Any strategy to acquire less common genes?

[HunterSilver]

I've ripped all of the genes that I can from the basic Germlines and Xenogenes. I've been checking traders and ordering traders as often as possible, but even after years of this, I've barely acquired any genes outside of what can be ripped out.

I'd really like to get my hands on psychite impervious, great medical, awful crafting, etc.. Is there any strategy to actually consistently get these genes to show up? The archite genes are regularly on traders, but I have literally never seen genes like great cooking, acid spray, super psy-sensitive, and so on.

[Pizzarugi]

Trade caravans are terrible. Trade ships and visiting faction bases tend to have more stuff to offer. Other than that, you could try and wait for a quest involving Sanguophages to appear, capture one, and milk them for their genes. My advice: Lop their legs off so there's no risk of them trying to escape.

That being said, there are mods which greatly increase trader stock and silver. And if you don't like sending someone out to visit faction bases (and I can't say I blame you), there are mods which make planetary travel a huge deal easier.

[HunterSilver]

Sorry for the confusion, I hit all of the local cities for trade as well. Anyone within transport pod range gets cleaned out by me twice a year. I'm still struggling to get any genes that aren't found in existing germlines and xenogenes.

I'd like to avoid modding in super traders if at all possible. I looked at the mod for the gene trader, but it also throws in tons of rare items and trade resources to the trader to the point where they were trivially common and that feels bad to include in a game.

I'm worried that there just aren't any other sources for me to tap, and so rarer genes become nearly impossible to acquire. Great cooking shall forever remain outside of my reach.

[Pizzarugi]

Originally posted by HunterSilver:

Sorry for the confusion, I hit all of the local cities for trade as well. Anyone within transport pod range gets cleaned out by me twice a year. I'm still struggling to get any genes that aren't found in existing germlines and xenogenes.

I'd like to avoid modding in super traders if at all possible. I looked at the mod for the gene trader, but it also throws in tons of rare items and trade resources to the trader to the point where they were trivially common and that feels bad to include in a game.

I'm worried that there just aren't any other sources for me to tap, and so rarer genes become nearly impossible to acquire. Great cooking shall forever remain outside of my reach.

According to the wiki, some genes don't exist on some factions at all, so ripping genes out of people won't guarantee you everything. I spent 1-2 ingame years looking for the genes I need to make the perfect pawn, because towns kept not offering the genes I was looking for. It was awful.

You don't need to be extreme for trade mods.

I use this one which lets you customize the frequency of trade caravans/ships appearing, how much silver+stock they carry, and how much that scales depending on your wealth:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2876541977&searchtext=trade

If you'd like to trade with more towns beyond your transport pod range, I strongly recommend this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2878587061&searchtext=srts

[HunterSilver]

So it sounds like there really aren't any other options then. Dang. I guess I'll just be content with what I have then. Thanks.

[Astasia]

In my experience, if it doesn't exist on one of the common xenotypes, I just wouldn't count on seeing it in your game unless you make a custom xenotype with it at start. It just comes down to RNG and if you keep checking traders you should find it eventually, but it could take years, possibly longer than you want to spend in a playthrough.

There is a mod that can help without adding extra stuff to traders, though it does so by removing a lot of leg work from the process:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2396808851
Once you get a comms console up you can check each settlement to see what it's selling remotely, then if you find a gene you want you can send a caravan out to buy it. This means you can check like every settlement on the planet rather than the ones that are just nearby, which is a pretty big increase to the pool of available genes every 30 days. It has a search function, but it only searches settlements up to 100 tiles away max (defaults to 40 in the mod options).

[HunterSilver]

Got it, thanks. I'm liable to just skip the genes then for now and if they ever pop up it'll be a happy surprise. I gather that finding and acquiring genes is RNG intensive, and I was mostly hoping there was some built-in way to reduce that RNG and target farm a bit. I'm already cheating quite a bit by using the gene ripper mod to speed up the process of acquiring genes from common xenotypes.