How Many Materials Are Needed For This Module?

Each module engineered must progress through every grade on the way to the target. A module can't be engineered with a Grade 5 modification until it has been sufficiently engineered at Grade 4. "Sufficiently" here means that every bonus measurement has reached at least 80% of its maximum possible benefit at the current grade. There is no benefit to engineering an intermediate grade beyond the 80% mark.

For engineering a module to Grade 5, intermediate grade materials should be virtually always sufficient with the following rule of thumb:

One Grade 1 mod, two Grade 2 mods, three Grade 3 mods, and four Grade 4 mods. Simple! Most of the time, Grade 3 and / or Grade 4 will need one less modification to unlock the next grade. Very rarely an additional modification might be required, but my experience suggests this will work around 99% of the time.

How many Grade 5 materials are needed is trickier. The usual cite is that ten Grade 5 mods will fully max a module, but I recently counted one module that took me eleven (it's possible that I miscounted). I've maxed a module in as few as five. More practically, though, I recommend using EDSY to test your build in advance and see how much engineering you actually need -- I find that four or five Grade 5 mods is sufficient on nearly any module. I might truly maximize the power plant on a power-hungry combat build, or the FSD on an exploration build, but almost nothing else warrants doubling (or more!) the required materials. My combat corvette, for example, has a 65%-complete G5 FSD that needed three mods; it jumps 16.7 LY. I could make six or so more mods, tripling the G5 material outlay, and reach... 17.2 LY. Half a light year. That optimization is rarely necessary. Don't feel like it's a requirement. Even my substantially-optimized Bubble Bus DBX probably doesn't need the work I gave it: its 95% FSD jumps 67.5 LY; a two-mod 50% FSD would still jump 65.7 LY. Probably enough!

My usual planning is six Grade 5 mods per module, with the understanding that I'll probably quit around four.