A guide to Freighters and Frigates by Governor JWAL
Many people are annoyed or confused at how painful and annoying it is to get a nice capital S class freighter today I am here to fix that. First of all what is a freighter? A freighter is a colossal starship that acts as a trading station and portable base there are two ways to gain a freighter. Buy one with units or get one for free via defending one in a space battle.
There are two kinds of freighter Capitals and regular freighters. The difference is quiet obviously capital classes have significantly more storage and are much larger than your average freighter a maximum of 34 to a regular freighters 19. Freighters also have different species of crew some have Vy’keen crew and some have Korvax crew these changes are only decorative however. There are also two types of capitals “Trains” and “Venators” venators look like the uhh big ships from Star Wars and trains look like sentinel battle cruisers but bigger.
Now onto the subject to get your dream freighter first of all find a system of which has the desired freighter there are two ways of doing this the first being checking r/NMScoordinateexchange on Reddit for some very good looking freighters! Or warping randomly until you find a system with the one you want the only problem with this method is that to encounter a systems capital freighter you don’t just pulse drive and hyperdrive around like usual you have to encounter them in pirate battle events this event involves defending a freighter from pirates this may occur whenever you warp into a system although it must be 3 hours since the last pirate battle and you must have warped more than 5 times when both of these criteria are met you can encounter one.
When you’ve found the freighter you want now what? You don’t kill any pirates ignore the battle go to the space station and leave your ship to auto save before going back outside of which you will then receive an emergency transmission offer assistance and then kill the pirates when this is done land and if it’s not an S or you are unhappy with the class reload your game. The way this works is that you don’t save when you leave your ship in a freighter meaning you can scan it to check it’s class and reload to redo the battle and change its class sometimes you’ll get unlucky and get multiple C’s and A’s in a row but if you persevere you’ll get your ship! You can change the colour of them by the way!
Now for the stats and frigates. Your freighter will usually have a relatively low looking stats page at the beginning but don’t be disheartened because you can get upgrades. The best way being to look through derelict freighters (you can find these form buying a beacon from the scrap dealer); they are quite expensive and are one time use but a secret hack is activating them and then putting them in your personal refiner and not taking them out (MAKE SURE YOU DO THIS BEFORE YOU START PULSING). After this you can complete all the objectives and extract the upgrades from the engineering terminal.
Then when you hand in all the data to the envoy or scrap dealer you can go to sell the receiver (you can take it out of the refiner after turning in the data) and it will revert to not being active and you can use it again! (Might be patched will look into it) This will increase the speed or abilities of frigate expeditions and increase hyperdrive range on the freighter!
You can also use the engineering terminal to print freighter bulkheads (Storage increases).
Frigates are small ships that you can recruit to your freighters fleet by approaching the ships with green icons near them in the fleets on naturally spawning freighters and pay them to join yours. Most if not all of them are B or C but they will level up the more encounters they have with enemies or the more trades of trade ships and such.
You can send them on expeditions after you’ve recruited them to gain money and other rewards. Expeditions are of a few types being Combat, Industry, Trading, Exploration, and “Balanced.” Each frigate has a specialties shown by the numbers in the frigate selection screen the higher the score of every frigate on the mission the higher the rewards and chance of success.
Some frigates are special because they reduce fuel costs of other frigates. You need to use frigate fuel to send out expeditions it’s crafted with di-hydrogens and tritium. Fuel is used up after an expedition and the more frigates the more fuel is required.
You can get freighter upgrade that increase the abilities of these expeditions and speed they are acquired from the engineering terminals of derelicts. Expeditions can be equipped with upgrade that help them like mine control devices to increase the trade ability of an expedition or heat sealing explosive drones to increase combat ability. These can be unlocked with salvaged frigate modules (Unlocked easiest from destroying cargo pods in freighter fleets) from the main terminal in the control room near the warp terminal and navigator. This is also how you change the colour of your freighter; to unlock a colour is 5000 nanites. The warp drives of freighter must also be upgraded to travel to red, green and blue stellar systems. These upgrades are unlocked the same way as the expedition ones from the terminal near the navigator and warp terminal in the captains room/command centre.
