. . .is that they need to stop generating my character and starting ship using my name as the seed value. I’m sick to death of having to begin every expedition as a short-ass Gek with the camera angle too close to the ground, and the ugliest, slowest, and least maneuverable hauler I’ve ever seen to fly around in. It even has the same name every time.

It’s especially cruel on expeditions like this one, where I can’t just pop into the space station or anomaly to use the appearance modifier, or buy a new ship.

Even if the character model and ship they start me with didn’t suck so bad, I’d still get tired of them being the same on every expedition start.

I wish they would just make expedition character generation truly random instead of basing it on the player’s name.

Other than this one thing, I enjoy the expeditions quite a bit, but man am I sick of being 3-feet tall.

I was on an icy extreme weather planet fighting a sentinel pillar. I didnt have a cold weather protection tech and just quickly jamming an ion battery into my hazard protection every 30 seconds or so. It was tedious but I had to fight this pillar for a mission. Eventually an extreme storm rolled in, which was problematic but luckily the last bot, the mech, was almost dead. I took down the mech and headed over to the console.

Standing at the console, I then see WARNING: EXTREME WIND EVENT Huh I get slowly pushed up against the pillar, and am unable to extract myself I blink Then I am flailing in a white void. No ground in sight. Very concerned for my safety, I look up. And realize I am on the edge of space. Then, some random jerk wad in a space ship starts trying to shoot me out of the sky He lands a few laser shots on me and that’s where I begin to panic. Now there really wasn’t much I could do in my panic, and luckily I was calm enough to save my jetpack for when I inevitably returned to the ground. So I watched helplessly as I was buffeted by strong winds and being attacked by spaceships. Eventually, after what felt like an agonizingly long time, I began to see flickering flames of damaged machinery through the fog and saw the ground getting closer. I sparingly used my jetpack to slow and eventually reach the ground relatively unharmed. Immediately, I try to call my starship in, but the ground here was very uneven.

Then, a few seconds after having landed, a new message appears. WARNING: EXTREME ELECTROMAGNETIC EVENT Before I have a chance to process this new warning, the world erupts in lightning. Panic level rises more and I desperately try to get to flatter ground.

Then a direct strike. Completely ahnnilating my shields and leaving me with two health cores. At this point my panic has reached its apex. I began floundering desperately trying to call my ship in, spamming left click and looking everywhere.

I did manage to get my ship called in. I hopped in, and immediately left the planet. Critically wounded, tech broken, but alive. After taking a moment to calm down and make sure the planet I landed on wasn’t a portal to oblivion, I realized: I never finished my mission at the sentinel pillar. Steeling myself for what was to come, I went back, but it was entirely uneventful. Mission complete, I left the planet. Hopefully, never to return.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a clip of this whole ordeal, which I greatly regret. It was truly the craziest chain of events that happened to me.

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!

I used to fight pirates with the standard photon cannon on my Radiant Pillar. I struggled and felt uneasy about dogfights, and since the game occasionally keeps throwing pirates at me and some missions contain killing pirates, I decided it’s geking time to grade up. No regrets.

Long story short: grab the Positron Ejector, fellow noobs.