I started my save as a rookie and just accepted the first freighter I was offered. It was a B class and had plenty of base built with parts I hadn’t even unlocked yet which was great for me ‘cause I was so early-game. Finally decided to get around to upgrading to a top of the line freighter, and after a couple weeks just casually checking out every freighter I happened to see the best I saw was a couple A’s.
Today I pretty much exclusively hunted for freighters for four hour (not contiguous hours, I can’t game for that long all at once!) without finding an S class. Finally, I caught an A I liked the look of, so I settled. Before I start spending bulkheads, is it worth it to keep casually looking for an S? Like, is there really any bonus beyond more supercharged slots? Searching gives me few results and most of it is 2-3 years old so may not even apply anymore.
I’d love to hear the groups advice, anecdotes, and other random freighter knowledge.
If I understand correctly, you have a better chance of an S-class freighter in Outlaw systems. The capital freighters can only be got from a freighter fight, which happens after at least 5 warps and at least 3 hours gameplay.
You can save before you do the fight and reload if the freighter isn’t S-class. Reports elsewhere suggested it still took hours to find one.
Note you can tell what class a freighter is by looking at a wall in analysis mode in the landing bay.
But an A-class is plenty good enough!
How do you savescum an S-class freighter now that getting out of your ship creates a “restore point” instead of autosaving?
You have to save before the warp in; you can no longer save on the space station. IIRC you don’t get a save on exiting your ship after the freighter battle, so you can reload and warp back in again.
Don’t do the battle. Go straight to the space station. Get out of your ship, get back in and go out to the freighter. Check its class. If not what you want, reload the bottom (oldest) save. You’ll be back in the spave station. Rinse and repeat until you get what you want.
I know this used to be the case. Last time I tried though reloading the game no longer kicked off the battle (so the freighter was gone). You’re right that you can skip the fight if you land on the freighter, but I believe you now have to warp in each time.
Okay let me just get way off-topic on this but can we talk about Capital Freighters vs freighters a second? Wiki’s and Tubes all seem to make the distinction between freighters (lower-case f) and Capital Ships/Freighters (upper-case F).
Play enough and see enough under attack by pirates and you will notice yes, they sometimes are noticeably larger than the random freighters you might find in this or that solar system. Certainly they are larger than most of the freighters which you may see randomly warp into a solar system after you arrive. They all still show up as Your Capital Ship in navigation. So what’s the deal with making the distinction? Is it some kind of save-editing data-mining thing where people have started differentiating the two because there’s something intrinsically different?
I swear there are more layers of player-added classification…
There are two models that you can only get as Capital Freighters in varying lengths; Sentinels (long ones shaped like a bread knife) and Venators (look like an Imperial star destroyer). These will not normally show up in a system without going through the freighter fight. (They did show up for me in the expedition which was weird but I haven’t seen them in normal play).
Other than looks though I think there is no difference, and the smaller non-capitals are much easier to get.
I settled for an A class. It’s plenty.