Now that 4.7 has been deployed to the public Star Citizen servers, I’ve been focusing on two main tasks.

The first has been to do what I can to collect blueprints. I have deployed my trusty Alliance Aid-branded fabricator into my home hangar at Area 18 and it’s ready to go. While it still starts me off with the BPs for the P4-AR and ammo (as well as a pistol, ammo, and a set of armor), I want to expand my options and get more. Always more.

I found a site called SCMDB.net which allows for searching known missions in the game thus far. Each mission description lists the payout, and with 4.7, it also lists the possible blueprints I could get from completing the mission. I’ve been working on this particular mission, the “Routine Patrol”, for the Antium Sand armor and Parallax energy rifle. Why? Because I can easily solo this mission and it gives out blueprints. There are other missions that will require a duo or more, and the site also includes the new mission sets that arrived with the recent patch.

The next step is to collect the materials I need. This is, of course, more difficult because I have to go out and find the damn materials which is quite literally like finding a needle in a solar system. There are a few tricks, though:

1. Using the journal. The in-game journal lists all materials and where they can be found, in general terms, such as “Ita”, or “The Aaron Halo”.
2. Cold searching. This is usually what I do. I go out to an area where there are asteroids, like a Lagrange station or the Aaron Halo belt in Stanton, and just ping. I decode the signatures to figure out what the rock clusters provide, and head towards the signatures I want to collect.

If you were to watch me do this, it might not make any sense, and until this morning, it made only about 50% sense to me. My M.O. had been to fly to the asteroids, ping, and just choose a signature that looked good. Once I got near it, I could scan it and that would reveal the composition of the rocks. If course, I will have just flown at least 15km from the point of contact to the rocks, and I’d often decide that I didn’t want those rocks. I wanted other rocks, so I’d start the search again.

Then I found this chart made by community luminary Mr. Kraken.

The signatures displayed via scanning are multiples of these numbers. For example, I had been looking for Iron, and I had found a signature with a value of 17,080 which is 4,270 * 4. Sure enough, when I rolled up to the cluster, there were four rocks of Iron…none of which I could break with my lowly Prospector, but at least I have the ability to scan and read the signatures quickly and reliably. To make things easier, I made a spreadsheet that does the math for me, so I can simply cross reference the signature to find the mineral and quantity before deciding if I want to chase it down or not.

This afternoon I found some Ice, which I don’t actually need right now but I think there’s a mission that requests it’s sourcing and delivery so I might keep it around for that.

I am currently processing the Ice as well as a lot of other things like Agricium, Aslarite, and Titanium. I know I need the Aslarite, and might need the Titanium, but the Agricium might be a saleable item; it used to be very profitable, though I’m of two minds now: sell it, or keep it for later when I need it for building things.

One thing that hit me broadsides is this unit of measurement specific to crafting labeled as “CSCU”. I’m guessing it’s something like “cubic SCU” but I am not sure — I hate when games throw changes at players and don’t surface the change, the reason, or the definitions in a widely visible and announced manner. There is still “SCU” as a measurement, so CSCU and SCU are two different measurements. Case in point: I have 21 CSCU of q828 Hephaestanite (I have been misspelling this for days). When I send this batch to the refinery, this quality was the lowest quantity in the batch so I have no idea how I got a whole 21 CSCU. But I’m not complaining; I only need 2 CSCU to make a P4-AR, and I have more than enough to add some pretty good stats to my favorite personal weapon.

This means that my previous anxiety and diatribes regarding the perceived difficulty of a solo or small group mining op to obtain enough materials to make these small stakes items seems to have been completely off-base. My friend @Mindstrike made a point that for ammo, it’s always going to be easier to buy it from the shops; ammo has no stat movement based on the quality of the materials. For items like my P4-AR, though, the materials seem relatively easy to obtain, and the likelihood of obtaining good quality materials is also higher than I expected. I shouldn’t have an issue keeping a stable of sauced P4-ARs in my inventory, or replacing them as time goes on. The only wildcard will be for larger items such as armor which ask for more esoteric materials, or just more materials in general. As of right now, I’m holding on to all minerals I obtain, just in case I might need them some day.