Driving around on the planets for these things is maddening. They’re so far apart, barely drop what I’m looking for, and there’s never really any danger to break up the monotony.
Can I obtain these materials for engineering/synthesis from asteroids, or do those only drop the cargo space minerals used for trade?
It’s been a while since I’ve played but I have this spreadsheet bookmarked as my go-to for engi mats. In my experience I had a lot more fun by farming tons of all the mats and then ignoring them. Trying to accrue them naturally takes forever.
The raw material notes in that sheet apply only to legacy. For live, it’s the same planets, but you either drop in the blue and look yourself, or you navigate to some known coordinates. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/live-4-0-materials-farming.610751/#post-10004234
Koli Discii C 6 is your best bet to farm engineering resources imo. Right in the bubble, easy to get to, and a variety of mats to pickup. You’ll need to relog though to keep up the farm but you can get a decent amount of crap in an hour or two. You wanna find the crashed python on the planet.
Can’t speak for synthesis mats though, never bothered with it myself.
In case of Manganese (you’ll have to do research for Phosphorus yourself), since it’s common in raw group 3, I would go rather after Ruthenium and trade down.
- Use Spansh to search for bodies with vulcanism and high Ruthenium contents near your location (I’ve put Sol and range 1000Ly in this search)
- or search for fungal life. It will probably be further away than volcanism but from my observations plants prefer flat areas so are easier to harvest even on high gravity planets
- you might also want to add to the search to have the least percentages of other rare materials. From my experience it’s not that important to do so but YMMV
- in theory you might want to search for landmarks instead of just volcanism/genuses but most of the database has data from before Odyssey so it’s not filled out much. Landmarks/POIs has changed. Whether a body has volcanism or genuses, not so much
- Watch this on how to find a concentration of landmarks. You don’t need an SLF but you need to fly low for landmarks to render (below 200m).
You are looking for- Phloem Excretions on the plants. Just land in a concentration of plants and you should find some
- Needle Crystals that seem to be most common on Lava Spouts. But I think I’ve found some on geysers/fumaroles in the past too
- if you landed in a place and can’t find growths or protrusions you are looking for in 5 minutes, take off and try another patch of blue
- If you are running EDMC with Canonn plugin, scanning a growth or geyser should put it in landmarks in Spansh for future searches
EDIT: mining will also give you raw mats but rather lower grades and I don’t know how to search for a ring so you get mats from group 3 and not another one
- Use Spansh to search for bodies with vulcanism and high Ruthenium contents near your location (I’ve put Sol and range 1000Ly in this search)
