Hint: Not well.... For context, engineering is the Elite Dangerous version of SC's crafting. There are plenty of similarities but most importantly: There are 5 tiers Upgrading components in those tiers requires materials of varying rarity. SC's "quality" is replaced with totally unique materials for each tier. Finding those components requires a LOT of searching around and luck. Each upgrade required an element of luck as the stats were semi-randomised. The stat-boosts from Engineered components were (and are) significant, in the 40%+ positive range. So what happened with the Elite Dangerous players? PvP died almost entirely. If you met someone in a Grade 5 engineered ship with the Meta loadout while you were flying a stock un-engineered ship you were toast, no matter the skill difference. This was already pretty bad given the different loadouts that were sensible to have for PvE combat vs PvP combat but engineering made it insurmountable. "Open" mode (PvP server) was a ghost town, most people went to "Group" or "Solo" to avoid getting ganked. Meeting Grade 5 PvP Meta ships hovering over Engineering outposts was nobody's idea of fun. Credits were rendered functionally meaningless, as the only valuable assets were these materials that could not be traded between players. Did Frontier Developements try to fix this? Kind of. The material grind ended up being massively reduced. Material traders were introduced so you could trade up or down quality levels and across different categories, avoiding the need to force players into gameplay they didn't enjoy. The RNG ended up being massively reduced. A certain number of "rolls" at a given grade would always max out that grade in the end. Because credits were meaningless the mission system started to add materials to the mission rewards. None of the fixes helped though, the player base had already lost interest, and even with the changes the current Engineering system is a massive grind to work with. So... why are CIG implemented almost exactly the same system in SC? Who asked for this? Who thinks this is a good idea in an open world PvP-enabled game? There is no conceptual way for this to work properly, and there are only a few possible design choices CIG can make: Make the crafting and upgrades system powerful enough to entice players to go through the grind needed to gather materials and blueprints. Results in huge powercreep, and player skill becomes largely irrelevant given the massive disparity in item and ship stats. Make the crafting and upgrades system only provide marginal boosts with associated drawbacks. No straight upgrades. Well, nobody will bother interacting with the system, unless some specific meta combination emerges, bringing us back to the point above. Just admit that the game is turning into a PvE co-op MMO and lean into it. Have all the fancy upgrades and crafting and devices and power creep that you want, and the only effect will be that people need to grind gear to be able to join others in PvE raids. Not really the game we were sold, but it would at least be a tried and proven formula that a lot of people would enjoy. Someone make this make sense...