How to Farm Freighter Engine Upgrades - Salvaged Frigate Modules
In Beyond, freighter engine upgrades are now purchased on the freighter control deck at the freighter upgrade station, using currency called "Salvaged Frigate Modules" (SFMs). The first upgrade costs 4 SFMs, the second costs 8 and the third costs 12. (In vanilla Beyond they used to cost hundreds, but the latest patch lowered that).
You sometimes get Salvaged Frigate Modules in crashed freighters when you dig up the cargo, but it's not very frequent and that's a lot of work. Here's a faster way to get them:
You also get SFMs when you destroy the cargo pods on freighters and frigates in space. Any ship in space that has spherical "nodules" sticking off of it can be attacked, and so can ships that have rows of cylindrical storage tanks. There are other models that do, but they're a bit more difficult to tell, so just stick to the easy ones. Shoot at the balls/tanks and they will explode with very little effort, and will put cargo in your ship's hold. It will usually be Platinum, Gold, Chromatic Metal or Magnetized Ferrite, but sometimes (maybe one in 8 or 10) you get an SFM.
When you shoot at freighters, the sentinel space ships get called, and they are very difficult to get rid of by fighting them. The trick is to duck into a space station or the Anomaly, and that instantly calls off the attack. You can leave right away and you are safe.
Because the Anomaly is so easy to call, and it can be called very close to other objects, this makes farming for SFMs very easy.
Fly around in the system until you see a freighter and frigates warp in nearby. Find a good ship to attack, and get close enough to shoot it (your crosshairs go red when it's over a cargo pod).
Then move a bit to the side and call the Anomaly just on the other side of the ship.
Shoot the cargo pods, getting as many as you can before the bad guys (good guys?) come to shoot you
When the fighter shots start to land around you, high tail it for the Anomaly. It should only be 10 or 12 seconds away. If you are going as fast as you can away from the ship you attacked, chances are the fighters won't even catch up. Sometimes when you hit the super-slow zone right in front of the Anomaly door, they catch up and get a shot or two off. I have NO extra shields on my ship, and they take maybe 10% off before the Anomaly door opens and sucks me in, which ends the conflict.
When you land, instantly take off and go back out into space and go back to 1).
I have just Photon Cannons with a single C level mod, and I can take out an entire large freighter before the fighters come, then run away to the Anomaly to turn them off and come right back out to do it again.
Sometimes if you come at them from the wrong angle, a ship can have a turret cannon that will shoot at you. They're easy to take out before you take out the pods. They take less damage than a pod.
I have farmed 12 SFMs (enough for the first 2 engine mods) in about an hour. Way faster than hunting for crashed freighters and digging up cargo pods.