Raw materials prospecting is terrible gameplay and makes no sense in terms of technology lore

[ste234]

Please hear the community on this issue - you're pushing people away from the game with this stupid system.
It's a space game, where i should be flying in space, yet instead you push me to drive around on planets in the dark, finding pebbles in a car with handling that feels like something from a indie alpha.
Furthermore it makes no sense in terms of immersion and lore - theres thousands of refinery worlds yet noone sells raw materials, even though i see miners on the astroids collecting them. Theres a whole galactic economy, yet noone sells iron despite it being using to manufacture basic ammo that all stations can supply. Its a thousand years into the future, people have developed and manufactured hyperdrives, plasma weapons and even interstallar fleet carriers, but theres no mines nor supply chain for iron. Infact the height of iron extraction technology is manually driving around finding pebbles, guided by a scanner that cant even differentiate iron from other sources. As for collecting the iron, the height of that technology is a cargo scoop that needs to be told to pick up each piece of iron one by one - noone automated this in the thousand years people were collecting and using iron. This is clearly ridiculous, its such a forced mechanic that it doesnt even make sense in the ingame world. Its like in one regard the elite universe is in the future, yet in another its regressed to hunter gatherer days

 

[Martind Forlon]

There are more ways how to get iron (and much more as this) in quite sufficient amounts and it not even need much time. Here is one hint: metal-rich rings (no need for any surface vehicle there).

 

[CMDRQuainMarln]

Crystal shard sites and Brain Tree site give you grade 4 raw materials you can trade down to large quantities of iron and othe lower grade raw materials.
I hear your complaint.
Later, if you get into personal equipment engineering, you'll need stuff like gaffa tape or whatever.
This leads to jokes like, billionaire fleet carrier owner murders family in their home for gaffa tape.
I'm not even kidding....

 

[Greasetrap42]

I used to actually enjoy collecting raw mats on planet surfaces. It was a nice peaceful calming activity I could enjoy when I just want to relax. It was pretty easy and no big deal to do "organically" while taking a break from other activities. Ya okay it doesn't make much sense to shoot rocks to collect bits of ion and sulfur... but its a video game. Kinda an updated version of pac man I guess. With nobody chasing you. It didn't need to make too much sense.

But then came Odessey....

• Getting sufficient G4 mats on regular planets "organically"... no way. Gotta go to crystal shard planets on special farming mission.
• If you gotta go to crystal shard planets to get G4s... why bother collecting raw mats elsewhere. There is no point to it.
• SRV controls absolutely suck using keyboard/mouse. Drive Assist on, Drive Assist off, it doesn't matter, it sucks.
• Random mats blowing up and sending my SRV flying? Why? What is the supposed science behind this? Or the game mechanic we are supposed to get good at? Why? I don't understand.

Now that my raw mats are back at 100% full I will likely never collect raw mats again. Ever. EVER!

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Please hear the community

Don't claim to speak for me (or anyone else for that matter). You don't like that particular mechanic - that's fine, complain about it as much as you want. But don't be so presumptuous to assume you speak "for the community". Speak for yourself.

 

[Kissamies]

Well, it's more about how this game evolved, I guess. Planetary surfaces and collecting materials for engineers appeared in the same expansion, after all. That's also why the engineers are all on terrestial ports. I think collecting materials used to be a lot simpler with all the biological and geological sites with high grade raws conveniently in the same spot, but I don't think it's still so very hard.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

As for the topic, especially "collecting pebbles in a car": Everything has been mostly said. Off the top of my head there are at least two alternatives to surface prospecting. Laser mining asteroids gives you loads of basic raw materials as a byproduct. Good for when your bins are actually empty, so I would recommend that for a fresh CMDR.

The one I prefer is visiting the crystal shard sites. I do that once, maybe twice a year. Don't see it as a chore, make it an event. Some communities also make trips out there as the occasional group event, often with carrier support. Me, I usually do it alone and leave my carrier behind. Before I set off I trade all my G4 raws first over to selenium and then down to everything else. It can be done in one session if you are really determined, I usually do it in up to three - one to trade over and travel out there, one to visit the planets to collect, one to travel back. It can be really a fun activity.

In contrast to both laser mining and visiting the shards, surface prospecting is really, really inefficient, and I see it more as an "emergency" plan if you run out of materials you might need for synthesis when you are out in the black.

It's a space game, where i should be flying in space, yet instead you push me to drive around on planets in the dark,

Ii is a space exploration game, and most people would say driving on the surface of planets in a rover is part of that.

finding pebbles in a car with handling that feels like something from a indie alpha.

You realize it is not meant to be a "car" like some Forza game or something... right? it is a vehicle meant for surface exploration. You think the lunar rovers drove "nicely"? They operate on low to near-zero gravity bodies. And frankly, most people think the handling of the Scarab is quite nice. You only tried the Scorpion because it has a bigger gun, by any chance? Also: Turn off drive assist. Really. Turn it off.

 

[ste234]

Thanks for the useful suggestions. My complaint isnt that we have to go to planets, i think thats part of the experience, i appreciate the work thats gone into making them and i welcome it - its the driving around for ages doing something that makes no sense lore wise and thats largely unsatifying as a gameplay experience. We could have been going to the surface to rescue people, deliver / aquire supplies, scan a feature or a weird microbial lifeform, anything but collecting iron and other basic elements. Its the most unimaginative thing they could have put in and as lore breaking as if i had to harvest timber to unlock my guardian upgrade

As for speaking for the community - i think the numbers speak for themselves. if you look at youtube, the most popular videos on there about materials are all about how to exploit the game to avoid having to do it. Whether its davs hope or HIP 36601, the majority of players seem to want to avoid this gameplay

I think it could easily be improved by making the dss scanning better, improving the heatmap mechanic, improving the SRV scanner so it can filter for the desired material, adding a filter and collect all option to the cargo scoop removing the need to select each piece individually, giving the SRV some traction control and bigger wheels so its less inclined to spin or snag on small rocks and changing the materials that need to be collected this way to rare ones only so it makes more sense lore wise. The whole process just needs streamlining and to have the pointless busywork removed. In current form, its very tedious where it should be fun and rewarding to explore the surfaces

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

As for speaking for the community - i think the numbers speak for themselves. if you look at youtube, the most popular videos on there about materials are all about how to exploit the game to avoid having to do it. Whether its davs hope or HIP 36601, the majority of players seem to want to avoid this gameplay

I think I have a pretty good idea which videos you are thinking about. I would be slightly cautious to equate the handful of content creators that participate in farming guides (and their comment section) with "the community". Doing "best start", "easiest way" or "quickest method" is what those guys do. And for a few of the Youtube guide creators, those who fill their comment section mostly don't even play the game. That's hardly "the voice of the community".

Also, Telling their audience to earn their materials as a byproduct of another gameplay loop isn't sexy or drawing in ad revenue. Incidentally, those who propagate those slightly exploitive farming methods (my biggest pet peeve isn't even promoting relogging, but using self-destruct to skip four bleeping jumps to a material trader) are also the ones who complain the loudest about burning out on the game.

I would also be careful to confuse "loud" with "majority". I am pretty convinced there are much more players simply dealing with material collection as part of their game routine and not making a peep about it than those who turn up here or in the youtube videos' comment section moaning about bad mechanics and how the game forces you to do something you do not want to do, because all you want to do is pew (yes, that's hyperbole). ED, by nature, is a career progression game, and working for your stuffs is part of that career progression.

I am not saying material collection doesn't have flaws, just saying: There are ways to get them as side products of other gameplay loops, ways to incorporate it into exploration, and ways to grind the fun into the ground. Choice is yours.

 

[Rock Hunter]

I’ve never really got on with the SRV, I’m talking about the Scarab predominately as it was the only option for so long, despite desperately wanting to. I had grand plans of joining the planetary circumnavigation club or doing a ridge race….but I just get fed up in the damn thing. Snagging on the smallest obstacle and having to boost to get off, only to end up upside down or wedged into another part of the landscape. I also agree Odyssey certainly seemed to make things worse in terms of control, but with that said, Helmut Grokenberger is certainly spot on with his advice regarding Drive Assist - turn it off and never turn it back on, it makes it a vastly more positive experience.

As regards shooting rocks for iron and the lower grade minerals/materials. It made more sense some years back before crystal shards and so on sprouted up and was a good starting point/learning experience back in the day for new Cmdrs looking to make their first G1 upgrade. We forget, and the proliferation of the YouTube videos you mention illustrates well, how engineering may have been designed for gradual advancement but has long been overtaken by the desire to G5 everything immediately and with minimum fuss. Particularly if you’ve ground your way to a Cutter two weeks into playing and now have to grind out the mats to make it a meta Shield Tank…immediately.

Scratch the surface and you find quite a lot that indicates very little technological advancement despite all the FSDs, beam lasers and telepresence. Sometimes it’s best not to pull on the threads you find

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Addendum: As for another example of materials collection as a byproduct: Most of my encoded data bins are always full to the brim, because I made it a habit a long time ago to scan every ship I encounter in supercruise or at stations, and I do quite a bit of bounty hunting. Doing that, most encoded materials you need for engineering just roll in. I have not visited Jameson's crash site since shortly after I started the game, which was nearly four years and over two thousand play hours ago.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

And as another addendum: Gathering materials via laser mining or crystal shards is in no way "exploiting the game". Relogging Dav's Hope or HGEs might be considered exploitive; shards and laser mining are certainly not.

 

[Rock Hunter]

Addendum: As for another example of materials collection as a byproduct: Most of my encoded data bins are always full to the brim, because I made it a habit a long time ago to scan every ship I encounter in supercruise or at stations, and I do quite a bit of bounty hunting. Doing that, most encoded materials you need for engineering just roll in. I have not visited Jameson's crash site since shortly after I started the game, which was nearly four years and over two thousand play hours ago.

Great advice. I’ve done it since I started in Jan 2018 and now rarely get any scans dropping anything as I’m always full. Drop in at a Data trader and you’ll fill back up much quicker than you imagine - space can be busy.

 

[Chaparral]

Mining asteroids yields raw materials passively. If I need raw mats, I usually do platinum laser mining for a while.

I completely agree that surface prospecting is currently in the garbage bin of useful game mechanics.

I would prefer to have the SRV prospecting surface mechanic be a prelude to surface mining. The already have the assets for surface mining implacements. (Towers with pink laser drills).

Let us find outcrops, position scaled down versions of those assets over the outcrop, and allow us to collect raws mining the surface.

Make the whole thing a bit more spicy by adding surface pirates.

 

[Jmanis]

It's a space game, where i should be flying in space, yet instead you push me to drive around on planets in the dark.

Who's pushing you to do that?

I would suggest raw materials need to be made available through missions as rewards, but engineering is not mandatory; you don't need it to do anything in the game... so just do it when you happen to accrue the materials in the course of whatever you're doing.

Furthermore it makes no sense in terms of immersion and lore - theres thousands of refinery worlds yet noone sells raw materials, even though i see miners on the astroids collecting them. Theres a whole galactic economy...

That's because the whole credit economy is a busted waffle and desperately needs fixing.

Want to buy materials? Say goodbye to the common credit spinners because they completely upset the apple cart for any logical price for materials, because there's no sane price that exists right now.

Currently, a G5 material is worth 200k, and a G1 about 10k; you can calculate this film mission rewards.... but let's just play with G5s

200k is too low. If you could buy them for that much, nobody would ever pick them up.. credits are way too easy to come by and you'd just have full bins of everything in no time.

So... 2m? Too much. Because of the mission reward calculation you'd suddenly be getting huge payouts for picking your nose... unless you're suggesting wholesale nerfs to mission rewards at the same time, which would be awful.
Conversely, because economy balance is non existent, there's a chance that heaps of players going through otherwise normal game loops which, compared to the big money spinners, pay very little. It just further incentivises homogenous play styles preferencing minmaxing instead of exploratory activities embracing the procedural events in the game.

tl;dr purchasing materials is entirely dependent on fixing the credit economy.... which would undoubtedly mean heavy nerfs to some of the game's favourite credit spinners. Be careful what you wish for.

 

[Fizzatron]

Furthermore it makes no sense in terms of immersion and lore - theres thousands of refinery worlds yet noone sells raw materials, even though i see miners on the astroids collecting them.

Tis a good point, I will agree. But we know why, it's because it is a game and Frontier, like any other publisher, added a feature and wanted to create something unique to obtain as a result of engaging with it. With Horizons now being firmly established, I would not be opposed to seeing some of the materials being sold as commodities, but that would make most sense as a part of an overhaul of the whole market aspect of the game, which I would also love to see, with the expansion of synthesis/crafting and the introduction of player owned mining/refining/manufacturing Surface Bases, and/or Fleet Carrier Modules.

As for collecting the iron, the height of that technology is a cargo scoop that needs to be told to pick up each piece of iron one by one - noone automated this in the thousand years people were collecting and using iron. This is clearly ridiculous, its such a forced mechanic that it doesnt even make sense in the ingame world. Its like in one regard the elite universe is in the future, yet in another its regressed to hunter gatherer days

We're talking about individual prospecting on alien worlds that have no infrastructure to mine on an industrial scale. So from that perspective, we're going about it in the same way that the present vehicles on Mars are, which isn't a reflection on the lack of human civilization's ability to mine and process iron either.

Overall, I don't mind the mechanic myself to be honest, but I wouldn't say no to extra things to do whilst in the Scarab.

I enjoy giving the Scarab a spin and for a moment it was good to combine the exobiology portion with material gathering to kill two birds with one stone, and also give some purpose to driving around some cool vistas.

However, when it comes to exobiology, the blip that you get when you pass over a bio feature using the scanner in the ship has meant that I now mostly have done exobiology using the ship in a nose down helicopter style fashion, which has yielded the best results. So therefore, my request would be to fit the Scarab with that type of sensor or have an specialized SRV that has the bio ping feature that allows us to drive and ping to find those camouflaged bios. I would prefer to do the whole thing using a Scarab, and actually also have some real surface mining opportunities with some of those big boulders via a dedicated mining/exploration SRV or with an onfoot tool to extract delicate precious items from surface rocks.

 

[metatheurgist]

Those are 2 issues actually.

1 - It's not a space game - it's a everything in space game. Planets were on the list long before legs were. There are barely enough things to do on planets, if you couldn't drive on them as well they might as well not have them
2 - The crafting system is just rubbish. Whoever thought shoehorning a fantasy MMO crafting system into a scifi setting was a good idea was smoking some good stuff

 

[Greasetrap42]

Making G4 raw mats only available at crystal shard planets (in reasonable quantities) means when a cmdr goes to get some it is best to make the most of the trip. So yes, it becomes self imposed grind farming until bins are full. Replacing what players like myself used to do on planet surfaces little bits at a time. I never used to worry about filling up all my bins... but over time I always had enough. Do I need my bins all filled up? No. But I don't want to have to return to crystal shard planets every time I build (or rebuild) a new ship.

A big grind once per year replacing what used to be casual gameplay done piecemeal over extended periods of time, sometimes on the other side of the galaxy.

 

[ste234]

i want to give credit where its due - the biological sites offer a much better player experience. I found a decent metal planet with 1 biological signal (Synuefe EN-H d11-96 planet 2) - on there i've been finding loads of brain trees with a separation of seconds rather than minutes which is far better than i was experiencing earlier. Thanks for the suggestions everyone, i hope frontier can take some of the feedback on board

 

[varonica]

i want to give credit where its due - the biological sites offer a much better player experience. I found a decent metal planet with 1 biological signal (Synuefe EN-H d11-96 planet 2) - on there i've been finding loads of brain trees with a separation of seconds rather than minutes which is far better than i was experiencing earlier. Thanks for the suggestions everyone, i hope frontier can take some of the feedback on board

You're still on old Horizons 3.8? Keep in mind the raw materials collection process is different for the different versions. Advice I might give for Odyssey collection differs from Old Horizons 3.8, just keep that in mind when asking questions.