Hey Travellers,

Traveller “SunZenShow” here with some tips for finding (not buying) an Exotic ship while also making a Vy’keen’s hoard worth of units and nanites.

You’ll want to start off with about 20 (or more… more the better) navigation data. Best way to get this is either by purchasing them whenever you visit stations, or searching for settlements that allow you to map the area. There are also at least 3 scattered around space station interiors and often at settlement locations as well.

Next, go a Cartographer at any space station and exchange for the planetary chart that leads you to “distress signal”.

Now, go to any system and choose a planet. You’ll more than likely want to clear one planet at a time, but it doesn’t matter which one you choose. I usually start off with whichever one is closest to the space station to make selling the trash ships you find easier.

Once on the planet, use your planetary charts. You’ll get 1 of 4 locations. Either Observatory, Abandoned Building, Crashed Freighter, or Distress Signal. If you get anything but Distress Signal, completely ignore it. This is the major part of the strategy. Once you have the 3 undesired locations up, they will no longer be selected by your planetary chart and all you will get is distress signals, leading you to ship after ship.

The only hiccup in this strategy is the losers at some distress signals with broken ships – they will ask you to repair their ship, and reward you a pittance for wasting your planetary chart. There is a SMALL chance that these losers will spawn with your exotic ship. There may be another one, but in this case, if there is only one – then you are kinda SOL.

It hurts when this happens, but given that there’s about 30 crashed ships per system and they sell on average for 1-3million without any additional repairs besides the launch thruster and pulse engine.

If you have a lot of resources (wiring looms, activated copper, paraffinium, etc) then you can repair these ships further and get closer to recouping the total value of the ship.

The best part is, you’ll also get tons of inventory upgrade parts from scrapping the ships, as well as upgrade blueprints to use or sell for nanites.

Yesterday I did this strategy for about 6 hours and made 110 million units and 14k nanites, so I believe this to be a very viable strategy for finding exotics and making money.

Final tip, for every ship you find, use it to gain at least 1 more navigation data by scanning for settlements after you find it. That way you don’t have to stop and look for navigation data every couple dozen ships.