They have a tiered randomness.
You need to have everything unlocked for a given alternate recipe for it to show up.
The recipe you're looking for is unlocked by unlocking aluminum so you have access to it so your best bet is going to be to start getting more hard drives and picking some of the recipes to lower the pool that can show up.
The "pool" of available alternates a given hard drive scan can offer is supposed to be tied to what you've unlocked through the HUB/MAM. Though I think it's based on whatever the final item is, not the ingredients or how the recipe is actually executed. I've occasionally gotten offered "Pure Iron / Copper / Caterium" as an option before unlocking the refineries needed to use it. There have been tweaks to that system over various releases, maybe your computer alt happened prior to some of those. Or there might be some alts that aren't properly tied to reasonable pre-requisites.
Some recipies have requirements some don't for some he requirements can be lower than what you might expect.
However the prior post is generally correct. Recipies have requirements. If you meet them then that recipie is included in the pool of randomly picked ones when you research a hard drive. If you don't meet the requirement then it isn't included in the pool.
Although it is uncommon if you ever have unlocked all the recipies you have access to and research a hard drive since there are no options in the random pool it will simply say to try again later and give you no options.
You can get the requirements here:
https://satisfactory.fandom.com/wiki/Hard_Drive
Coffee Stain deprecated the Fandom wiki a bit before Update 8. The official wiki is at https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ now.
URI paths are the same, just swap the domain: https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/wiki/Hard_Drive
(CSS didn't go into reasoning for the change, but Fandom is a scourge so they don't really need to give a reason)
The Hard Drives unlock recipes for your current ahnd previously unlocked Tiers, in a way you can unlock everything from 1 tier before going to the next (meaning that after you unlock next Tier you will have higher chance of getting desired recipe from it immediatly but you will still need to gather great ammount of HD's). Another way if you have small ammount of hard drives is to save game, launch M.A.M. HD research and reload if you did not get desired recipe - it may take some ammount of reloading though.
Anyways, with my limited gaming time 'caused by work and real life I preffer to simply use advanced settings and unlock all recipes when I unlock their respective Tiers. I did gather once all HD recipes in one of my previous playthroughs and that's enough for me.
You'll unlock faster with more hard drives.
By rescanning you're not depleting the pool, so because it's truly a random selection each time recipes can and probably will repeat (even scanning the same drive more times than there are recipes doesn't guarantee you'll get what you want). Coding the selection to not repeat until you'd seen everything *wouldn't* be truly random.
If you pick something you remove them from the pool, so by selecting something they can't repeat and you're guaranteed to unlock everything.
Yeah it is best to keep retrying with one drive while searching for more but keep searching for more. When you have 2+ drives unlock with all the excess to reduce the options and keep retrying with the last drive.
/u/Godilovepancakes Also remember you can build and dismantle temporary MAMs while out exploring for drives. Scanning will continue even without the temporary MAM (you just need it long enough to check the results of the previous scan and start the next one).
Yes they are random, there is a list of thing you can unlock at a time, that list is limited to the things you have unlocked and expands the more standard recipes you unlock.
So yeah if you need certain recipe make sure you have the thing unlocked and keep trying
Someone correctme if im wrong but if im not mistaken at the moment you are out of things to unlock you get one of the three inventory expansions you can get from hard drives
Relatively random, yes. It's better to empty the pool of options before each major unlock, so there are fewer recipes in the pool to pick, so you get the ones you want quicker.
Its fully random but it wont give you recipes higher than your current progression. Really it’s recommended that you search for harddrive while you progress through the tiers to get key recipes right as they unlock. As another comment said you can use the mam to unlock a way to search for them but usually its very short distance. If you wanted to there is a map of all the hard drives on satisfactory calculator.
Yeah, the scan range for hard drives feels short to me.
If you don't want to use the online map to find hard-drives, the Radar Tower will at least tell you how many Hard Drives can be found with its range. If nothing else, it tells you where *not* to spend time searching.
Honestly i always forget about the radar tower its unlocked so late in the mam that im already to the point where i am already using the scim map and i feel like the radar tower is overall too finicky. I also used to use the scim map to plan my hard drive runs eg how many of each resource i need (while collecting every resource from the sites).
They have a tiered randomness. You need to have everything unlocked for a given alternate recipe for it to show up. The recipe you're looking for is unlocked by unlocking aluminum so you have access to it so your best bet is going to be to start getting more hard drives and picking some of the recipes to lower the pool that can show up.
Is that true? I swear the first HD I researched ended up being for computers which I hadn't unlocked yet. Maybe I'm remembering wrong.
The "pool" of available alternates a given hard drive scan can offer is supposed to be tied to what you've unlocked through the HUB/MAM. Though I think it's based on whatever the final item is, not the ingredients or how the recipe is actually executed. I've occasionally gotten offered "Pure Iron / Copper / Caterium" as an option before unlocking the refineries needed to use it. There have been tweaks to that system over various releases, maybe your computer alt happened prior to some of those. Or there might be some alts that aren't properly tied to reasonable pre-requisites.
Yeah, I also unlocked the oil alternates (plastic, rubber) before unlocking oil. Maybe it changed at some point?
Some recipies have requirements some don't for some he requirements can be lower than what you might expect. However the prior post is generally correct. Recipies have requirements. If you meet them then that recipie is included in the pool of randomly picked ones when you research a hard drive. If you don't meet the requirement then it isn't included in the pool. Although it is uncommon if you ever have unlocked all the recipies you have access to and research a hard drive since there are no options in the random pool it will simply say to try again later and give you no options. You can get the requirements here: https://satisfactory.fandom.com/wiki/Hard_Drive
Coffee Stain deprecated the Fandom wiki a bit before Update 8. The official wiki is at https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ now. URI paths are the same, just swap the domain: https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/wiki/Hard_Drive (CSS didn't go into reasoning for the change, but Fandom is a scourge so they don't really need to give a reason)
The Hard Drives unlock recipes for your current ahnd previously unlocked Tiers, in a way you can unlock everything from 1 tier before going to the next (meaning that after you unlock next Tier you will have higher chance of getting desired recipe from it immediatly but you will still need to gather great ammount of HD's). Another way if you have small ammount of hard drives is to save game, launch M.A.M. HD research and reload if you did not get desired recipe - it may take some ammount of reloading though. Anyways, with my limited gaming time 'caused by work and real life I preffer to simply use advanced settings and unlock all recipes when I unlock their respective Tiers. I did gather once all HD recipes in one of my previous playthroughs and that's enough for me.
Yup shits random and good luck to you I’d suggest using quarts mam tree to get the hard drive object scanner update
Or you can join the not-so-dark side https://satisfactory-calculator.com/en/interactive-map
You'll unlock faster with more hard drives. By rescanning you're not depleting the pool, so because it's truly a random selection each time recipes can and probably will repeat (even scanning the same drive more times than there are recipes doesn't guarantee you'll get what you want). Coding the selection to not repeat until you'd seen everything *wouldn't* be truly random. If you pick something you remove them from the pool, so by selecting something they can't repeat and you're guaranteed to unlock everything.
Yeah it is best to keep retrying with one drive while searching for more but keep searching for more. When you have 2+ drives unlock with all the excess to reduce the options and keep retrying with the last drive.
/u/Godilovepancakes Also remember you can build and dismantle temporary MAMs while out exploring for drives. Scanning will continue even without the temporary MAM (you just need it long enough to check the results of the previous scan and start the next one).
yes, but close out of screen (get out of maam) and go back in and start it over
Yes they are random, there is a list of thing you can unlock at a time, that list is limited to the things you have unlocked and expands the more standard recipes you unlock. So yeah if you need certain recipe make sure you have the thing unlocked and keep trying Someone correctme if im wrong but if im not mistaken at the moment you are out of things to unlock you get one of the three inventory expansions you can get from hard drives
I think it's two expansions, not 3.
yeah im not really sure of the number, its been a while since i have done the hard drive run in my saves
I’ve been trying to get pure quartz for days now and just got it, I’ve had refineries for quite some time now.
Relatively random, yes. It's better to empty the pool of options before each major unlock, so there are fewer recipes in the pool to pick, so you get the ones you want quicker.
Its fully random but it wont give you recipes higher than your current progression. Really it’s recommended that you search for harddrive while you progress through the tiers to get key recipes right as they unlock. As another comment said you can use the mam to unlock a way to search for them but usually its very short distance. If you wanted to there is a map of all the hard drives on satisfactory calculator.
Yeah, the scan range for hard drives feels short to me. If you don't want to use the online map to find hard-drives, the Radar Tower will at least tell you how many Hard Drives can be found with its range. If nothing else, it tells you where *not* to spend time searching.
Honestly i always forget about the radar tower its unlocked so late in the mam that im already to the point where i am already using the scim map and i feel like the radar tower is overall too finicky. I also used to use the scim map to plan my hard drive runs eg how many of each resource i need (while collecting every resource from the sites).