I don’t think it is supposed to end until tomorrow? All the websites say Nov. 24th - Dec 7th for Expedition One. How much did you have left to do?
The toughest ones, I guess - like finding the undiscovered systems, finding a green and blue star (started in a red system, so I guess I got lucky with that one), finding a derelict freigter, finding an abandoned system. Maybe a couple others, but I’ve been trying for those for a while now.
Maybe I can help.
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Derelict Freighter : One of the rewards from one of the other tasks is an Emergency Broadcast Receiver. You can also get one of these for FREE from Iteration Helios on the Anomaly or buy one from the scrap dealer on any space station for 5mil units. Launch into space and use the receiver, then point yourself towards a distant planet and enter Pulse drive. Within a few seconds the receiver will alert to a signal. Drop out of Pulse and a derelict freighter will appear. It has a landing pad to land on, and from there you can explore the mystery. Bring along some protection from extreme cold though, as it’s chilly inside those things!
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Green & Blue stars : Summon the Anomaly (X menu). Once you’ve landed inside, go find Iteration Hyperion in the circular room with all the Iterations that sell blueprints and upgrades. He sells starship tech blueprints for nanites. Purchase blueprints for the Emeril Drive (green) and the Indium Drive (blue). Also snag the Economy Scanner as well (you’ll see why shortly). Build and install these on your ship. You can now travel to green and blue stars. Locate them by color on the space map, but read on first.
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Black Holes and Undiscovered + Abandoned Systems : While you’re in the Anomaly collecting the colored warp drives, economy scanner and the free EB Receiver, chat with Polo and ask about Black Holes. He will light up a route on your space map to the nearest one. Head to and through it. When you emerge on the other side, start looking for what you need. Green and Blue stars will be plentiful if you still need those, but the Undiscovered and Abandoned Systems are going to be tougher to get. Remember that economy scanner I told you to snag from Hyperion? It tells you on the space map about the economy of every system. Start scrolling around the space map looking for normal (yellow) systems with an alien race (Gek, Vy’keen or Korvax) present but where the economy percentages say “no data available” instead of the usual buy/sell percentage data. These are abandoned systems! Warp to one and if it is as yet undiscovered, mission accomplished (and it’ll count as one of your 3 Undiscovered Systems too!). Note that I had to warp out a couple thousand LY from the black hole to find an uncharted abandoned system, so maybe try getting pretty far away before starting your search. On the plus side, that far off the path most other systems will be undiscovered too, so you’ll knock out that milestone pretty quick. When you’re all done discovering everything for these milestones, head to any space station and take the portal back to a station you visited prior to the Black Hole. Now you’re back on the Expedition path.
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Explorer’s Guild : Find a Korvax system. The Korvax mission agents always seem to have easy (scan stuff) Explorer’s Guild missions. Take on a 'Scan Minerals" or “Scan Flora” type mission that rewards Explorer’s Guild reputation. The target plaent/area will always be on warp jump away in an adjacent system. Fly there, scan the required targets, and fly up to the space station in the new system to hand in the mission. Check there for another easy EXplorer’s Guild mission, or if they don’t have one (Vy’Keen systems often don’t, or they have one that is “Kill 14 creatures” which can be time consuming) warp back to the original system and look there again.
I appreciate the tips, I’ll see what I can get done later this evening. To be honest, this being my first real effort at playing the game, I wasn’t expecting I’d get through the entire expedition - and my main goal was getting a Normandy to play with, which I believe is the next expedition. So I’ll be slightly bummed if I don’t get it done but not seriously bummed.
Expedition 2: Beachhead (Redux) launched this morning and ends December 21 (2pm UTC) in 1 week 5 days 12 hours.
Edit: This is the shortest/easiest expedition, but if you plan to play at some point, go ahead and start a new Expeditions save now, or at least 24 hours before the end time. The fastest completion time I’ve seen so far is about an hour.
Milestones:
An hour?! Where’s the fun in that?!
Started Expedition Two last night and yes, it does seem to be the easiest and shortest of the four expeditions. I played for 90 minutes and while I didn’t finish it (LOL) I did complete all of the Phase 1 tasks except for warping to the first rendezvous point and a couple of Phase 2/3 tasks as well just in the course of getting started. I spent extra time collecting resources on my starting planet (including Activated Cadmium to sell for a quick cash infusion) and ran a couple of Gek missions to earn nanites for upgrades.
A quick scan of the milestones for this expedition shows only one that might be somewhat time consuming (Another “Discover 4 Systems” milestone, but a black hole and 1000LY warp away from it will likely produce those results fast enough) and interestingly enough the final set of milestones are “encrypted”, meaning we don’t get to see what they are until we accomplish the phases ahead of them. Cool stuff!
Pro Tip : Take the time to read through all of the Expedition milestones in every phase in your log before leaving the first planet. There are A LOT of them which can be accomplished in your starting system, and several more that can easily be picked up as you warp along the path to Rendezvous 1 and Rendezvous 2 if you take a moment to look around in each system you pass through.
Also, after nearly 400 hours of play in NMS, I was yesterday days old when I warped for the first time inside my freighter. In all the times I’ve used the freighter bridge to start frigate missions, unlock freighter tech and upgrade my freighter, I never even looked to the right to see the navigation station where you can bring up the map and warp your freighter (including yourself and all of your collected starships) around the universe. I always just warped wherever using my ship, then summoned my freighter when I got there.
Expedition 2 completed! Pretty short one and probably my least faviourite. But the Normandy is a sweet reward.
The most boring part was getting enough Quicksilver to buy one item needed for a late milestone.
Expedition 2 completed here as well! Welcome to the fleet Cmdr. Shepard!
Sorry for the poor screenshot, apparently I’m in a goth system as everything stayed dark no matter where I placed the sun in my attempt to get a nicely staged photo.
Unlike Expedition One which took me nearly the entire 2 weeks to complete (finished a couple of days before cutoff), Expedition Two only took a handful of 1-2 hour sessions (less than 10 hours total) and was relatively easy, especially with the lessons learned from previous expeditions (like use the black hole to get far enough off the beaten path to find “discoverable” systems for those milestones).
The longest bit for me was the milestone to rescue a stranded traveler. I bought a dozen distress signal maps from the cartographer and exactly NONE of them led to a stranded traveler. Lots of crashed ships with dead pilots, many abandoned buildings and a couple of crashed freighters, but zero live travelers to help. I finally ended up going to the Anomaly and taking a group mission from the Nexus to rescue a stranded traveler and doing it solo. It took a good hour or more as the Nexus rescue missions are more involved than simply finding a guy and using materials to repair his ship, but in the end it got me the milestone and a nice mission reward on top of that.
Just a quick reminder that Expedition 3 : Cartographers - Revisited begins today.
Best practice is to keep firing off maps, and to ignore (do not visit) the “wrong” kinds of sites. The reason is, when a chart or an exocraft scanner places an icon for a specific kind of emergency type point of interest (e.g. an Abandoned Building), it’s no longer possible for charts/scanners to locate another Abandoned Building on that planet. So once you have icons for all the other kinds of emergency POI, thereafter charts will only locate crashed ship sites on that planet.
Except when I do that, invariably the next chart I try to fire off gives me an error claiming I’ve already mapped a location of that type in the system. So for example if the first chart I pop shows me an abandoned building, and I try to pop another chart in the same system, if it too is Abandoned Building it will simply toss up the error, not use a chart, and force me to visit the first location before I can use another chart, unless I change systems. This happens with annoying frequency.
I wonder if this was a “fix” put in place during a patch?
The scenario you’re describing usually means there are no locations of the type you’re looking for, and thus avoids wasting the chart.
That’s possible, but it’s unclear, imo, as I’ve had them do that and then succeed a second later.
So there’s two things that can happen.
One is you get an error that says something like “a building of this type is already marked.” If that happens, you can try again (and again, and again…) until one of the other types in that category is marked. For example, the distress signal charts often find abandoned buildings; once one is marked, using a chart and having it randomly decide to find another abandoned building results in the error above. But you can try again, and you will (eventually) get one of the other options, like a crashed freighter or whatnot. This method only consumes charts when new locations are found, but not when the error comes up.
The other is that there just isn’t anything valid within range for that chart to find. You get a different error along the lines of “no buildings of this type found.” That’s NMS saving you from wasting a chart! If you do it again, you’ll lose the chart and find nothing. The easiest way to see this message is to go to an empty system and look for settlements – there aren’t any. But sometimes other charts will throw up this message in non-abandoned systems, too.
And, slightly off-topic, but man, what a game. The expeditions pulled me back in, and I’ve been having a blast. I hope they add a few more in the future, and/or just let you start them whenever you want. It’s been particularly fun because my kids – the older one, nine, especially – are really into it to. NMS really does a great job of building a sensawonder for them.
When I was their age I had a ripped copy of Elite running on an aging Apple IIe and thought I had it good. Little did I know!
Thanks, I’m pretty sure this is what was happening to me, and I simply stopped trying to use the charts as soon as I got the error message thinking it wasn’t going to let me find anything else until I visited that location (usually an abandoned building). I’ll try re-using them post-message next time until I get a different result.
Expedition Three is pretty cool. I spent almost two hours last night puttering around on the starting planet doing all of the Phase One milestones and most of the Phase Two ones as well. I like that this time your crashed ship is an exotic, which means it takes more complex components to repair it, and the milestones are set up to walk you through finding the resources, tools and blueprints needed to create those components. I quit for the night (after midnight) at the point where I am now ready to repair the launch system on my ship finally. Looking forward to flying again after spending so much time planetside.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. Like I said, the behavior isn’t consistent, most likely because the feature is still not fully baked (although better than it used to be).
I’m guessing you already knew this, but Exotic ships don’t normally have that tech. They tweaked it for this Expedition.
Oh, btw, there’s a Phase 3 milestone to extract minerals from a hotspot, and it looks like Faecium is not extractable from hotspots.
Yup, I just liked that this time we got an exotic “crashed” ship rather than the basic models from the other expeditions. The expedition unique parts to repair were cool as well, I kinda wish that was the way all exotics worked as it would make them more… uh…exotic. Then again, I have an S Class Exotic on my main save that I barely use already, my preferences being the max-slot S-Class Hauler I spent hours searching for back before any schmuck could add storage slots to starships and upgrade their class at any space station and the S-Class fighter I got as a reward for the first expedition, so maybe making exotics even more difficult to acquire and maintain wouldn’t be the best idea.