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!

No sarcasm – genuinely been having lots of fun. This is my first time in a harder difficulty/permadeath playthrough (I’m new to the game)

As soon as it spawned me in and I discovered how fast my hazard protection was dropping, and how little sodium I was getting from the plants, I was having that good kind of gaming stress fun. Spent 30 minutes meticulously gathering materials while ducking in and out of caves, reached my ship, realised I couldn’t repair, and checked the milestones. Laughed at myself for wasting 30 minutes gathering all those resources and yeeted myself off a cliff

Was very quickly attacked by pirates, and since I didn’t want to spend my precious sodium I was a little lax on repairing on my shields. Vesper Sail proceeded to get damaged, and needed Deuterium to repair. Since this was my source of launch thruster recharge and pulse drive efficiency, I was extremely amused at how I’d gone and made this harder for myself right off the bat. No worries, to the Anomaly to grab a medium refiner – wait, it cost 100 salvaged technologies??? Absolutely cackling at this curve ball, I got to work on gathering those. I’d got about 50 when I changed planets for a change of scenery, and got attacked by pirates again. They were nice enough to drop a repair kit this time

Quickly discovered S class upgrades costing 6k+ nanites from merchants, so I took my time exploring planets to scan all the animals. Flew around aggressive Sentinel planets checking for Pillars, to sneak up to them and disable the Sentinels before I went exploring. As soon as I got a Scatter Blaster and a couple of shield upgrades I was brave enough to fight them for the full 5 waves. All along I’ve been taking the time to gather and turn in Ancestral Memories and Liquid Sun to Polo – it was great to see the memory fragments upgrade to B class so far

Pirate attacks were still stressful, so I grabbed an economy scanner from the Anomaly, saved up several million units, then went and camped out in a pirate system to try and grab an S class Solar. Had terrible luck with S class spawns and was getting impatient, when a ridiculously adorable A class 7-winged Rasa spawned in, that was an upgrade in both tech and inventory slots, and within my price range. Grabbed it, upgraded it, went to hunt some pirates

I’ve genuinely enjoyed the expedition forcing me to take my time and avoid risks – being careful around hazardous plants, not angering Sentinels when I’m not in the position to fight them, and carefully avoiding the worm nests on infested planets. I’ve not been racing through and treating it like a checklist, which I kinda did with the previous two reduxes. Each upgrade has been worked for and felt super rewarding, and any good luck finds from buried caches or from memory fragments has been far more exciting

I’ve just made it to the 5th iteration with every milestone in the previous parts completed, and I’ve managed not to get myself killed so far. I’m looking forward to unlocking the scrambled milestones and seeing what I need to do, and ultimately completing the whole thing

I’m very inspired to start my own fresh permadeath playthrough after this!

Hey Everyone,

This is a Megathread for all the people of the sub. If you have questions, Ask away. If you need anything just ask. This is uniform thread where you can ask for pretty much anything (from Questions to Nip Nip) that will be live 24/7 all year around and refreshed every couple of days.

This Megathread is closely monitored by me so if you have a question that no one has answered, don’t worry I will personally get back to you in a reasonable time. I will always be keeping a close eye so no naughty business please.

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