I meant manually hunting. I usually wind up with more teeth and scales than I can use without particularly seeking them out. Though I guess I don't buy things with them a lot.

The one time I did buy alien alloy from the store, I didn't have too much trouble farming 750 scales from big lizards, though. I could bring in 30 or 40 scales per trip. I didn't time myself, but the trips themselves couldn't have been more than a minute or so in duration. It was definitely tedious, but not totally unreasonable.

Traps are a poor source by comparison -- 20x to 40x less efficient per time spent. Admittedly, they're passive. Sort of.