I have spent the last TWO HOURS attempting to extract a Superior Brain. A single one. I got NINETY FOUR of the inferior ones before a Superior Brain dropped. This is a mandatory step in the progression of the game, and it's utter garbage. The Brain Extractor itself is a steaming pile; it doesn't do enough damage to oneshot anything outside of Alpha sector mobs, and even then only in the daytime. Anything else requires at LEAST 2 shots. Actually firing the gun requires nearly half my total energy pool, and the projectile it fires has a HORRIBLE range. I got killed at least a dozen times, in the Alpha Sector for god's sake, because I could not connect the shots from the blasted thing to monsters trying to devour me. This is easily the most frustrating task in the entire game, and it utterly annihilates the pacing. This is totally ridiculous and needs an overhaul pronto!
Not only is the brain extractor weak, it's the only projectile weapon I've seen with a minimum range beneath which it'll just miss. How's that even work?
Since the player crafted it, hoping to find a superior brain, that means that the player in question does not have a superior brain. To someone without a superior brain, this is an amazing weapon and truly does not need improvement. Once you find the superior brain, you realize what a piece of junk this is, and you never use it again.
I strongly suspect this problem is not by design, but rather is a bug. The drop rate for the superior brain is a flat 7% in the code. But it's not at all uncommon for people to have this problem when trying to obtain a Superior Brain. What's more, I made some variations on the brain extractor (to get flesh biome stuff without finding a flesh biome), and I got all kinds of weird behavior. For example, the vanilla extractor started dropping items from my custom extractor, despite the fact that my mod does not affect the vanilla brain extractor in any way. And... Well, countless other problems that suggest to me that the way treasurepools and monstertypes interact is somewhat buggy and/or not fully implemented. So it's not just you.
