Overview
This guide (written in 2020) shows how to get the Adventurer and Master Adventurer achievements, which require finding Xeno artifacts.
Introduction
Your goal is to get a combat crew which can defeat xeno on the ground, with enough crew slots to support 3-4 non-combat xeno hunters and 4 for a “B team” of expendable spice hall soldiers.
You will need the Expert Xeno Hunter unlock first, which requires a sprint run to win 5 crew battles against xeno on normal difficulty. You can use the crew composition section of this guide to build the crew for that, but you will need to do that run before starting this one. Without that, you can’t reliably get Xeno Hunter recruits, so you can’t get the Macabre Harvest talent, which is pretty much the only way to get this achievement.
Template
Difficulty: hard, obviously to qualify for the achievement.
Attributes A. Combat captain, 30 strength, 30 quickness, 30 fortitude, 18 wisdom.
Ship B. I used the palace interceptor (speed 29), which requires the easy “perfect contractor” unlock, but other ships would work. Small, so that you don’t need many ship crew, and fast, so that you don’t waste time traveling and also to escape from unwanted ship combats.
Contacts C. You must have the Xeno Hunter contact. It’s also helpful to have Prospector for explorer recruits. Other contacts to taste; it’s helpful to be able to sell regular intel; scavenger and scientist recruits are nice because they also have ground exploration talents.
Skills D. 4 points in explore.
Experience E. Highly recommended to have explorer, but you may prefer a melee based start like assassin or blade dancer. While explorer says it doubles the chance of artifact cards in ground missions, these are so rare, I did not see much effect.
Starting as Javat on the default map is nice, because there are quite a number of wilderness planets in your home sector.
Initial crew setup
(Not specific to this achievement). Two crew dogs with ship ops saving talent, two mechanics with repair saving talent, two pilots with pilot save talent, two navigators with navigation save talent. For now keep two gunners with tactics save talent; later when the navigators level up, add their tactics save talent and drop all the gunners.
If you get a combat crew with decent stats (I scan for wisdom + quickness > 40 and strength > 20) keep them to promote to a melee combat officer later. I don’t have much luck recruiting these from the spice halls but keep an eye out anyway.
The first year
Do the initial arbiter transport mission to get Calagan as a contact. Fly between each of your three local contacts and take all their local missions. If you want, you can fill up on cargo, but that usually nets at most 1k credits per stop where the missions yield 5-10k. Cargo just takes more playing time to organize, I skip it. Don’t take missions which involve jumping out of the system, and be careful that you don’t take any missions requiring ship combat or ship combat related minigames (patrol, blockade). Sometimes Calagan gets secondary traits where he loves giving out those missions.
Once your reputation with the xeno hunter contact goes up, start replacing gunners and etechs with xeno hunter recruits. Don’t let your electronics pool get below 100%. Let these recruits stay in the background and level up. Give them Blooded Lure and intimidate saving talents. Eventually they will take Macabre Harvest which is the key talent for this achievement.
As your officers level, develop the captain along melee talents. I just put all levels into swordsman. You can add one level in Zealot, Assassin or similar for variety. The doctor should put one level into Military Officer for Tactical Edge, and then all levels into combat medic till level 8 to get lifeline. For the other officers, get something which gives improved recruiting, like commander level 1. These officers will replace each other looking for better combat officers, using the recruiting talent. If you have a five officer ship, you will keep one officer on ship, maybe the quartermaster; but for the other two, it doesn’t really matter what skills they take, they are temporary.
You need to get one Xeno Hunter officer. Once your xeno hunter contact has good reputation and you have a recruiting talent ready on one officer, dismiss a different officer and recruit a xeno hunter officer. This gets better stats than recruiting as crew. Hopefully you get a decent recruit; if not you can try once more but don’t run out of money.
This officer will go into the combat team in slot 3. You will need to get to Xeno Hunter 5 for Macabre Harvest and Bounty Hunter level 5 for Unfaltering Ire; add in any other rifle class for variety. Exo scout for their anti-xeno talents is nice, but don’t level this till the other two reach level 5. Choose a snubber weapon; your talents will let you shoot from the back but the snubber will allow at least basic attacks from position 1-2.
You need to get a second melee officer from somewhere. Sometimes you can get lucky and a contact will also offer a melee recruit; sometimes you get lucky with a spice hall recruit swordsman. Once you get the recruit, replace one other officer with this crewman. Choose Wing Commando for the second class because Whirling Blade can be used from position 3. Add one other melee class like Assassin, Zealot or Blade Dancer. Sometimes I have to waste one class because the recruit was a non-sword class with nice attributes, like soldier or pistoleer or even a crew class.
As your crew levels, keep replacing ship crew slots with more explorers, xeno hunters and soldiers. Get as many ground exploration talents as possible.
The final thing you need before exploring is a weapons locker. If you have been running missions and haven’t spent too much money on recruiting officers, you should be able to afford a level 4 locker. That’s sufficient given a good combat team layout.
Your first exploration mission
Make sure you have the combat officers ready to go, the upgraded weapons locker and a full set of 4 B-team soldiers. Now start exploring! In the Javat system, there are plenty of wilderness planets. By this time you should have a reasonable number of ground exploration reroll talents. Just land at each planet and explore as long as you can. It’s unlikely, but you may get some artifact rewards.
If you see xeno combat cards which also have an artifact reward, don’t reroll those, let them come. This is what your B-team is for. If you feel lucky, you can try these with your main combat team; but you get the artifacts before the fight. So, send the B-team and use the surrender button as your first action. Usually half of them die; get more from the next spice hall you see. Keep an eye on how many you have left. You don’t want to accidentally accept a combat when you don’t have a full B-team to send.
If you see xeno cards without artifacts, at this point, use a reroll or cancel talent. Your combat team should be able to take on the occasional pirate; don’t use up the reroll or cancel talents on those. Use reroll or cancel on the “months lost” event. Sometimes there will be a risky card layout, like “months lost” plus “pirate” plus “xeno”. You can walk away, to another planet, or take your chances.
As soon as you get one set of xeno artifacts, either from a reward, or a B-team surrender, make sure you know where to see your progress. There is no easy way to see it, and you may need some notes on paper also. In the ship panel, choose “captain’s log”, and then choose “scores and stats”. In the first set of statistics under “Traveling Far”, you will see, “My exploration of faraway worlds has uncovered the rarest artifacts <N> times”. Now, this is not exactly a count of progress towards this achievement. Both Xeno artifacts and Rare Trade Goods count here. So, note what this value is, and come back here frequently to make sure you don’t miscount any RTG drops. You need 10 xeno artifact drops, RTG don’t count; so you will need to monitor this <N> and discount any RTG on your paper note.
The main point of exploring at this time is to warm up and get levels. Make sure to also do a round of missions occasionally to get money. Probably your contacts are no longer giving missions in-system. Look at the missions they give, and try to pick one adjacent system with a lot of missions going to it. Then stack up those missions. You may need to increase the number of passenger or prisoner cabins on your ship; those are cheap upgrades. Obviously package missions are better, and you probably don’t have the cargo capacity to do the commerce missions.
Once you are around captain level 10, hopefully your xeno hunters will be able to take Macabre Harvest. Once you have 2-3 crew with that, now you are ready to rumble. Hopefully this should still be sometime in year 3.
Wrapping up
It seems strange, but for this five year achievement, it is fine to be at the end of year 3 and only have one artifact find so far. The key point is that you have a combat team that can kill xeno and you have at least 2-3 Macabre Harvest. Now, each time you win one xeno combat, you will get 2-3 ticks of the achievement counter. Try this one time to be sure. Visit the talent page for one of your XH crew with MH, and make sure it is not on cooldown. Look at the current value <N> for rarest artifacts as mentioned above. Now win a xeno fight. In the post battle summary, click the button to use Macabre Harvest as many times as you have charges; now go look in the scores and stats page. You will see that it went up.
Now just win 2-3 xeno battles like this and you are done. Once you have this setup, it is easy, although a little tedious, to continue on to Master Adventurer. That needs 30 artifacts in 10 years. Your rate of progress should be very fast, and it’s just a matter of killing xeno every time MH is off cooldown. If you can get more XH with the MH talent it will go even faster.
Good luck in the void, Captain!