... that you have your exosuit fully upgraded and then you find multiple drop pods when scanning the planet? Last night I was heading to a trading post about a 12 minute flight away and decided to just cruise there above the surface as opposed to going to space and back down. Scanned along the way and found no less than 4 drop pods. That never happened when I was looking to add exosuit slots.

... you accept a mission to scan X amount of animals, fly down to a planet you've not explored and no animals show up? Even though the description says 'abundant' for fauna. Yeah, I moved to different areas and waited as well as did some hiking. Found exactly 2 animal species. Bloody hell.

...that S class ship you want shows up when you first enter the system or land on the planet but you're flying a ship you want to keep? You swap ships to get rid of the one you want to trade away and the S class is gone, never to show up again no matter how long you wait (I don't like to bother with the constant reloads to make it spawn).

... you find that perfect paradise world and the sentinels all want to curb stomp your ass on sight?

... almost every time I look at the multi-tool on offer, it's a bloody pistol with less than 10 slots (and ugly pink and green to boot)? I've actually had good luck with starships and freighters, but the multi-tool gods hate me.

Hahaha, if this is true, then NMS is more realistic than I thought. ^^ This happens a lot in real life like when I go to the supermarket and I can't find what I'm looking for even if I go to other locations. But when I'm no longer looking/needing that something, that freaking item is in stock—and at a discount. ^^

Short answer to OP for the drop pods:
Drop pods will always be in the wild whether you have everything upgraded or not. BTW, you don't need to run after them, you can upgrade your exosuit at space station. (Ok, agreed that if you are on planet already, then it's handsome to find them instead of returning to space station).

Same goes for Signal Boosters, they are not intelligent and give you only locations some distance around your position. If you got already some positions you need to change your place (go on other planet hemisphere) and try again, this time you should get some new locations.

Then, oddities go on when 'Asking for Directions' when interacting with NPCs. If you wonder why a NPC gives you nothing, then don't wonder any longer...It's because the symbol is there already, it's just bad RNG :)
But there are 2 NPCs who *remember*: It's Nada & Polo in the Anomaly: Don't get to them if you didn't make some substantial progress, because they'll have nothing for you except maybe a black hole or Atlas position.

I think you misunderstood me. I know about upgrading at space stations (it's how I upgraded a lot of my cargo slots). I also know the drop pods will always be there in the wild (I've found a fair number of them over the course of this playthrough). My point was, before I had my suit completely upgraded I never ran into so many on one outing before. I tend to use the ship scanner to find buildings while I fly from one place on a planet to the next. If it's a longer flight (more than 5 minutes) I usually pop into space and then use the pulse drive to get there faster. On the occasion in question, I happened to decide 'Screw it, I'm going to fly for the 12 minute journey and just scan for buildings along the way'. Four of those happened to be drop pods. The point I was making was all the times I did this before I had my suit completely upgraded, I never found so many drop pods at once.

Yeah, the game does seem to that to you. I always think the game knows what you have and will give you the drop pods now that you don't need them. Same with being able to buy drop pod tech to use with the portable scanner, they magically appear once you don't need them.

It reminds me of so many games, where, off the top of my head, you go grinding some mobs and they drop loads of a certain useless item that you NPC for coin, then later in the game you get a quest to get x amount of that item and the mobs no longer seem to drop it, or 'rare drop' quest we called it. As soon as you finally get it and hand in the quest, the mobs suddenly drop it all the time again.

Like you guys're saying, it's like the game (NMS) seems to know. Same with the fauna, similar to GROOTS point, spend forever trying to complete the collection, almost give up several times but once you do complete it, go back to base and all of a sudden it's like they think your base is the Ark and they're all sat outside. Had that happen again yesterday.

And it's still the only game in a long time, that's kept my interest like this .

Yes I get now what you mean. Since NEXT I have the (bad) feeling that HG has changed the location distribution routine concerning buildings and objects on planets. I go down at a random position on the planet, fly in a radom direction and what happens? At some point I get a building *straight ahead of me*. Not to the left, not to the right, but straight ahead every time, not a building that I can barely see at some distance away from my route, no, but straight on my path. That's more than a coincidence, it's like your multiple drop pods I think: they changed it badly, It seems to imply that now in NEXT these buildings pop-up on the fly and their postitions are not determined when you enter system.
In previous game versions I didn't have this feeling, it was more 'natural', also the ship scanner worked differently and you really needed it, here in NEXT the scanner is pretty useless.