Where's the beef, or why do the station traders seem to be run by communist party rationers?

[Danya Turrel]

I've been looking for Argnu Steak (again) for hours. I've noticed:

No one seems to have any. You'd think the Argon Trading Stations or maybe their food factories would carry some.

Station traders all seem to have the same few (unwanted) items, in the same quantity, over long periods of time. You'd think their inventory would turn over and their product mix would fluctuate somewhat, right?

I once found some (right when the game came out) on a pirate station. Unfortunately the pirates don't like me much since the incident with that Split female and the Data Splicer Handle. How was I to know she was the station manager's gf?

Is there a mod that fixes this? Surely its a feature that for some unfathomable reason appealed to the game's overlords. Maybe a galaxy-wide steak-shortage due to environmentalist protestors against the damage Argnu synthetic bovine farts do to the station atmosphere's? But seriously guys, why put trading kiosks in the game if they are as useless and static as they are now?

Danya

[Requiemfang]

Have you tried lock box hunting? I've found a few in those, also the civilian traffic if you accidentally pop a few of them the beef can be found in the loot they drop sometimes, also the rare criminal civilian ship will have em as well.

[Kazuma]

I've been looking for Argnu Steak (again) for hours. I've noticed:

No one seems to have any. You'd think the Argon Trading Stations or maybe their food factories would carry some.

Station traders all seem to have the same few (unwanted) items, in the same quantity, over long periods of time. You'd think their inventory would turn over and their product mix would fluctuate somewhat, right?

I once found some (right when the game came out) on a pirate station. Unfortunately the pirates don't like me much since the incident with that Split female and the Data Splicer Handle. How was I to know she was the station manager's gf?

Is there a mod that fixes this? Surely its a feature that for some unfathomable reason appealed to the game's overlords. Maybe a galaxy-wide steak-shortage due to environmentalist protestors against the damage Argnu synthetic bovine farts do to the station atmosphere's? But seriously guys, why put trading kiosks in the game if they are as useless and static as they are now?

Danya

1 in 5, no worse than 1 in 10 station traders will get the RNG for steaks... even seen fruit at about the same rate; lock boxes its pretty common. If you have your own station with multiple trade stations check them all when your "in town". I haven't seen it make any difference as to who fundamentally owns the dock. There may be a slight difference in the seed if its a luxury / standard / or feeble dock.

[dwbennett]

Once in a while I find a Station Trader with steaks and immediately buy them all. I had trouble finding spices and then it seemed every Station Trader I looked in at had them so stocked up and then ignored them. I had enough items to make six fine meals, made them and was able to make a cool 180k cr in a heartbeat.

All I can say is be persistent. Keep checking every Station Trader and you'll (hopeful) soon find some steaks.

Take care,

[Danya Turrel]

Thanks! I guess the squeaky wheel gets the grease because as soon as I got back on (after claiming a couple of abandoned ships my explorer guys found) I started finding steak everywhere.

It's still kind of frustrating though. It's too bad we can't do an egogle search and find out who has whatever we're looking for. Especially with station trading. All that transport tubing around stations gets old.

I do like the bars though, when completing the fine dining missions. Egosoft could really do a lot with the bars.

[Socratatus]

Bars are horrible right now. They need a lot more work.

[SilverDragonLord]

Aye, in all honesty this is a huge issue personally. If ya end up getting a faction quest with 2-3 of these missions in it like i did, it becomes a massive source of frustration. At this point id spend 10M to build a factory that makes Argnu Steak considering how much of a waste of time and frustration it is going from station to station, trader to trader looking for anyone who will bloody sell the damn thing and still barely find any. Even if you do each Fine Meal requires 5 of them so even if you magically find a trader that sells them you would be lucky to complete half of what you need. I know that crafting vendor items used to be a real quick and almost cheaty way to make money but really they desperately need to increase the stock rate for these items if only for the quests. There are far far easier ways to make a metric ton of cash then this so there's no reason not to raise there stock rate. Unfortunately ive found no mods or way to edit the files to do this, if anyone finds a way do let me know. XD

[Buzz2005]

to get fine meals just take lockbox missions and don't give back the stuff, or find free lockboxes

[Alan Phipps]

Why are you sort of replying to year-old thread questions?

[SilverDragonLord]

Because even now a year later it's still far too much of a pain to acquire said resource thus still applies? And why make a new thread for the same thing.
Aye i know lockbox's are one of the other best ways to get them but they can also take a long time to find and there's no guarantee they have what you need.
And hell the "very easy" mission i'm still struggling to complete has required about 8-10 fine meals, Ive spent way too long trying to scrounge up what little i could to finish this damn quest chain.
I just wish there was a better way. XD

[Buzz2005]

you playing the beta? accept lockbox missions that are easy to find and with those missions lockboxes are easy to find too

they usually have just those wares for fine meals

[Alan Phipps]

@ SilverDragonLord: That's the thing though. It isn't very clear from your posts whether your issue is with an overall scarcity of steaks as per the original thread or that the fine meal quests shouldn't appear so frequently in chained and thus mandated missions. At least in the equivalent 'normal' individual missions you can choose whether to accept them or not according to whether they are for say one fine meal or for eight as warned in the mission briefing.

Scarcity of steaks is more likely a station trader stock balance topic, but the components of chained missions is more likely a missions topic. Hence different devs might be involved in their design and improvement.

[SilverDragonLord]

Your not wrong, it can easily be a combination of both. Since that specific quest requiring fine meals is very common as far as ive seen, especially with faction quests. Having the resources that you need to complete said quest being unnecessarily rare considering the low reward feels like it could be balanced better. Which begs the question do you balance it by increasing the spawn of base resources for all vendors, make vendors for specific stations more likely to have that set of resources in bulk, Steaks for meat facs, rare spice from the spice facs and fruit from perhaps swamp facs and so on.
Or does one simply make the missions less likely to chain together as ya said. Though even then it's quite possible that your next mission chain could still require the same thus leading again to issues with the lack of supply.
When it comes to getting the raw resources from lockboxes, each box may only give 1-4 items and even if say steak was one of those items you may not get enough to make even a single meal of the 3+ you need. So even though the quests do help you might have to accept quite a few of them just to complete one mission.

Personally id love to see specific stations traders carry different resources in bulk pertaining to them as it makes more sense that way, that would give more options in how they want to complete quests rather then limiting them to scrounging for bread crumbs for minimal reward.

[hannihanagarth]

Try the trading stations.

They have multiple traders and I have found everything I needed for three Fine Meals on a single station ( Ianamus Zura IV to be precise)

[Fercko2]

So I think the spawn rate is okay. I found everything for Fine Meal in 15 minutes.

What Egosoft could do to reduce frustration is maybe give some hints in the mission briefing or just writhe in the Encyclopedia a few examples.

So Traders are not the way. You will just fly around 5 hours and still won't have everything. So how do you get the materials required to Craft Fine Meal? Just head to a Pirate base and kill civilian traffic. It's that easy. I used the HAT station in Heretics End.

[CBJ]

This is the second time this thread has been dredged up from the depths. The forum rules do ask people not to do that, because old threads often contain out of date information about older versions of the game, which can really confuse newer players.