Getting Cadmium, Emeril, and Indium drives During Expedition Polestar

[Rexxer]

FYI: although you cannot buy the starship drive upgrades at the Anomaly, as one normally would, you can still get them as random rewards at operations centers, - if you answer correctly.

[tkwoods]

I got the first one from a milestone. I'm approaching R3 and have not needed these yet.

[Rexxer]

Originally posted by tkwoods:

I got the first one from a milestone. I'm approaching R3 and have not needed these yet.

Maybe towards the end, I didn't see it myself, as the option was eliminated from the Anomaly for pretty much all of the Expedition. Some upgrades you may get earlier however, REQUIRE Cadmium and such, (like Amplified Warp Shielding for the freighter), and unless you are scrapping, you can't buy it.

[wesnef]

I got Cadmium & Emeril from. . . buried caches?

[Bored Peon]

1. Get a pulse drive upgrade. Class B yields 75 Cadmium.
2. Install and dismantle it get cadmium.
3. Put the cadmium and chromatic metal into a refiner and double your cadmium.
4. Repeat.

[Dr.Abscondus]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

1. Get a pulse drive upgrade. Class B yields 75 Cadmium.
2. Install and dismantle it get cadmium.
3. Put the cadmium and chromatic metal into a refiner and double your cadmium.
4. Repeat.

Got Cadmium this way. Frigate mission brought me Indium. Still working on emeril.

[Rexxer]

The point is: lots of random ways of getting Cadmium in the Expedition. I have yet to ever get the precious metals from buried caches though. And I dug up a lot for an initial nanite infusion. If it's not nanites, its some oddball trade item, or something you deconstruct for materials, but the materials are platinum or some such. I think I even got rusted metal once, but never Cadmium. Scrapping I just remembered, however, is not one of those ways, as the precious metals you get from scrapping are all the activated versions which cannot be used in equipment upgrades.

Given how short the range of the freighter is, it almost seems faster anyway to upgrade the starship with lots of Class S modules and then warp to milestones with the starship and then summon the freighter. However, for this expedition, I wanted to see how much the freighter's range would increase with just its hyperdrive blueprint upgrades. It's not a lot.

[Metal_Masher]

I went all the way to the final Waypoint without needing to upgrade the HyperDrive for the Freighter for the other star types as the route kept in the Yellow Stars for the Expedition Route all the way to the end.