Despite being a Day One player, with several hundred hours on the game (and all expeditions) I never attempted a Permadeath run.

My first day one “clear” was on hard difficulty and, depite the game being very basic at the time, it was challenging and never unfair. I almost always played normal during the years.

I have to confess that the harder difficulty settings of Permadeath is a lot more fun. I don’t mind about the fear of losing the save (I died 7 jumps from the core because I fell down a cliff) both all the balance setting that Permadeath implies. It was about the fact that despite a normal game, the event density (and their variety) is higher even if the difficulty is not so much challenging.

Being chased if you have valuables in the ship is fun, encountering lots of bounties is fun (you can never be sure they will evade or come after you), there’s more variety in fauna attitude towards the player and so on. Having the system patrol ships or the freighter fleets doing something useful is fun. Almost every jump lets you have an event. I completely forgot, for example, that pirates may attempt ground raids. It was so rare in normal difficulty that I was suprised to have 3 raids in a very short game (about 15 jumps, including a black hole hop that brought me at about 4K LY from the core).

The only mildly frustrating element is the material scarcity and the inventory limits (but is mangeable if you know the game very well).

Maybe the only part that is unfair is the starting tutorial. It has the same dilated timing of the normal run but in PD you don’t have time to lose: usually the starting planet is just a deathtrap you struggle to survive due to resource scarcity or very harsh environment. When you regain player agency and can plan your next move carefully and choose the risks when going afterresources in the next planet, everything becomes fun again.

I’m the only one that was surprised by how the permadeath difficulty settings makes the game more enjoyable?

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!