I remember my first derelict freighter – it was an exciting change of pace from the normal NMS gameplay. As of today, I’m nearly done maxing out the storage in my freighter, and I have perfect freighter upgrade modules. What started off as a cool diversion quickly turned into a bit of a chore. I don’t think it needs to be this way. I think they could be fixed with just 3 easy steps, none of which require new assets or significant overhauls.
Don’t make scanners (near-)mandatory to find them – make them appear at regular intervals (like freighter defense)
Before you even find a derelict freighter, the experience is already tainted by the method in which you find them. In my opinion, finding a derelict freighter ought to be an unexpected, cool, spooky opportunity. But because of how you find it – by simply paying a bunch of money – it’s becomes just a transaction. A roundabout way to purchase upgrades for your freighter. Even the first time, you know roughly what you’re getting. I hear about people finding them by chance as a random event the first time they find one, and it sounds magical. Wouldn’t it be better if that was everyone’s experience? When I find a derelict freighter, wouldn’t it be better if I was thinking “I wonder what’s inside? I bet there’s some great loot!” instead of “there’s the thing that I paid for, it better come with some great loot.”?
You could increase the chance for them to appear when pulsing, but I think that just creates incentive for people to pulse aimlessly for hours on end, and that’s no fun either. I think the way freighter defense missions appear – every ~3 hours of game time, whenever you jump (in this case, when you pulse) is great. That way you aren’t incentivized to grind. They just happen every once in a while and you’re excited when it happens. And just get rid of scanners altogether. Discovery > purchasing.
Don’t make derelict freighters dependent on the system seed – make them random every time.
The NPC that sells you the scanner tells you not to use it in the same system over and over…but that’s not how the game rewards you, at all. Scanners are fairly expensive (if you’re not abusing exploits) and the process of running derelicts can be tedious, especially when you’re doing them one after the other. If you’ve found a derelict that dispenses S-class modules, what’s the incentive for running freighters somewhere else? Sure, it will be more fun than doing the same one ad nauseum, but the reward is likely to be comparatively useless and will prolong the time spent running them. Even if you’re just running cargo bulkheads, it still takes time to travel to a new system.
The solution is simple – just ditch the seeded derelicts. Make them completely random. Seeded derelicts make no sense anyway – why do you keep finding the same ship over and over? Just generate a random derelict every time, with random loot. Players will naturally do the thing that gives the best rewards, so don’t incentivize them to keep running them same one. Telling them not to is futile. Instead you need to make sure the optimal thing and the fun thing are the same thing as often as possible.
Improve the loot
Making everything random probably got some peoples’ hackles up – as tedious as it is to get a perfect suite of modules now, if the upgrade modules were random and only available every couple hours, it would become much, much harder to get even close. The fix for this is easy – the loot needs to be increased. A lot. It takes roughly 30 derelicts just to have a full set of upgrades, setting aside quality, and that’s the only way to get them. That is way too many derelicts. And that’s before the ~hundred runs you’ll need to max out the inventory and upgrade space.
I’d say each derelict should provide at least 3 upgrade modules per run on average – maybe each of the computers gives you an upgrade, instead of just the engineering bay. In addition, cargo bulkheads should be available in random loot, probably around 3-5 per run. That’s a total of ~7x more loot than currently received from derelicts. Alternately, the loot, and difficulty, could be based on how high of a “level” you are (determined by exosuit/MT upgrade module quality), to enable derelicts to be enjoyed by players of all levels while providing incentive for higher level play – though that is admittedly a more complex fix.
Another smaller issue with the loot is that the most common and unique loot from derelicts, tainted metal, is pretty half-baked. There’s only a handful of cosmetic items available for it as a currency, and most of them, frankly, are kinda ugly and unappealing imo. I ran out of things to buy within a couple derelicts (and ran out of things I was genuinely interested in using almost immediately) and then tainted metal quickly lost its luster. This includes 2 of the 3 computers which provide tainted metal when returned (or reputation, but that’s way less fun). You can purchase X-class upgrades, but you can get them more efficiently and with better selection by refining the tainted metal into nanites and purchasing the upgrades from a pirate system, so it may as well be runaway mold. There are such an insane number of cosmetics available for quicksilver, I really think some of them should be moved into the tainted metal camp to provide it a bit more utility for it, so that it retains its luster.
Derelicts likely took quite a bit of work from the HG team, and I think it’s a real shame that they aren’t more fun. These three fixes, unless there’s some serious spaghetti code going on, I think HG could bash out them out in an afternoon. And then the hard work they put in can shine the way it ought to.
