I wanted to add that I put the Cluster Capacitor experimental on that enhanced charge PD.




I know right? did you see my earlier post about this? I was surprised as well. The answer to your question is both a yes and a no I suppose. In order to take advantage of a material trader, you need materials to trade. So you still need to be gathering. It's just that you don't need to go for specific things necessarily. Mats can only be traded for other mats. So you don't necessarily need to scan wakes, although that's one of the easiest to do, but you will need some data mats if you want other data mats.

One easy way to do this is take the engineering mats reward option when you do missions, especially if it offers grade 5, which you can then turn around and trade down for stuff you need.

Personally, I get my mats from ...

SRV gathering on planets for the metals and minerals

Wake scanning for data

Mission rewards

Entering USSs. In these you can get all sort of things. I recommend you investigate every High Grade USS you come across. Even if you don't need what's in there, it will be very valuable at the material traders.

Even just your everyday scans in combat sometimes yield a data mat.

Material traders and remote workshops make the whole thing a little too easy in my opinion. I am certainly taking advantage of the service, but I think I would prefer if some things were more rare and difficult to achieve.