So other day I decided it was time to grow my fleet of living frigates. After using up my small supply of two (2) anomaly detectors, I realized that I actually had no idea where they came from. A little digging on the wiki told me that they “occasionally” drop from destroying asteroids. Well… that’s vague. So I shot out into my local system’s deep space and began blasting some asteroid fields. One hour later, no Anomaly Detectors. After a little more research around Reddit and the Steam forums, I realized that nobody really does know how to efficiently farm these things, just that they “occasionally” drop from asteroids. I saw some theories here and there, but none with some good, solid evidence- so I took it upon myself to produce some.

To test, I decided to spend 15 minutes in various system types destroying asteroid fields. The timer starts the moment I find an adequate asteroid field, and paused if there are any interruptions (hostile ships, cargo scans, etc.).

Before I get on with the results, let’s establish what we do know about Anomaly Detector drops. Their wiki page says they drop from asteroids, but looking into the page on “asteroids” gives us another vital piece of information: they only drop from “small” type asteroids. Not the large ones that break piece by piece, and NOT the crystal type asteroids (which is the primary asteroid type in my initial system).

So without further ado, here are the actual numbers for the 13 systems I tested in order of most Anomaly Detectors to least, including their star color, primary lifeform (if any), and whether or not they are dissonant:

• Blue “abandoned” system (Gek), dissonant- 10 Anomaly Detectors

• Red “uncharted” system, dissonant- 8 Anomaly Detectors

• Red “uncharted” system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Red Gek system, dissonant- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Red Korvax system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Green Gek system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Green “uncharted” system, dissonant- 6 Anomaly Detectors

• Yellow Gek system- 5 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue Vy’keen system, dissonant- 4 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue Korvax system- 4 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “uncharted” system, dissonant- 3 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “uncharted” system- 2 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “abandoned” system (Vy’keen), dissonant- 2 Anomaly Detectors

So, what do our most successful systems have in common?

… basically nothing. In fact, the #1 system has more in common with the bottom 3 than any of the other top 3. Between 1st, 2nd, and the 4-way tie for 3rd place, we have red, green, and blue systems; uninhabited, abandoned, and populated systems; dissonant and non-dissonant systems- a little bit of everything. With the information gathered, I’m very comfortable in saying that the system you search in does not matter at all. It’s all RNG.

So that’s it? All that time wasted to find out it doesn’t matter?

Well, not exactly. Knowing that the drop rate is unaffected by the system type allows us to focus on other areas to maximize our collection: Not all of those 15 minute testing periods were built the same. Multiple times, I accidentally hit NPC ships mining asteroids as well. System freighters would warp in, despawning the chunk of asteroid field I was currently harvesting. I even had a freighter distress signal interrupt me without warping. Of course, I stopped my timer for the sake of testing fairly, but it did add to the actual time spent mining. So while they may not drop more Anomaly Detectors, uncharted and abandoned systems wind up being more efficient for farming Anomaly Detectors, as you’ll experience fewer interruptions.

So after over 3 hours of mindless asteroid blasting, I can definitively provide the most efficient way to farm Anomaly Detectors:

• Step 1: Warp to an uncharted or abandoned system. Any system color will do.

• Step 2: Locate an asteroid field and verify that it does not contain any of the “crystal” type asteroids. If it does, repeat step 1.

• Step 3: Blast to your heart’s content! If you install a Cargo Scan Deflector, you should have next to no interruptions whatsoever!

Hopefully somebody out there finds this post useful. I know it was a lot of text for a rather underwhelming conclusion, but at this point I was too far in to not post my results. And even if it wasn’t super productive, it was fun doing some actual research on a relatively undocumented topic in the game.

Anyway, now I gotta go figure out what to do with 72 Anomaly Detectors.

Happy hunting, travellers!

With Frontiers and the sale, there’s probably a lot of new players coming to the game so I wanted to put together a list of some lesser known tips and tricks. Some of these may already be well known but a lot of them are either things that took me a long time to find out about, or things I see people asking about a lot. Some of these are probably gonna be useful to experienced players too. I’ll add more things to this thread over time.

Reply with your own tips and I’ll add some good ones to this post too!

• The mining laser is faster the more it heats up. When you use the mining laser, the heat bar in the corner goes up and eventually the laser changes colour. For maximum efficiency, try to keep the heat bar almost full without overheating it. It will mine twice as fast this way.

• The melee jetpack boost. This one’s been around since the game first came out so it’s probably more known but it may be worth mentioning for newer players. When you’re on the ground, if you melee and then immediately hold jump/jetpack, you get a significant forwards boost. This is probably the fastest way to move around without vehicles and it doesn’t require any upgrades.

• You can refine oxygen to get carbon. By around mid to late game, you reach a point where you have so much money that you can bulk buy almost any of the main resources from trade terminals instead of having to mine or farm them. The one exception is carbon, which as far as I can tell never appears in trade terminals. However, you can just bulk buy oxygen and refine it into carbon.

• Use the smallest terrain manipulator size for maximum resources. The number of resources you get from mining things with a terrain manipulator seems to be more based on time spent mining rather than the actual volume you mined. So by changing the size to the smallest, you can get far more resources from each ore deposit. ( This thread about this inspired me to make this post )

• Use medium / large refiners to make resources that you don’t have blueprints for. This one is somewhat relevant to expedition 3 specifically. One of the objectives requires you to make herox but you don’t immediately have the recipe for it. However, some resources like herox can be made in refiners which do not require you to own the blueprint. A lot of these recipes can be found on the wiki.

• The main story will unlock a lot of blueprints quickly. I know personally I mostly ignored the story when I started and just kind of did my own thing for a while but I got annoyed with how long it took to unlock certain base parts or equipment. But if you just follow the main storyline first, it will unlock a lot of important things for you far quicker than if you were to do it manually.

• The first freighter you rescue is free. In the early game, you might come across NPC freighters which are very expensive to buy directly. But after traveling to a couple new star systems, you will eventually warp in to a pirate fight. If you save the freighter from pirates, you can get it for free. If you want an S class, you can just reload a manual save from before you warped into that system and repeat that fight until you get lucky and spawn a free S class freighter.

• Use the space anomaly to escape space fights with pirates or sentinels. If you get in some space trouble, you will be stuck fighting for a while without the ability to pulse away. One simple way to get around this is just summoning the anomaly and entering it.

• You can turn off PVP or multiplayer altogether in the settings. Going into the settings > network > multiplayer will give you options to turn off certain parts of online play. I would recommend at least turning off PVP and others editing your bases to prevent griefing. If you’re having issues with glitches / crashes, turning multiplayer off entirely may help. Nothing in this game actually requires multiplayer, though some aspects are more fun with it on.

• Use the space station teleporter to save the station to your teleporter list. If you ever want to warp back to a certain star system again, simply fly into its space station and find the teleporter there. Just opening the teleporter menu will register the teleporter to your list and you will then be able to warp back to it from any other teleporter.

• Using your jetpack against a vertical wall does not use up jetpack fuel. If you need to get out of a hole, just walk into the wall and boost up.

• To save launch fuel, land on marked landing spots. This is not just landing pads, if you land on any landing spot that has the green circles, it won’t cost any launch fuel to lift off again.

• You can teleport to any of your base computers, even if the base doesn’t have teleporters. If you just want to mark a cool place you want to return to in the future, just putting down a base computer is enough for you to later warp there with a teleporter.