Having finished the expedition (and watched the questions in this forum) here’s a handy FAQ!

General tips

• Read all the tasks – they don’t have to be done in order. Some of them you can get out of the way early on. (scanning flora / fauna, learning words, pictures of different environments..)
• At every space station, especially in the rendevous systems, scroll through all the other bases. Some of them will have super helpful names like “Airless photo op” or “Sunken Freighter here” or a list of available resources.
• Most of the time it’s better to not be in multi-player mode – that will mean that resources others have gathered, beings in stations that have been talked to, ships that have been found – all these will still be available to you, where they probably won’t be in multi-player. However, whenever you visit the Anomaly it is nice to be in multi-player.
• You can craft ammo out of ferrite. Super helpful for those pesky sentinels. Speaking of Sentinels, you can tunnel underground or dive into the water to escape them. Usually.
• Once you go through the back hole, immediately go to the space station in that system and use the station teleporter to get back to your base or the previous system. Do NOT try to warp back to the 3rd rendevous, it will just make you frustrated.
• The very first system you spawned in on has a planet that will work for the hot planet pic.
• If you are reading this on Feb 19, Tier 5 community research isn’t done yet. If you want the rewards for that, don’t complete the expedition until that is done.

What do I take with me?

• If you are a new player, not to worry! you will be able to collect what you need. Also look for other bases that are offering things (see tips above) The rest of this guide is for folks who aren’t starting a new save for the expedition.
• If you have a main save, and want to bring stuff over – here are some things to consider.
  • Basic building blocks: 9999 stacks of carbon, ferrite, sodium, oxygen, chromatic metal, silver, tritium, di-hydrogen, ect
  • Special items: things to claim an interceptor (inverted mirror), things to make liquid explosive (acid, unstable gel), cadmium, salt
  • Things to make or save money: wiring looms, salvaged data, exosuit inventory modules, runaway mold or tainted metal to make nanites, high ticket items to sell (hot ice, floral samples, stasis pods, ect.)
  • Tech row: eh. not as helpful as you’d think, especially if you are bringing over things for nanites and selling. You could drop some S class stuff here for the exosuit? but especially if you plan to “buy” a copy of your multi-tool and ship, those should already be tricked out.
  • In general, the items and upgrades you really need to complete the tasks will be given to you or will be possible to obtain. For instance you start out with a portable refiner. Don’t buy the special star warp upgrades from the Anomaly – you’ll get them as a reward.

What can I take back?

• All the expedition rewards will be available from the quicksilver booth in the anomaly on any save.
• If you transferred from your main, you can use the same storage system to send stuff back (like companion eggs, other stuff you’ve collected that’s hard or expensive to get, resources if you want to)
• Here I found the tech slots much more useful, taking back upgrades for use on other starships/multitools.
• You will be able to buy back the ship you are in and the primary multi-tool you are carrying, so if you brought stuff over from your main, make sure you are back in them going back. You’ll be able to claim the reward ship and atlas staff at the quicksilver station.
• Yeah, for real, you can only take back one ship and one multi-tool. so be sure the ones you want are the ones equipped.

What about my money / nanites / bases?

Ok – disclaimer. I haven’t actually completed the expedition yet, I’m waiting for the Tier 5 community research to complete. So I don’t know FOR SURE about this, but here’s what I’ve read.

• Your bases will be available from your main.
• Some of the stuff you didn’t take back with you will be converted into units and nanites.
• Anything you buy with quicksilver on the expedition will also be available to claim on the main.
• if someone who has completed the expedition wants to chime in with what happened to their units/nanites/quicksilver, that would be much appreciated!

Anything else interlopers? Feel free to chime in with tips or ask questions in the comments!

Just learning controls and tried to go to a ruins, grabbed the glowing thing, robots unleashed, hopped into ship .. yeah that didn’t help robots followed and shot me down. Now ship is busted and I don’t remember how to fix.

Any guidance is appreciate.

Regard,

Gerald

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.

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Don’t make scanners (near-)mandatory to find them – make them appear at regular intervals (like freighter defense)

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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.”?

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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.

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Don’t make derelict freighters dependent on the system seed – make them random every time.

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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.

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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.

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Improve the loot

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.