So, I've played the game for a few hours now. Very fun! One of my favorite Roguelikes.

But I am getting frustrated. After all this time, I have unlocked ONE recipe, and it had an ingredient I had seen only ONE time among all my playthroughs.
I felt lucky to even have found that recipe, as it was one of two messages I decoded fully, out of about 10 messages. So it makes me suspicious that you unlock all the recipes with the engineer.

Here's the problem. Does the game expect me to play it for 100 hours before getting a decent number of recipes, then even longer to find the rare crafting material? I really don't have the time for that.

Honestly, half the problem is that about 50% of my inventory is crafting ingredients that just sit there until I die.

The idea of experimentation is not doable to me. There's way too many possible combinations, and it's not like you get unlimited tries, anyway.

It is pretty grindy, especially with expansions. Most characters aren't good at Electronics and Decipher. Engineer is the best, but if you only decode 75% of a message, you don't get the Sotsdex entry, so you have to wait until you get the same message again.

One thing you can do is run Easy until you get the first 50 messages. That way, there are fewer ways to get half a message, and eventually they'll repeat more quickly. After you have that or are close to it, then you can run in Normal for more.

Of course you can use the wiki for recipes, but that's sort of cheating and you won't get a success probability until you have succeeded at least once to get the Sotsdex entry. If you ever lose your data, though, you might as well use the wiki and restock your Sotsdex by doing this, since you already did it on your last computer.

There's no avoiding how it just takes forever and they mix in tons of flavor text to dilute it even further. For similar reasons to why you might want to play on Easy first, you might want to finish farming the base game recipes on Normal before you install Mind Games, and then move on to Gold. But that could get old. It's probably the best way to get the most recipes per run ASAP.

If you don't do it in that way, then you'll eventually finish the Sotsdex in the same amount of time. You'll just spend half of the total time time filling a whole Sotsdex with half-recipes instead of half a Sotsdex with full recipes - the former kind of sucks in the mean time.

If you didn't start playing the base game and farmed up while waiting for the expansions one at a time, then it's going to be kind of a chore to catch up.

I installed all 3 things at once, the main game and 2 expansions, however that would affect things. I was doing better on easy, but out of next batch of message I translated, most were garbage, and I didn't ever translate a complete recipe.

I'm exasperated at this point. To save my sanity, I might just look up recipes. Call it a personal weakness, but I can't stand having all that stuff in my inventory, nor can I throw it out because I know that it somehow has a use. I've had the same 4 recipes since I owned this game, (2 given from the tutorial). I've burned out lots of cook stations and labs, trying to discover new recipes.

Agree. Ingredients are abundant while recipes are rare. So there are two choices: either having grind-runs or cheating by looking into Wiki. I'd say I don't like none of it.

I agree. God love the people who played a 100 hours to give us the wiki's and recipes, but not everyone wants to do that, I've got other games to play. Recipes were coming too damn slow and I was going to give up but I decided to look at the recipes and NOW the adventure is enjoyable. No more dithering over which ingredients I should keep, no gnawing my teeth at receiving decrypted message about death plan gamma, etc . Now I am crafting useful things, opening up spaces in my inventory. Hell, I made a sandwich worth 300 food, used diagnostic chips to avoid bad bios, crafted backpack to recharge my laser. I leave some useful stuff near the exits just in case I find something to complete another recipe and I can go back (Why can't we use lockers, ooy)

My advice is just use google the wiki for recipes. In my opinion the whole deciphering mechanic is not fun.

They are interested in doing a sequel, so I hope they learned a lesson or two with this.

First, having to find the same message multiple times to decode it is a pain. Second, flavor text isn't fun it it's taking the place of something that could have been useful. Third, if you can just look it up on the wiki anyway, why punish people for playing straight? Fourth... you use Decipher for opening Tesseract wells and... I forget what other uncommon random spawn thingy... but come on. This skill needs more uses. i.e., a "metagame" character skill is just unfun game design, while it could be fun to have a more worthwhile skill have metagame payoffs.

I use the wiki all the time, but last I checked, it wasn't up to date with Pilgrim content..

These should help...

http://sword-of-the-stars-the-pit.wikia.com/wiki/Recipes/New_Players