When I first started playing a few months ago I was in normal mode and got insanely lucky. In the first
couple weeks I had an exotic land right in front of me in a space station and I had *just* enough to buy it with trade-in. The first freighter I was offered was an “S” class. And then not long after that I found a second exotic (a yellow and gold royal.) I even found a star system with three awesome planets (Bountiful, Tropical, Paradise.) For a while it was fun but got boring pretty quickly.

I kept that save but decided to start another one on permadeath with the difficulty ratcheted up a bit. MUCH harder and definitely frustrating, but a lot of fun! A lot more animals attack me on planet surfaces and pirates definitely seem more skilled in fights (a couple times I barely made it out alive after prolonged battle, when in my other save I’d dispatch them in less than a minute.)

I think I am just over 15 hours into it and still hanging in there. I have an “A” class fighter for a ship, and have not seen a single “S” class anything. I’ve only been offered one freighter so far and it was a “C.” I was in two other battles where I could have been offered a freighter but accidentally shot them while fighting the pirates and then had to deal with pirates AND sentinels with no reward for it. The struggle is real. Me in my other save: “Oh look, another exotic. I’ll add it to my collection.” Me now: “OMG is that sodium?! WOO HOO!”

There is a famous solar system in Euclid (11FFEAF8879) in which any derelict freighter run will produce S class freighter upgrades.
The system is therefore FULL of bases and at any one time there are probably 5 or 6 people in the system.

Most people will come into the system, buy a scanner from the scrap dealer (at quite a high cost) and then go and run the freighter themselves.
You know the feeling, you’re alone on a dark empty freighter in the freezing cold, opening boxes and fighting random aliens and faulty security drones. In a little world of your own.

I had an idea. I’d sit near a planet looking at the space station. When I see a person come out of the station I wait for the ‘this user has found something in deep space’ message, then I’d warp to their location.. Wait for them to go in and then join them.
There they are opening boxes.. I run past them and go straight to engineering, get the module, teleport out and leave.

When I did this the first time.. I actually went and stood in front of the guy and jumped up and down expecting them to at least try and shoot me. They were clearly surprised to see me, but they didn’t shoot me so I went and got the module from engineering and left.
At the time I didn’t know if this would prevent them from getting the module (it doesn’t). But I didn’t care it was a bit of fun.

I do this all the time now. I don’t bother buying a scanner.. I just warp to every spot in deep space that shows an active player, and run and get the module.
Not a single once (I’ve done it over 20 times) has a player ever shot at me. Though most times I just run right by them, some never even notice me.

Everyone should do it.. it’s hilarious 🙂
And it’s harmless, the player who bought the scanner still gets everything they went for. Plus they get the heart racing moment of being confronted out of the blue by another real human 🙂