Engineering Materials

Three loops cover almost everything. Farm what is easy. Trade for the rest. The one rule: trading up or sideways costs 6 to 1. Trading down pays 1 to 3. So farm high grades and trade down.

• Hard wall: you can never trade one type for another. Raw stays raw. Data stays data.
• Raw has no Grade 5. Raw tops out at Grade 4.
• Guardian and Thargoid materials are separate. They are not in HGEs and not at normal traders. See Modules 7 and 8.

Caps drop by 50 each grade. Anything past the cap is lost on pickup.

• Strategy: cap the easy G5 and G4 materials. Trade sideways only for what a blueprint actually needs. Trade down freely to fill low grades.
• Where the traders are: Raw traders sit in Extraction or Refinery economies. Manufactured in Industrial. Encoded in High Tech or Military.
• Fastest way: Inara Nearest Stations, filter by Material Trader.

Pick what you have and what you want. The calculator applies the live trader rules: down a grade pays 1:3, up a grade costs 6:1, same-grade cross-category costs 6:1, and two moves multiply. Raw has no Grade 5, and types never cross.

Why HGEs

• Since the August 2024 engineering rework, an HGE holds around 30 to 100 canisters instead of 3 to 6.
• Each canister is worth 3 units. One signal usually takes a G5 from zero to the cap of 100 in one or two visits.
• Any guide written before mid 2024 badly undersells this.

Good hulls: Asp Explorer, Diamondback Explorer, Krait Phantom, Cobra Mk V.

• With a canister targeted: the limpet grabs that one canister, then dies. One limpet, one pickup.
• With nothing targeted: the limpet roams and grabs every canister in range until its timer runs out. The timer is set by the controller. If nothing is left to grab, it idles near your ship until it expires.
• So: clear your target, then launch. One limpet can clear many canisters. It will not live forever, so bring spares.

1. 1Jump into a system with the right faction and state. High population spawns signals more often.
2. 2Open the Nav panel. Filter to Signal Sources.
3. 3Pick a High Grade Emission. Check the timer. 25 minutes or more is ideal. Timers run from about 5 to 40 minutes.
4. 4Drop in. Check the contacts panel to confirm the material before you commit.
5. 5Clear your target. Deploy limpets.
6. 6"No valid collection targets" means the instance is empty.
7. 7Relog to the main menu or desktop. Come back in the same game mode. Solo is fastest.
8. 8Back in supercruise, set throttle to zero. The same HGE is right behind you. Turn around and drop back in.
9. 9Repeat until limpets stop collecting. That means you hit the cap.
10. 10Fly to a Manufactured Material Trader and trade for what you need.

• The drop is decided by the faction that owns the signal and that faction's state.
• Check the HGE's info panel, not just the system state on the galaxy map.
• Some pairs share a signal, like Core Dynamics Composites with Proprietary Composites.

Community mapped. States change on the BGS tick. Verify before you fly. G4 bonus: Proto Light Alloys drops with the Boom family. Proprietary Composites drops with Core Dynamics Composites.

• Dav's Hope. Hyades Sector DR-V c2-23, body A 5. Drive the abandoned settlement in an SRV, collect, relog, repeat. Fills G1 to G3 fast. Slow for anything higher.

This is the most valuable single farm. It is the most common G5 manufactured material, and it trades into every other manufactured G5.

• In game Galaxy Map filters. Set allegiance to Empire. Check state and population in system info. Most reliable.
• edgalaxy.net/hge. Player reported HGE sightings since the last BGS tick, sorted by material.
• Inara Nearest Star Systems. Set allegiance, state, and population in one search.
• EDCoPilot. Announces which rare manufactured materials a system can spawn as you enter.
• Achenar and other big Imperial core systems work when not at war. Achenar needs a permit (Imperial Navy Squire).

• About 3 units per canister. Cap is 100. One good signal usually caps you in a single visit, often in under 15 minutes.

• System HIP 12099, body 1 B. Coordinates -54.3803, -50.3575. The crashed Cobra Mk III of CMDR John Jameson.
• The August 2024 rework made this site much richer. It used to have 4 data points giving about 4 units each.
• Now it has 8 data beacons paying out 20 to 30 units each, plus the wreck itself as a 9th scan that plays Jameson's final logs. Some guides count 9 because of that.

• SRV (Planetary Vehicle Hangar)
• Detailed Surface Scanner. Only needed on your first visit. After that, "Jameson Crash Site" shows in your Nav panel.
• No weapons, cargo, or limpets. The site is non hostile and data is weightless.

1. 1Fly to HIP 12099 1 B.
2. 2First visit: map 1 B with the DSS, then fly to the coordinates. Later visits: pick it from the Nav panel.
3. 3Land right behind the crashed Cobra. From there your SRV turret reaches most of the data points.
4. 4Scan every data beacon with the SRV turret. Nudge forward for the far ones.
5. 5When you see "storage full," exit to the main menu and log back in. Many players switch game mode (Solo, Private, Open) to force a fresh instance. No need to quit to desktop.
6. 6Repeat from step 4.

1. 1Cap Adaptive Encryptors Capture and Atypical Encryption Archives. Ignore the firmware.
2. 2Fly to the Encoded Material Trader at Ray Gateway, Diaguandri. About 2 jumps away.
3. 3Trade both down to zero for what you actually need. Remember: sideways costs 6 to 1.
4. 4Fly back. Repeat.

Skip trading for Wake Scans. Fit a Frame Shift Wake Scanner and scan ship wakes at busy stations or Resource Extraction Sites. The whole Wake Scans category fills up while you do other things.

• Crystalline Shards are surface sites on airless moons. Each needle you shoot off drops about 3 units of one Grade 4 raw.
• There are 7 raw categories, each topped by a G4. Cap the G4s, fly home, and trade down to fill everything below.
• Use the DSS to map the body. Shards show under Biological signals, not Geological.
• Shoot the thin needles, not the base mound. The mound drops nothing.
• Scoop the fragments with the SRV cargo scoop.
• Relogging does not respawn shards. Stripped clusters take weeks to regrow. Just drive to the next cluster. The fields are huge.
• An unengineered exploration ship works fine.

The fields are large. Players post different coordinates for the same body. Any dense Biological patch on the right body works. Unverified alternates from the original guide, not re-checked: Ruthenium at Outotz LS-K D8-3 B 7 B. Antimony at Slegao GU-W C3-1 D 6 C.

HIP 36601 often has Fleet Carriers parked, some publicly dockable. That means refuel and repair on site. It also means other commanders if you fly in Open.

• There is no Crystalline Shard site for Selenium. The known source is a brain tree forest on HR 3230 3 A A, about 425 ly from Sol.
• Shoot the bright seed pods on the trees, not the trunk. About 1 in 7 trees has a pod.
• Pods give about 1 unit each, so it is slower than shards.
• Posted coordinates vary: 52.6000, -165.8786 and 45.66, -30.49 and 41.8858, 16.6268. Selenium trees cluster in certain spots.
• Warning: players reported in August 2025 that most trees on 3 A A now drop Manganese and Zirconium, with Selenium rare. Other players say you just need the right clump.
• Backup plan: trade another G4 raw sideways at 6 to 1. 150 Polonium buys 25 Selenium. Also watch mission boards.

About 3,950 ly round trip. One evening.

1. 1Bubble to HR 3230 (about 425 ly). Selenium.
2. 2HR 3230 to HIP 36601 (about 1,415 ly). Polonium, Ruthenium, Tellurium, Technetium.
3. 3HIP 36601 to Outotz LS-K D8-3 (about 406 ly). Yttrium, Antimony.
4. 4Home (about 1,715 ly). Trade down at a Raw Material Trader.

Crashed Anacondas inside the bubble have 14 to 16 damaged cargo racks. Shoot them open for raw materials. Lower grade, but you can trade up.

Trading down inside a row is cheap. Cap the G4 in each row and you can fill the whole row. Never farm G1 on purpose. Carbon, Iron, Nickel, Phosphorus, and Sulphur pile up everywhere you fly. Lead and Rhenium come from asteroid mining.

The August 2024 rework made missions a real material source.

• Mission rewards now cover every material type, not just the old three.
• A single mission can pay up to about 24 units of one material.
• Check the mission board every time you dock. Include passenger missions.
• Biotech Conductors and Exquisite Focus Crystals never spawn in HGEs. Missions and trading are the only ways. The Robigo passenger run was the classic source. Its current value gets checked in Module 9. ⚠️
• Missions cost you nothing extra if you are already flying.

Once stocked, most commanders only repeat this every couple of months.

• The Rhino SRV and Surface Mining launched September 2, 2026.
• The patch notes mention tuning how often extra "microresources" drop. Microresources is the game's word for materials.
• Nobody has mapped surface mining as a material farm yet. This card gets updated once there is data.

Changes from the original guide, and why.