Limits on Sentinel ship farming?

[nannerpuss]

A day or two ago I did the Sentinel ship routine, got the locator thing, did the camp, etc. Pretty cool ship, but I want a new color or shape. So I hit Dissonent systems and the last two will not drop the locator thing for me to find a camp again. I killed 13 of the big ass mirror guys and I ended up with 3 stacks of mirrors and not one single locator. Just spent about two hours or so and I'm tits up with crystals, shards and mirrors, but need that locator.

Am I doing it too soon? Do certain planets not drop locator items for the walker kills? I don't have a problem with an imposed mechanic limit on it because farming Sentinel ships would be fast and my B-class one is worth 54,000,000 in scrap, so you could break the whole economy if you farmed them honestly.

[Krash Megiddo]

Bad RNG. The big ass mirror guys will eventually drop a locator. I assume you mean this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2961604963

I don't know if this affects the drop rate or not, but its easy to confirm if the corrupted planet will have camps and crashed interceptors:
Scan for trading post.

[nannerpuss]

Originally posted by Krash Megiddo:

Bad RNG. The big ass mirror guys will eventually drop a locator. I assume you mean this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2961604963

I don't know if this affects the drop rate or not, but its easy to confirm if the corrupted planet will have camps and crashed interceptors:
Scan for trading post.

Yep, those are the ones. But about the Trading Post, you mean from orbit if I use my trade post scanner and it *doesn't* detect one on the Corrupted Sentinel planet, there is no camp there and thus bigass walkers won't ever drop the locator on that planet?

[Krash Megiddo]

Originally posted by nannerpuss:

Originally posted by Krash Megiddo:

Bad RNG. The big ass mirror guys will eventually drop a locator. I assume you mean this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2961604963

I don't know if this affects the drop rate or not, but its easy to confirm if the corrupted planet will have camps and crashed interceptors:
Scan for trading post.

Yep, those are the ones. But about the Trading Post, you mean from orbit if I use my trade post scanner and it *doesn't* detect one on the Corrupted Sentinel planet, there is no camp there and thus bigass walkers won't ever drop the locator on that planet?

That's correct. After the battle, you'll see a brief message "nothing detected" and it goes away rather quickly so its easy to miss. If in doubt, scan for a trading post. All that does is confirm if the planet is populated or not. No population = no camps, interceptors, or settlements.

[lordoftheapes79]

Originally posted by Krash Megiddo:

Bad RNG. The big ass mirror guys will eventually drop a locator. I assume you mean this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2961604963

I don't know if this affects the drop rate or not, but its easy to confirm if the corrupted planet will have camps and crashed interceptors:
Scan for trading post.

I've actually found these are much more common on extreme worlds. They tend to spawn on top of Storm Crystals.

[Krash Megiddo]

Originally posted by lordoftheapes79:

Originally posted by Krash Megiddo:

Bad RNG. The big ass mirror guys will eventually drop a locator. I assume you mean this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2961604963

I don't know if this affects the drop rate or not, but its easy to confirm if the corrupted planet will have camps and crashed interceptors:
Scan for trading post.

I've actually found these are much more common on extreme worlds. They tend to spawn on top of Storm Crystals.

Once I had to kill 10 of these to get a locator to drop. I don't think the system is smart enough to only drop locators in populated planets, but I haven't confirmed that.

[lordoftheapes79]

Originally posted by Krash Megiddo:

Originally posted by lordoftheapes79:

I've actually found these are much more common on extreme worlds. They tend to spawn on top of Storm Crystals.

Once I had to kill 10 of these to get a locator to drop. I don't think the system is smart enough to only drop locators in populated planets, but I haven't confirmed that.

You misunderstand, I didn't get a better drop rate on extreme worlds, there are like 3x as many drills on extreme worlds. I found 2 or 3 of them on patches of storm crystals more than once and they're just more common, I could see 2 or more locations from each one I destroyed. I had a run yesterday where I destroyed 20 drills before getting a locator, and that wasn't an extreme world, so it took much longer than I would have liked...

[Krash Megiddo]

Originally posted by lordoftheapes79:

... I had a run yesterday where I destroyed 20 drills before getting a locator, and that wasn't an extreme world, so it took much longer than I would have liked...

20:1 drop rate is horrific which confirms to the OP its possible to have such bad RNG.

[Faceplant]

You can just walk up to it and see if it's an inverted mirror or echo locator. Takes about 30 seconds if you're slow to land, peak at it and get back in the air if it's an inverted mirror. Add a minute to snag it and spin down the sentinels if it's an echo locator.

The economy is most definitely broken if you farm interceptors.

[lordoftheapes79]

Originally posted by Faceplant8:

You can just walk up to it and see if it's an inverted mirror or echo locator. Takes about 30 seconds if you're slow to land, peak at it and get back in the air if it's an inverted mirror. Add a minute to snag it and spin down the sentinels if it's an echo locator.

The economy is most definitely broken if you farm interceptors.

I've been farming them in my exocrafts. I didn't know you could see that, generally I take them out from a hundred yards in 3 seconds with the exocraft cannon. Besides, the 95 nanites these things refine into is an acceptable consolation prize lol

[FREEZED]

Originally posted by lordoftheapes79:

Originally posted by Faceplant8:

You can just walk up to it and see if it's an inverted mirror or echo locator. Takes about 30 seconds if you're slow to land, peak at it and get back in the air if it's an inverted mirror. Add a minute to snag it and spin down the sentinels if it's an echo locator.

The economy is most definitely broken if you farm interceptors.

I've been farming them in my exocrafts. I didn't know you could see that, generally I take them out from a hundred yards in 3 seconds with the exocraft cannon. Besides, the 95 nanites these things refine into is an acceptable consolation prize lol

i farm those with ship and infra cannon, kill sentinel then shoot the loot canister and you pick loot up, no need to land, if you do farming on pirate system then you do not get combat encounter at all.

[Langkard]

If you use a Dreadnought AI fragment from killing the sentinel capital ship which spawns at level 5 in sentinel space battles, you can find a dissonance spike and its sentinel interceptor without using an echo locator. That way you, if you are looking for a particular color or style of interceptor, you don't have to waste an echo locator on a planet with an interceptor you don't like. Save the echo locators for when you find a sentinel color and style you like, so you can use the camp computer dissonance spike locator to find multiple ships while looking for an S-class.

[Khalunka]

It feels so cheating how expensive and perfect state the sentinel ships are. I scrap them but discard all the items, dont sell them at all. So stupid you can get that ship without any combat and in perfect state, considering how pricy it is. Nms is really bad about balancing and making things feel fair. :x

[nannerpuss]

Hey I have one more question here:

When I use the Trade Facility scanner in a system, it's only ever going to find one market on one planet, right? So just using it as a way to determine if there is a camp on a Corrupted planet isn't really viable, right? If it happens to detect a place on the one Corrupt Sentinel planet that's a guarantee of a camp, but there are several other planets and there could be a camp on the Corrupted Sentinel planet despite not finding a trade outpost?

[Krash Megiddo]

land on the corrupted planet or fly low in the atmosphere when you scan.

[Unlucky]

Originally posted by Frick:

It feels so cheating how expensive and perfect state the sentinel ships are. I scrap them but discard all the items, dont sell them at all. So stupid you can get that ship without any combat and in perfect state, considering how pricy it is. Nms is really bad about balancing and making things feel fair. :x

To be fair, ya'll are the ones going out of your way to exploit the game's systems to avoid combat...
You could just also turn off combat or damage or purchases or whatever else you don't like in the difficulty settings and it would be even easier for you. Ya'll decided to take the harder route. It has nothing to do with "balance" anymore. The game openly gave us difficulty settings for these things.
The REAL question is.... Why do ya'll still feel that you have to exploit the game rather than just use the settings?