incredibly depressing….

So I reinstalled elite dangerous now I have a machine that is capable of playing odyssey having not played for quite some time. The last thing I did was fly to Colonia and that's where I find myself with half a billion credits and an Asp Explorer.

I want to unlock the local engineers and I started with the osmium mining yesterday which went OK, I have never done mining before but it was fairly engaging, relatively easy to understand.

Now I need 10 units of "faction associates data". I have been trying to even start this, for 12 hours with literally nothing to show for it.

So, as far as I know to get this you need to scan data points in Hab modules.

To get to hab modules I have come to trakath where there are three tourism centres each with a good number of hab modules.

> To get into the hab modules I need to bring the outpost back online.

>> To bring the outpost back online I need a power regulator

>>> To get a power regulator I can either steal one from an online outpost, find a crashed ship and hope its got one, take a mission to get an outpost back online and then abandon that mission, or take a "recovery" mission that will take me to a mission specific crashed ship.

So, I have been attempting each of these all day, except the mission ones, there are no "recovery" missions available on any station I have been to.

Is this the whole gameplay loop still? just a never ending sequence of "in order to do this you require this" because its f*cking depressing.

What am I doing wrong here? 12 hours I have been at this, I would have thought that in 12 hours of play it would be possible to take even the smallest of steps towards some sort of goal?