-Here is a ship progression guide I put together since I just completed this process.
As of now it is still possible to dupe inventory items and make the necessary units that way, but this could be helpful for those who'd rather not dupe. This information I either gathered from personal experience or with the help of posters in this thread, so thank you. I assume there are already guides out there (maybe in this thread, but I missed them) in the ether already (reddit, etc) so if I'm missing something obvious or made some mistakes, let me know. The whole thing can be a bit daunting when you first start out and it is difficult to know when you should be saving or splurging your hard earned units.
Two important things to note, and why this guide might be helpful.
- The price of ships increase exponentially as one progresses through the game. You might be able to buy a 28-30 slot ship for 4-5 million but a 37 slot ship could cost 3x that. Rather than try and keep up with the ridiculously steep per-slot price jump, the guide below can save you a lot of time and money.
- As you upgrade to warp reactors and better mining lasers/photon cannons, some of the ships you run into will match the "level" of your inventory and the price will increase accordingly. It might be better to hold off on upgrading anything above basic Sigma warp reactor until you've bought your Upgrade 2 ship as seen below.
As far as I know, one could theoretically skip to step 5 if they wanted to just grind out crashed ships. I prefered to save that part for the end when the ship prices became absurd. This process felt natural and gave me inventory space to complement my progress in the game overall.
- Upgrade 1-Save up 1.5-3 million and buy your first ship. This will be a big step up from the starter ship (or pre-order ship), obviously, but I feel it is better to make one big purchase rather than buy several incremental upgrades. It will save you money in the long run to upgrade once. The goal here is to get a ship with low to mid 20s for slot spaces.
- Now, save your units! Unless you really need to buy a dynamic resonator for your hyperdrive or suspension fluid for warp fuel (you probably will), it is better to find resources or find good prices at vendors and buy low/sell high. It is ok to buy suit upgrades, but be aware a ship slot can hold double the resources of a suit slot (500 v 250).
- Upgrade 2- at around 5-12 million, buy your next ship. I know that is a wide range cost-wise but your mileage may vary for sellers depending on the hyperdrive and warp reactor(s) on the ships you're buying. That 5-12 million may seem daunting but it will be doable especially as you find more of the vortex cube/gravitino ball/aquasphere type planets which are great for farming.
- The goal here is to get in the early to mid 30s for slot space. If you can get a good bargain and get a ship with 37+ slots, all the better.
- The final step is to find crashed vessels and transfer ships. We saved this for last because fixing up all of the systems on just one crashed ship can be a huge drain on your resources. Instead, we're only going to be fixing the basic minimum on the new ship and switching it out immediately until we hit the desired 48 slot ship. That is why I don't recommend doing just one transfer at a time with a full fix at any point in your playthrough, although you could get away with doing several very early on in the game if you so choose. Once you start transferring ships in mid-late game however, it is better just to do them all at once until you hit 48. You can ping a bunch or all (10-20 if you're following the guide) of the ships you need at the same time using the strategy below. If you're playing it completely straight, you'll need to either locate transmission towers via bypass chips or just flying around the surface of planets and finding them visually.
Credit to Stoze.
Do you know about the bug/exploit with Gek transmission towers? You can re-enter the code there and just ping a shit load of ship crashes from a single transmission tower and just go from one ship to the other without stopping to trade up ships. It only works on a Gek system for whatever reason.
- Now just swing by all each pinged ship one by one. It doesn't matter what the ship looks like, you won't own it for long anyway. Just make sure the ship you're switching to is a +1 slot increase when transferring, every once in awhile the crashed ship might actually be lower.
- As you transfer over, break down any upgrades from the old ship and transfer over as many valuable resources as possible (rare elements like Omegon. Also Nickel, Aluminum, Gold or Emeril which will be needed to repair or build Warp Reactors). For now, KEEP THE NEW SHIP UPGRADES INTACT. The upgrades on your current ship could possibly have an impact on the upgrades you'll find on the new ship. [note: this needs further testing, but I'd recommend waiting to break down upgrades on the new ship until you've found another vessel to swap]
- After the transfer is complete, you'll only need Iron (for carite sheets, you'll need 6 for each ship repair), Heridium and Platinum (you'll need some to fuel the launch as well) to fix your new ship just enough so it call fly (only the Launch Thruster and Pulse Engine). These are widely available on almost every planet, so if you run out you can quickly farm. Once the repairs are done, you'll be ready to fly; head to the next pinged ship. Rinse and repeat the last 3 bullet points until you hit 47 slots.
- For the final 48th slot, now would be a good time to get picky and choose a ship you actually enjoy. I took another 40+ minutes to find one I liked but if you don't care what your ship looks like, just pick whatever.
The ship transferring step of the process took me around 2.5-3 hours for 13 ship swaps with another 40+ minutes for cosmetic/vanity purposes. Again, YMMV but that 2.5-3 hours is small in comparison to the grind of tens of millions of credits. My final result
Best of luck on your journey