So much Copper?

Why is it that every solar system that I visit, the planets all seem to have only Copper and a few other bits and pieces on them, I haven’t as of yet found anything else but Copper. It’s a good thing that I’m not playing it on nomal because that would really do my head in, if all I can get is Copper.

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I see plenty of parafanium deposits on my planets.
I never went to check them yet, as I currently have no use for parafinium, but that will change I guess.

There does seem to be a bit too much copper compared to the biome’s unique mineral but the Chromatic Metal made from the abundant copper is used quite a lot.
I stockpile it, refine it & then grab it as required as I gradually expand my biome specific farm crops.

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Copper is the new heridium. :wink: Actually all the star-specific materials are very common in their systems.

My problem is that I can’t find ammonium. I’ve found all the other biome-specific materials in plentiful supply (although most of my uranium comes from metal fingers), but no ammonium deposits.

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Wanted to post the exact same phrase! :smile:

My problem is that I can’t find uranium, though. Not in useful quantities that don’t require me to scrounge it as secondary resource from rocks that I don’t need otherwise, in any case.
Wanted to build some mining machines, but they take 300 uranium each and getting those is just too tedious…

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@Argh
I found ammonia as a refined product but not as a large deposit.
Salt + Fungal Mould.
(Apparently Parafinium + Ferite Dust works too)
Haven’t come across “ammonium”? Is it maybe another refined product?
@jedidia
My uranuim was acquired from traders at trading posts in systems with a radioactive planet as I could not find deposits occurring naturally.

Edit: added extra formular.

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Whoops, haha, yeah I mean ammonia. I’ve had to refine it like you’ve mentioned, it’s just a pain to have to mine a lot more resources to do that. “Metal Fingers” (old Murrine) are good for uranium if you come across them. Slow to mine, but high yield.

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That’s a big if! :smile:

When you land on a radioactive planet use your visor and look for the yellow marker.

Yeah fingers are rare resources, but I think they can be on any standard biome. They’re scattered around my normal mode desert home planet, my lush creative mode world, and I recall encountering them on others.

Being a rare resource, metal fingers are more common on planets with extreme environments/sentinel activity.

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Copper is associated mainly with yellow star systems. When you begin the game and first use your ship to visit another system your’re restricted to reaching only yellow stars. Once you have the hyperdrive upgrades fitted you can visit the less common red, blue and green stars. They provide other coloured metals, cadmium (red) and emeril (green) where copper is less common. Though in fairness you will occasionally find the respective metals in other systems, copper more so than others.

Ammonia is indeed best refined with the main path or it’s alternative, as @Mad-Hatter suggested. An alternative way to easily get loads of Paraffinium, is by refining Silver + Oxygen to then further refine into Ammonia using Ferrite or preferably Pure Ferrite, as it can be multiplied cheap.

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Lots of copper indeed, but certainly not the only type of deposits. Keep checking different system planets and you will notice other deposits as well. As long as HG doesn’t mess up with either empty deposits, or the mentioned deposit not being available at all. The latter I have had once when going to a Barren planet which supposedly had both Salt and Copper deposits, just to find out all Salt deposits were turned into Copper instead… Copper for days…

I also had a lot of trouble finding salt for a while, but eventually found a good planet for it while looking for the ammonia.

@Xion4012 The new resource is indeed Ammonia, but there’s also the old Ammonium Salt gas product which had me confused earlier too. Extreme environments are also where to find the “Activated” versions of the star-metals.

I stand corrected. That’s why you always fact check :disappointed:

Forget copper. Upgrade your drives, go to blue systems, and collect activated indium. It’s plentiful on the right planets, and you can build a base to teleport there whenever you like.

Copper refines to half its quantity of chromatic metal - 10 copper= 5 chromatic metal.

Activated indium refines to 4 times its quantity - 10 activated indium = 40 chromatic metal.

Once you have a base in a blue system, restoring crashed ships becomes realistic, and fun.

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Thanks for the tip.
I’m still a fledgling in NMS NEXT & my old established Legacy save is barely touched to ensure no nasty bugs mess it up.
Looks like a ‘blue-drive’ is on my shopping list next session :slight_smile:

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Non-Activated star color metals (Copper, Cadmium, Emeril, Indium) can also easily be refined to make a lot more of themselves.

Say you need more Copper… Split what you have in half, refine half into Chromatic Metal, then combine this with the remaining Copper to produce more Copper then you started with. And if it’s Chromatic Metal you need, refine some of it again. Like @Polyphemus suggests, higher colors (see the order above) produce better ratios of Chromatic Metal.

I believe the Activated versions of the star metals produce the same amount of Chromatic Metal as the non-Activated, just faster, but they can’t be expanded the same way.

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