¶ Unlocking AX Engineers
This guide aims to provide the most efficient ways for unlocking engineers neccesary for anti-xeno combat.
You DO NOT have to max out the previous grade of an engineering blueprint before applying the next. A module only stores one grade of engineering, so each higher grade replaces previous ones.
¶ Required Engineers
For a shieldless ship, the following components should be engineered at a minimum:
- Hull & Hull Reinforcements: Selene Jean
- Power Distributor: The Dweller
- Thrusters: Professor Palin
- Beam Laser: The Dweller (G3), Broo Tarquin (G5)
- Power Plant: Hera Tani (G5), Felicity Farseer (G1)
There are other optional, but recommended engineering includes:
- Heatsinks: Ram Tag or pre-engineered Sirius Heatsinks
- Sensors: Bill Turner (G5), Felicity Farseer (G3)
- Frame Shift Drive: Felicity Farseer (G5), Elvira Martuuk (G5)
- Shield Generator: Lei Cheung
¶ The List
When starting out, some engineers can be skipped. This gives us a minimal list of:
- Selene Jean for Hull / HRPs
- The Dweller for Power Distro and Beam Lasers
- Professor Palin for Thrusters
- Elvira Martuuk for FSD
- Hera Tani, if greater than G1 power plant is required.
¶ Full List
Since many of these engineers have pre-requisites, the full list of engineers who must be unlocked is much longer.
The full list is as follows (> denotes referrals):
- Elvira Martuuk > Marco Qwent > Professor Palin
- Felicity Farseer (optional, but highly recommended)
- The Dweller > Lei Cheung
- Todd McQuinn > Selene Jean
- Liz Ryder > Hera Tani > Broo Tarquin
While Farseer does not provide any unique grade five blueprints, it is highly recommended to unlock her first. Engineering a jumpship with an FSD and other experimentals she offers will improve your ship’s performance at a low cost.
¶ How To Unlock
A few guides exist on how to unlock engineers. The rough overview is that each engineer needs two things met: some achivement, and some cargo delivery.
A guide for unlocking engineers can be found here.
It should be noted that bringing a guardian-thargoid hybrid relic to Arque bypasses Palin’s 5000ly travel requirement. You may be able to acquire such a relic bi asking in the Anti-Xeno Initiative Discord.
Some CMDRs, particularly those purchasing the game after the release of the Odyssey expansion, report having access to certain engineers without meeting the prerequisites for unlock. These include:
- Mining 500 units of ore for Selene Jean
- Trading with 50 markets for Lei Cheung
¶ Unlocking Selene Jean
Courtesy of CMDR lyonhaert
For refining 500T of minerals most efficiently, I recommend this approach as it is more consistent and faster than any form of deposit mining.
- Mining Python
- A pristine metallic ring (38 Lyncis 4, inner ring is the closest to Selene Jean’s system)
Steps:
- Drop into a random spot and ditch any pirates that spawn.
- Start prospecting and looking for rocks with at least 1 resource >20% regardless of what it is.
- Make sure you have none of these resources ignored by checking the fragments in your Contacts list on the left during the first few fragments.
- Fire off collectors if you don’t have them all active (they do expire), and put 4 pips into WPN before mining a rock.
- For efficiency, try to find the pole of rotation if the rock spins and make sure the lasers hit that. Spinning or not, try to position the ship 200m away from the surface you’re lasering and angled downward so that fragments go toward the area underneath your ship (50-150m outside the cargo hatch). The idea is to get the collectors working mostly just outside the cargo hatch so they go very fast.
- After you’ve depleted a rock and finished collecting, just jettison anything that isn’t Painite and vent all the bins of the refinery before moving on to the next rock.
Expect this to take about 2-5 hrs, depending on positioning skill.
Occasionally check “Minerals refined” in your statistics to see when you’re over 500 on that number. Once you’ve reached that point if you have limpets left and don’t have 10T of Painite yet you can just keep prospecting for any rocks with Painite >20%.
¶ Optimal Engineering Routes
¶ Optimal Experimental Engineering
Courtesy of CMDR Ansic
This route provides you the optimal path for collecting the experimentals you need engineered for AX, assuming that you’re starting with buying your ship fully from Shinrarta Dezhra. Although you can go in any order, we suggest Deciat as engineering your FSD first will decrease the number of jumps you need, and you should engineer Armor and Hull Reinforcements last as they add mass (and reduce your jump range).
Note: This assumes that you have blueprints pinned to G5 from every engineer needed.
¶ Choose-Your-Own Adventure
Courtesy of CMDR Secretpro
Can’t be bothered flying to engineers in a random order to get all those experimentals applied? Looking for a way to save some time?
Lucky for you, I have found a pretty nifty way to make this part of the grind better!
First, go to https://inara.cz/elite/engineers/ and make a list of the systems each engineer you will need to visit resides in. Obviously, if an engineer can do several of the things you need, it’s probably better to pick that one.
Now that you’ve got that list, we can actually just use https://spansh.co.uk/tourist (the optimal tourism route planner) to create, what should be, the best path between all those pesky, spread out engineers.
Alternatives:
https://github.com/neotron/EDPathFinder
https://github.com/jixxed/ed-odyssey-materials-helper