so just find a convenient source on EDDB or Inara.
Notes: You can also get your shield boosters engineered here to G3. Particularly for a resistance build, this makes a world of difference. Lei can also G5 engineer your sensors.
Hera Tani
Location: Kuwemaki
Pin: Power Plant - Overcharged or Armoured (both are very useful)
Unlocking: G3.5 access to Liz Ryder and get to the rank of "Outsider" with the Empire, this will require you to do some missions for Empire aligned factions, and then an imperial navy rank mission.
Deliver 50 Kamitra Cigars - you buy these at Hammel Terminal in Kamitra, but you cannot buy 50 at the same time (no more will appear in the market after you have a set amount in your cargo hold). So you either have to do this trip multiple times (typically 3) or have a friend help you out by buying some and dropping them off for you outside the station.
Notes:
Selene Jean
Location: Kuk
Pin: Hull Reinforcements - Heavy Duty
Unlocking: G3.5 access with Blaster and mine 500t. With the new mining system you will probably have already done this before you get to the point of discovering Selene.
Provide 10t of Painite, with hotspot and double hotspot mining (check out the #????mining-and-trade channel this is now very easy to get.
Notes: - Selene is a bit of a specialist, one of only two engineers in the bubble who can do anything to your hull or reinforcements, and you probably won't be visiting the other one often (Liz Ryder), so you'll likely end up driving to see Selene for every ship you engineer in order to get the experimental effects applied.
You still with me so far? If so, you now have the ability to engineer the entire core of your ships (except for life support), shields, armour, most weapons, and some utilities. By this stage you should be seeing some incredible improvements to your ship performance, no matter what types of ships you are building. For more information about the remaining 17 engineers, take a look over here Engineers.
Material Farming
So, all that stuff is all very well, but unless you can get hold of the required materials, you aren't gonna be engineering anything much very soon. So... where do you get them from.
Well, as it happens it has slowly been realised that the gathering of engineering materials in Elite has been insanely grindy, so ways are slowly being introduced to the game to make things easier. Here is a rundown of the quickest ways to gather high grade materials. Then you can visit a Material Trader (see above) to trade these down to fill up on anything else you need.
One technique that you will need to use for many of these is "Menu Logging". This is just the system of performing an activity, then exiting to return to the main menu, before loading back into the game again to reset the instance.
This set of info is also provided here in a spreadsheet format (with less info) in case you just need a quick reference.
Material Spreadsheet
Encoded Materials
Most data comes from scanning stuff, either ships, communications beacons on planets, wakes from other ships etc. Most of these are fine if you are just gathering as you go, but they are also very slow.
However, there are two locations in the bubble where you can get a lot of Encoded Materials very quickly.
Jameson's Crash Site
Squadron Bookmark : "4.2: Materials - Jamesons Crash Site"
System : HIP 12099
Planet : 1B
Co-ords : -54.3803, -50.3575
This is a great site which is closely tied into the history of the Elite lore. Here there are 4 comms beacons each containing parts of the audio log from Cmdr Jameson on his final mission. These comms beacons also drop Encoded materials.
So, position yourself behind the cobra, where you can scan all the beacons by swinging your turret all the way around, put the handbrake on. And (if you're interested) listen to history while you scan the beacons again and again, Menu Logging to reset the instance.
The Bug Killer[/u]
Squadron Bookmark : "4.1: Materials - The Bug Killer"
System : HIP 16613
Planet : 1 A
Co-ords : -11.0093, -95.6755
Very similar to Jameson's crash site above, but with only 3 easily accessible comms beacons. This location has a smaller array of materials which drop here, but they are all high grade. This location also comes with the benefit of offering cargo racks with a number of high grade raw materials present (more on this later). As above, scan each of the beacons, and relog.
[b]Missions
The main exception to the above is for Modified Embedded Firmware (MEF), which are typically acquired as one of the reward options from missions. It is also possible to acquire Modified Consumer Firmware, Security Firmware Patch and others from missions as well. However MEF's are the most valuable available through missions.
Raw Materials
Raw materials are typically acquired by mining asteroids or prospecting the surfaces of planets. However, there are some ways to make this a lot more efficient.
The Bug Killer
Squadron Bookmark : "4.1: Materials - The Bug Killer"
System : HIP 16613
Planet : 1 A
Co-ords : -11.0093, -95.6755
As above, there are 3 cargo racks at the Bug Killer site, each of which contains a high grade raw material. This is certainly one of the fastest ways of filling up on the following materials: Antimony, Ruthenium, Technetium, Tellurium, Tungsten.
Surface Sites
There are now Geological and Biological surface sites on planets which reliably drop a specific set of Raw Materials. Geological sites are more common, and have a lower drop rate and more variation. Biological Sites are much more rare, and have less variety but have VASTLY higher drop rates for certain materials.
Warning Some of these sites have HIGH GRAVITY, so approach the sites with care and always check the gravity reading. I would also strongly recommend taking nothing bigger than a medium ship, and take two SRV's as the some of the locations are rough.
Check Squadron Bookmarks, you will see the following items listed which are Geological sites in the bubble. Note these work ok if you only need a few, if you need a lot, use one of the other methods and trade across.
4.50. Materials: Selenium - LHS 417 - 9 E A
4.51. Materials: Niobium - HR 7221
And the following sites which are Biological sites, about 1500Ly outside the bubble.
4.52. Materials: Polonium - HIP 36601 - C 1 A
4.53. Materials: Ruthenium - HIP 36601 - C 1 D
4.54. Materials: Tellurium - HIP 36601 - C 3 B
4.55. Materials: Technetium - HIP 36601 - C 5 A
4.55. Materials: Antimony - Outotz LS-K D8-3 B 5 C
4.56. Materials: Yttrium - Outotz LS-K D8-3 B 5 A
And remember you can always suicide your way back home from out here.
Manufactured Materials
Manufactured materials are things that have been produced by humans. As such they are typically dropped by ships, given as rewards from missions, or found at certain surface sites. As above, this guide will tell you how to find the highest grade materials so that you can trade these down efficiently. But with a few special mentions for other methods which reward well.
Combat
NPC's always drop some amount of materials when they are destroyed, what they drop depends on what type of ship they are flying. More powerful and higher level NPC's typically drop higher grade materials.
Conflict zones and pirates are a good way to get large quantities of G1-4 materials for 8 out of the 10 different material groups. It is also possible to visit an anarchy system, find a Haz Res site, and kill the mining vessels there, which will generate materials for the other two material groups (Heat and Mechanical components).
Missions
Mission rewards sometimes allow you to get either Biotech Conductors, or Exquisite Focus Crystals. Best chance of getting these is from mission rewards in systems which are in a Boom state.
Often the easiest way to get these is to perform passenger missions. Robigo is an old favourite for getting these. If anyone has found any particularly good sources of these missions, please report. Always looking to improve this guide.
Murder
NPC transport and mining ships drop manufactured materials along the "Heat" (ie Heat Vanes) and "Mechanical Components" (ie Configurable Components). The best way to do this is as follows:
Find an system in the “famine” state, ideally an anarchy system (as this avoids legal trouble), though this is not always possible. Visit the one with the highest population, scan the nav beacon and hop back into supercruise, look on the navigation panel to see if there is a “Distribution Centre”. If there isn’t, try a different system.
If there is a Distribution Centre, go there. You’ll find 3x T9’s parked up dishing out food to the starving. A noble endeavour. However, T9's also drop a wide range of valuable materials. So deploy hardpoints and kill them.
Collect, relog, rinse and repeat.
High Grade Emissions
These Unidentified Signal Sources (USS) make up the best route to the remaining G5 materials. The method to this is to find a system which meets the criteria for what you are looking for, drop in on the Nav beacon and scan it. Then return to supercruise and check through your nav panel to see ALL the USS's in the system. Systematically visit any HGE's that you see, then head to the next suitable system.
There are specific requirements to maximise your chances of finding what you seek. Firstly, you want as high a population system as you can get (this increases the spawn rate for HGE's). Secondly, here is a lookup table of what you will find in what systems.
Independent/Alliance Systems
Pharmaceutical Isolators:- Outbreak
Military Grade Alloys:- War/Civil War
Proto Heat Radiators :- Boom
Improvised Components :- Civil Unrest
Military Supercapacitors :- War/Civil War
Proto Radiolic Alloys :- Boom
Aligned Systems
Imperial Shielding (Empire) :- Any (preferably Election)
Core Dynamics Composites (Federation) :- Any (preferably Election)