Good luck with that one. At least have the decency to lie about it not running on your system and that all those hours were in the startup screen.
Grr. Trying to find a ship model I want that I can afford is such a nightmare. Q.Q
FTFY
1. Find a planet with one of the three rare Sentinel-bait items.
2. Find an outpost on that planet with a trade terminal.
3. Run around like it's Tribes skimming the ground to collect inventories full of them.
4. Profit.
I got ~3 million units in fifteen minutes doing that. Bought myself a nifty 24-slot fighter, too.
Surprisingly, the space combat is actually decent. Arcade-ish, but decent. Got jumped by four pirate fighters in my crappy old ship with no gun upgrades, nearly died a couple times there.
Tip! Use the Mining Laser on the ship for Dog Fights... The enemy can maneuver WAY better than you can making dog fighting against ships nearly useless.
That's the thing, though. You don't have to grind at all. Nothing forces it. Once you have the blueprint sequence to make warp cores, you can very easily go all the way to the galactic core without ever building an upgrade (save maybe one of the cheap environmental shields for really hazardous planets). The difficulty doesn't change substantially; you can avoid Sentinels and wildlife altogether on most worlds, and the most basic (read: a handful of iron + plutonium &c.) upgrades to your multitool are enough to kill the tougher ones and mine decently fast.
All of the grinding is
entirely optional. If you're doing it, either you enjoy it or you're looking at the game through that MMO mindset. It's the former for me--I like trying to find ships and multitools as close to perfect as I can get and kit them out with the best upgrades I can manage. I don't need to, but I want to. I mean, you could probably make an argument about the jetpack/shield/life support upgrades... except those take two minutes of gathering on any planet to build.
Also the photon cannon is totally better because it's slightly gimballed apparently, free tracking is free kills. ^^
--
An aside, something else they don't tell you: the jetpack upgrades attach to shield upgrades, not the jetpack. I was wondering for sixteen hours why they had jetpack upgrades if the jetpack had no adjacent tiles. >.<
e:
Apparently there are star classes, which affect the quality of planets around them.The experimental branch is up.