Machine muscle needs a higher drop rate and drop more pieces.

[Woeful Wraith]

I'm at a point now where I recently had zero machine muscles and zero ammo that uses them and I've been farming machines for almost 2 hours now and only collected about 30. This is absolutely ridiculous.

[Geeks On Hugs]

The economy is definitely more difficult than it was in HZD. In general I like that where you don't quickly become rich in a game and the cost of items becomes meaningless...but, yes, they could ease up specifically with machine muscle. I've had issues keeping enough on hand too.

Something else to keep in mind is it's not terribly expensive to buy machine muscle when you realize it's sold in sets of 5.

[GoldenOuroboros]

I'm noticing this as well. Hunting a lot of the apex predators and only the lower ones seem to have machine muscle, and if they do they'll drop 1 or 2 of it, If the machine is bigger you'd expect it to have more of that resource, not just a single one, Like a burrower would have 1 on it, then a tremor tusk which would be like a burrower per leg section should probably have 10-15 machine muscle on it.

Edit: I'm starting to think it's completely RNG now rather than have a certain amount, the tremortusk I just took down had 40 on it, which is great, but others have had it in the single digits. Their ammo drums also seem to have it in it as well, approach from behind, use machine breaker, take out the ammo drums, when it turns around, off the tusks then take it down. Have noticed that the average is around 12 per tremortusk not including the drums.

[.Master Jiren, The Strongest]

i use the sharpshooter bow quite frequently and always end up at full resources. i dont even look at what im looting. i just always have max. same goes for pretty much any weapon i use, i never have a hard time managing my resources, they seem to drop plentifully.