Thanks a lot for that, that does sound like a better option for these early moments. When you say dropping into the NAV beacon, is that the general area I land in when I first jump there? And what's a high RES? Sorry for being dumb but I've only played for a few hours so still piecing things together lol.
You have super cruise, which is the inter-planetary travel mode you're in when you arrive in a system. From there you see different POIs, e.g. the NAV beacon, signals and the likes. The NAV beacon, if available in the respective system, is usually located very close to the star you arrived at when jumping to the system. You need "drop into it", that means target it, travel to it in supercruise and when close enough, leave suprercruise to enter normal flight, which "drops" you in the nav beacon area in normal flight mode. The nav beacon itself is something like a satelite in that area around which every now and then an AI ship will spawn.
The RES is a "resource extraction site". They're POIs located in rings around planets in some systems, where mining ships, system security and wanted ships spawn. The wanted ships attack the miners and the security keep attacking the wanted ones. RES come in "low", normal, "high" and "hazardous" intensities. High offers the best payouts while still being relatively safe due to system security, while hazardous has powerful wanted ships and next to no security spawning.
In abstract terms, they're the Elite equivalent of mob farming spots for bounties.
This tutorial from ObsidianAnt is old by now and the game has since been expanded, but I can still recommend watching it to get started:
Edit: another snide remark... Since Frontier's game design department seems to be run by bumbling buffoons though, their love of time wasting randomness hasn't made halt of RES either. Since the beginning,
RES have been plagued by this stupidity:
Elite Wiki said:
Randomness
A certain randomness directly affects the ship spawn at RES in major ways. Given bad luck, even high-intensity RES within high-security star systems can yield deficient ship spawns.
Ship spawns are seeded randomly in RES and can be re-rolled upon re-entering the RES with no other player present at the site. Logging out and back into the play session is a quick way to reset the ship spawn entirely.
The frequency with which ships spawn can degrade over time even in potent RES. Oftentimes large-bounty targets can be found a good distance away from the RES waypoint at which point upgraded long-range sensors can help with locating those.
You practically have to actively reinstantiate the RES once you've progressed to larger ships and want to do RES hunting, without wasting your evening time. Note to Frontier, not that they'd listen: If your randomness serves no other purpose than wasting people's time unless they relog into the game,
get fucking rid of it! Since they don't seem to have learned that lesson between 2014 and now, chances of that happening seem to be the same as chances of Frontier replacing their complete game design department - zero.
So keep in mind: Logging out and in again is required. It's neither immersive nor elegant, but that reflects the entirety of for Elite Dangerous' game design. Still very fun, until you get fed up with it at some point.
