Fine meals

[Sticky Wicket]

I have seen a few quests called *making a good first impression* where you need to find fine meals. Is this something you can buy somewhere or you need to craft them with certain ingredients?

[Set-115689]

You buy the ingredients and craft them at a station. You can look in the encyclopedia wares/inventory items.

[mortis7]

After dozen of in game no SETA hours of gameplay I just abandoned this quest. I visited maaany stations and none had any ingredients...

[trooperrob]

all those inv items are found either in station traders, or in drops, or in asteroid fields. Once you have money / teleport you can have a scout sitting in pirate bases etc.

Put a sat near where Xenon come out and fight, and store a scout nearby. When the fight is over you can order it to collect drops

Those inv quests it is only worth doing if you have the items already until you get more familiar with getting the bits.

[Tin Pony]

Originally posted by mortis7:

After dozen of in game no SETA hours of gameplay I just abandoned this quest. I visited maaany stations and none had any ingredients...

I don't remember having seen a single station with ALL the ingredients, but they usually have one or two of the three. Sometimes argnu steak is the "rare" one, sometimes it's mixed fruit, but if I'm at a trader anyway, I look.

[ArcticISAF]

I don't know if it's accurate, but I feel like certain factions sell certain parts of items in high quantities, but then you have to go to other factions for the other parts. I don't think you usually see all the parts at one station anyway.

[Gregorovitch]

Fine meals are crafted with ingredients that are not generally or easily available from station traders. They are rare and randomly available so you can never know where you can buy them. But that alsop means just because a trader doesn't have any this time doesn't mean they won't next time.

However when you do find the ingredients (which are steak and fruit IIRC) they usually come in batches of 20 so when you find them it's a jackpot. However you need to hit two jackpots to craft fine meals.

Getting them by flying around stations is pretty much a bust since it could take you literally hours of playtime to do. You will go mad.

Somewhat faster is using the teleport facility but that's still a miserable grind.

The best way to do it is to abide by the old saw "luck is where opportunity meets preparation". In this case if you want to take advantage of these Teladi trade missions then every time you dock at a station through natural play (or you are passing a Teladi trade station as they have like six traders each so a much better chance) always check the traders and if you see steak or fruit just buy the whole lot and craft up bunch of fine meals once you've stumbled on a stack of both.

Don't bother accepting these missions until you have, but then you'll have about 20 fine meals so have at it with these missions.

It's the same thing with the missions to find specific yield mining deposit missions. These are a also miserable grind - unless you had the foresight get a scout to drop mining probes systematically across all the asteroid fields you know of. Then these missions are simply a matter of consulting your map to find an existing probe that reads the required yield for the mission in question and dropping a new probe next to it - which you can check before you actually accept the mission. You can farm a fair amount of high level pilot seminars this way.

[Knottypine]

You will most likely have to visit several stations to find someone with stock. Something I like to do is keep my own inventory of items well stocked. Since your personal inventory is huge, feels unlimited TBH, I buy things when I can so that I have some of everything in case there's a mission for it. I also generally hoard in any game that gives me the ability to, so that's my style.